Even Emil Bove, who is as deep down the Trumpian hole as it gets, liked Erik Siebert, apparently now former United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. Bondi and Blanche were good with him. Senators Kaine and Warner were good with him. The district judges were good with him. Even Trump was good with him when he nominated Siebert and the Senate confirmed him. Until he did the one thing Trump couldn’t tolerate.

Erik S. Siebert, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, had recently told senior Justice Department officials that investigators found insufficient evidence to bring charges against Ms. James and had also raised concerns about a potential case against Mr. Comey, according to officials familiar with the situation.

Facts? Evidence? These are not words with which Trump has any familiarity, and so he “retconned” Siebert’s appointment.

“When I saw that he got two senators, two gentlemen that are bad news as far as I’m concerned — when I saw that he got approved by those two men, I said, pull it, because he can’t be any good,” Mr. Trump said. The president did not mention that he nominated Mr. Siebert only after the two senators, Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, had already written Mr. Trump praising him.

Had these words emitted from any other yap, they would have been the fodder of a thousand jokes by Jimmy Kimmel Fallon. There is no level on which they are anything but bizarrely laughable, flying in the face of reality as they do. Yet, Trump said them.

When asked if he would fire Mr. Siebert, Mr. Trump responded, “Yeah, I want him out.”

Why?

Ms. James, he told reporters, was “very guilty of something.”

Something in the first degree, perhaps? James was his enemy and thus, by definition, “very guilty of something,” After all, Trump’s adoring pet, Bill Pulte, head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, said he “got” James, so if Siebert said there was no evidence,

Ms. James has been under threat since Mr. Trump returned to the White House. In the spring, his allies discovered a document related to a house in Virginia she bought with her niece, and believed they had struck gold.

On the document, she had said that she planned to live in the house as a primary residence, an assertion flatly contradicted by other documents associated with the house.

But Ms. James’s exchanges with the lender showed her having communicated clearly that she did not plan to live in the house, and there was no indication that the single document on which she said otherwise was taken into account during the transaction.

But Pulte said he struck gold, so Pulte must be right and Siebert must be wrong, because Trump wanted James “got.”

After the president’s oval office statement that he wanted Siebert “out,” Siebert resigned.

Mr. Siebert informed prosecutors in his office of his resignation through an email hours after the president, speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, said he wanted him removed because two Democratic senators from Virginia had approved of his nomination.

Trump, however, also found this intolerable, as it deprived him of the ability to pretend that he was in control and the use of his TV catchphrase.

Mr. Trump later disputed that Mr. Siebert had resigned, saying in a late-night social media post, “He didn’t quit, I fired him!”

There is no one waiting in the wings to replace Siebert at the moment, but one thing seems clear. Whoever is appointed to be the next United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia better prosecute Letitia James and do Trump’s bidding. After all, if Trump says she’s “very guilty of something,” isn’t that good enough?