It's always a bad sign when an outgoing employee gets a sendoff like this:

'Sean Spicer is a wonderful person who took tremendous abuse from the Fake News Media – but his future is bright!' Trump tweeted on Friday

His future is bright?  Such were the words of President Trump, who might not have relished the idea of his former press secretary, Sean Spicer, angry at him and sniping back from the outside.

So now he's out with a pat on the head.

It's hard to say what really went on, of course, and perhaps if we hear nothing more about this, it's no one's business except their own.  But it does highlight that the media have done an execrable job at reporting minute-to-minute anonymously sourced stories, all of them negative, showing that nonstop monitoring as they do is a good way to miss the big picture of what is going on in the Trump administration.  Not a one of them foresaw that Spicer was on the way out and that it might have been that the president was displeased with his performance.  Obviously, something was going on with the surprise appointment of Anthony Scaramucci to the communications post.  It also signals that Spicer obviously wasn't a leaker – at least not on this story – so whoever leaks in the White House is probably still there now that Spicer is out.

Perhaps Scaramucci is a more muscular guy to get Trump's messaging out, and perhaps that was what Trump wanted.  All the same, I  am sorry for Spicer, who was always a decent fellow, a perfect gentleman up against a pack of wild dogs.  As the president said, he was treated pretty unfairly.  Apparently, the times call for someone different – and President Trump might surely be first to notice.