Republicans in Washington, DC are fretting about more chaos as another one of the "grown ups" departs the White House.  Gary Cohn threw in the towel after the orange clown Donald Trump went against his advice and sent America careening towards a trade war.

Cohn's departure as director of the White House Economic Council puts him in the company of several dozen directors, advisors, ambassadors, and institutional staffers who've left in the past year.  It leaves Trump without yet another seasoned staffer who knows how to write and implement policy, and without yet another person willing to speak up and talk Trump out of terrible, hair-brained schemes.

"The number of bad ideas that have come though this White House that were thankfully killed dead - there are too many to count," said a White House staff member who spoke with the magazine Politico.  "With Gary gone, I just think, from a policy perspective, it means disaster."

Last week, Trump announced he would slap a 25 percent tariff on imported steel and a 10 percent tariff on aluminum, which would be seen around the world as the opening salvo in a trade war.  Canada, China, Germany, and Europe all signaled that there will be retaliation on incoming American products.  Cohn had been able to talk Trump out of it early on, but he reportedly lost his influence in the White House to an underling named Peter Navarro, a protectionist economic commentator on the business cable TV channels.  Navarro is reportedly a top contender to replace Cohn.

Navarro is the kind of guy who wants to pull the US out of multilateral trade agreements such as NAFTA, has called for an end to policies he says "coddle" China, and has wanted steel tariffs for a while. 

"The irony is not that we built and were central to the creation of the multilateral trade system but that it was deliberately, 100 percent built entirely with the goal of America first," said MIT economist Simon Johnson.  "It was in the interest of the US to set up market economies with relatively free and open trade as a counterweight to the Soviet Union."

The White House was caught off guard by Trump's announcement, which reportedly was the result of a tantrum over unrelated staff issues.  Key aide Hope Hicks abruptly resigned after Trump called her "stupid", Attorney General Jeff Sessions defied Trump's pressure to turn the Justice Department into his personal tool for political revenge, and Chief of Staff John Kelly was feuding with son-in-law Jared Kushner.  Frustrated over disunity in his own staff, Trump was unhinged and looking for a fight - and decided to make it about trade.

That's when Navarro, whose nationalist, protection economic view more closely aligns with trump, made his move against his superior Gary Cohn.

"Reports used to depict Mr. Navarro as stalking the halls near the Oval Office waiting for opportune moments to slip in and bend the President's ear.  Apparently, he succeeded," wrote Lawrence Martin in Canada's Globe and Mail newspaper.