Would Donald Trump really allow Melania to 'remove' a White House staffer given his views on women?

Apparently it’s not unusual for first ladies to get people they don’t like ousted, but they’re usually a bit too demure to actually throw shade

It’s been quite a day, hasn’t it?

I went to bed last night after going to see the Lady Gaga sobfest and ordering 1am UberEats McDonald’s (remarkably efficient) to try and chicken nugget my way back into emotional stability. Then I wake up this morning to find that the entire British government is collapsing. There is not enough junk food in central London to get me through this one.

Even my long-suffering friends over the Atlantic can’t seem to escape the madness. Poor John Kerry just wanted to quietly promote his book to Radio 4 listeners and got roped into giving a Brexit commentary this morning. In true Today programme tradition, he managed to use a lot of words to say pretty much nothing, in case you were wondering.

Theresa May is not living the dream right now either. Imagine getting the ultimate promotion and then realising that everyone hates you and all your staff have sneaky contracts that allow them to resign at a moment’s notice every time you do something they don’t like? And it’s all on TV for the world to point and laugh and make endless Twitter puns about you. Nightmare.

The one saving grace I suppose is that at least she hasn’t pissed off her boss’s wife. Poor Mira Ricardel has been less lucky. Don’t know who she is? A “senior white house aide” apparently (nope, me neither) who reportedly had some sort of hoo-hah with Melania Trump about who sat where on a plane. To be fair, I can see even the tightest of friendships being put to the test when one of you has to spend two and a half hours on a cramped Ryanair flight in between a screaming toddler and a stag do. Not sure what the Air Force One equivalent would be though. Maybe whether you get the suite with fold-out sofas and a private bathroom, or have to recline on the massive armchairs like a peasant. The private jet struggle is real.

Whatever the seating dispute was, it hasn’t ended well for Ricardel, who has been unceremoniously “removed from her post” (which is, presumably, the more presidential version of “you’re fired!”). Apparently it’s not unusual for first ladies to get people they don’t like ousted, but they’re usually a bit too demure to actually throw shade. Melania went out of her way to issue a statement saying Ricardel “no longer deserves the honour of serving in this White House”.

The whole thing is baffling on a number of levels. Not only is it hard to see how even his wife could think working for Trump’s cruel, chaotic, egomaniacal, pathologically mendacious, leakier-than-a-rat’s-bladder administration would be an honour; I also can’t wrap my head around Trump giving his wife that kind of power. By all accounts, they don’t seem to like each other very much, and even if they did, he’s made it clear he doesn’t much rate women’s ability to do anything other than look pretty – after all, we probably have “blood coming out of our wherevers”. To be honest, I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed by all this politics malarkey myself and it’s not even that time of the month. Must be that pesky old extra X chromosome making my brain mush again.

If there’s one thing we’ve learnt today it’s that there’s no danger of politics getting boring again any time soon. Remember when David Miliband ate a sandwich and it was front page news? Those were the days. Now that BBC Parliament has basically turned into a 24-hour soap opera, a bacon buttie wouldn’t get a look in.

Over in the States amid democratic crises and horrifying natural disasters, they’re all pontificating about the audacity of one woman to fire another. I give Fox a solid hour before they use the terms “bitchy”, “catfight” or “emotional”. They’ll have a field day if she actually winds up getting rid of chief of staff John Kelly next.

What I want to know is, now that Melania appears to have infinite power over the entire US government – could she maybe use it to fire her husband? Not as a spouse, necessarily, that’s her business and I could(n’t) care less, but as president. She couldn’t very well instate herself in his place given the fact that it was him who pushed the birther conspiracy racist nonsense that Obama wasn’t born in the US, and her migration history is tenuous, but there’s not exactly a shortage of other reality stars to take his place.

Maybe she can fire Theresa May too while she’s at it and put us all out of our misery. Wishful thinking? Most definitely. But we all need something to get us through the day.