IT’S increasingly difficult for newspaper columnists to write about day-to-day events at the heart of the Trump administration in Washington DC. No sooner have you chosen a current topic for dissection, than the President has managed to usurp that particular disaster or mis-step within a matter of hours with yet another breathtaking decision or outburst. And so it’s been this week with the latest acts of Trumpicide he’s inflicted on his own team.

Senior staff have arrived out the blue, made an instant impression, and then have disappeared just as quickly. Mainstays of the administration have packed up their belongings and slouched out the back door, others have had to be dragged out kicking and screaming.

It’s fair to say of all of the comings and goings in the past week, the story of Anthony Scaramucci has been the one to catch the attention. Arriving with a swagger and flourish that wouldn’t have been out of place on the stage of a Las Vegas casino in the swinging sixties, his performance in the televised press conference he undertook on his first day in the building was astonishing in its sangfroid and showmanship. But it was his foul mouthed rant to a reporter from the New Yorker a couple of days later, in which he abused a number of senior colleagues without thought to whether the conversation was on the record or not, which secured the quickest turnaround in political fortunes in White House history.

Over the course of six short months since his inauguration, Donald Trump has now employed two chiefs of staff, three directors of communications and two official spokespeople.

What an astounding turn of events this is.

But our personal schadenfreude shouldn’t allow us to be lol’ed into a false sense of security when it comes to the increasingly farcical world of The Donald’s White House. While on the face of it the past week’s escapades play like the latest episode in the world’s most expensive reality TV series, the fact remains that this isn’t light entertainment. The potential consequences of this fundamentally dysfunctional administration have consequences for us all.

In particular, the departure of former chief of staff Reince Priebus poses a significant cause for concern. His departure, following on the heels of that of communications chief Sean Spicer, means that the the Trump White House has lost its two most senior links with the Republican Party in the last fortnight, leaving it further detached from mainstream politics than ever before. I’m no friend of the GOP, but when the alternative is that the most powerful government in the world is left in the hands of a motley crew of former military generals, alt-right conspiracy theorists and close family members it’s safe to say that I’d join with the rest of the democratic world to favour competency and stability over the reckless chaos that seems to be the Trumpian alternative.

In the two-and-a-half decades since the fall of the Iron Curtain, the United States has, for better or worse, been the one remaining superpower in the world. In this time it retains the potential to be a force for good in the world unsurpassed by any other.

The world is currently faced with a rising Russian influence in Europe and the Middle East, the bloody ongoing wars in Syria and the Yemen and the increasing tensions on the Korean peninsula. Individually and collectively these issues present a clear and present danger to the world community, but without at least a benign US administration it’s difficult to see how any or all of them can be resolved peacefully in the medium term.

Added to this are the policy challenges he faces at home. The ongoing healthcare debacle, where he has failed along with the Republican leadership to strike a deal to repeal and replace Obamacare following widespread concerns about the alternative plans, along with the failure to make headway in the implementation of several key campaign promises, all mean that the pressure continues to rise on this beleaguered administration.

There must be concern that he will deploy previously used tactics of outrageous personal or political distractions to deflect attention away from serious issues at hand.

As we enter a new season of the Trump soap opera with a new co-star in new chief of staff General John Kelly, don’t be fooled that a bad week in the office for them means that we’ve all been saved from their nefarious clutches. What the US, and the rest of us across the world, needs now are clear heads and good governance if we’re all to meet the real challenges before us.

The record so far from President Trump is that while we hope for the best, we should continue to fear the worst. The chaos has only just started.