EXIT STOOGE LEFT?

It’s becoming clear how the top-rated Trump drama will end.

We have endured hours of gripping television to get to this point, but this week’s wild episode of TrumpWorld hinted at where this is going.

Spoiler alert if you don’t want to know, but I think it is now clear how this drama will end.

The show’s main character (played by Donald Trump) will be unmasked as a bumbling Russian stooge and kleptomaniac, hiding in the Oval Office, and he will soon get bumped off, probably sometime next season.

Seriously, based on this week’s episode, it seems certain that Trump will either be impeached or forced to resign. The only thing we don’t exactly know yet is whether this reality show will end in laughter or in tears.

In episodes to come, will the show become a replay of All The President’s Men, that riveting 1974 political thriller by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein about corruption in high places that chronicled the Watergate scandal and downfall of president Richard Nixon? Or will the story go in the direction of political satire as it did in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 black comedy starring Peter Sellers as the unhinged exNazi scientist who orders a U.S. nuclear strike on the Soviet Union: Dr. Strangelove or: How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb?

We shall have to stand by our televisions and wait and see, but the options are still very wide open. This week’s roller coaster of events in Washington has given the show’s genius scriptwriters lots to work with in the months ahead.

First, as a heart-stopping drama, this story is getting more dangerous by the week.

Last Tuesday, President Trump shocked Washington by firing James Comey, FBI director. Only once before in American history had a president fired an FBI head. Trump’s bombshell came at a time when the FBI was investigating Trump’s campaign over whether it colluded with Russia in its interference with the U.S. presidential campaign.

The White House was caught completely flatfooted by the eruption of negative political and public reaction. Many historians compared the firing with how Richard Nixon handled his downfall as president during the 1970s Watergate scandal. Some called it a constitutional crisis.

To many observers, it signalled that, yes, Trump must have something to hide — as did Nixon in 1972. Trump’s efforts to cover up what went on between his campaign and Russia last year have been obsessive. And as his approval ratings plummet, the damage to his Republican Party in next year’s congressional elections may be enormous. The clock is ticking for his presidency.

But, of course, there is that other direction — as cutting-edge political satire — that the scriptwriters may take this story if this week’s events are an example. Remember that the suspicion about Trump is that Russia has something on him — either of a personal nature or due to Russian financing of his empire — in other words, that he is a stooge of Russia’s President Vladimir Putin.

Given that, it was incredible that Trump’s first major meeting in the Oval Office on Wednesday morning, the day after Comey’s firing, was with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. And it was a meeting where only Tass, the Russian news agency, was allowed in. No American media were allowed into the Oval Office.

Tass distributed pictures of a smiling Trump with the Russian delegation to the world. There was no indication that the president even raised the issue of Russia’s hacking of the U.S. election with Lavrov.

And there’s more. In whatever direction this story goes in future episodes — drama or satire — the show’s scriptwriters will need to get it out of Washington occasionally to make it a smash hit in global terms. In that regard, Canada’s hockey interests were certainly well served this week.

After the U.S. president fired the FBI chief, journalists wanted reaction from Trump’s comrade-inarms, Putin, but he was nowhere to be found in Moscow.

It took a Canadian journalist — Elizabeth Palmer of CBS News — to track him down on Wednesday playing hockey in Sochi, site of the 2014 Olympic Winter Games. Fully dressed in hockey gear, he came off the ice for a moment and replied to Palmer’s questions:

“Your questions look funny to me. What do we have to do with this? I’m planning to play hockey with fans. And you’re invited.”

According to CBS, Putin then went on to score seven goals in the hockey game.

You can’t make this up. Tony Burman is former head of Al Jazeera English and CBC News. Reach him @TonyBurman or at tony.burman@gmail.com.

Either way, expect the show’s main character to get ditched