"… never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee." – John Donne

Trump-haters have drawn first blood.  Michael Flynn was the first casualty.  General Flynn could come back into the fold at some later date.  Exile, followed by reprieve, might be something Donald Trump would do.

Alas, for the moment, the president doesn't look as though he can take a punch.  The entire "sanctions" kerfuffle, conversations with the Russian ambassador, is inside baseball stuff.  Nobody cares much about sanctions, Beltway candor, or character anyway.

If every lawyer and politician in D.C. were fired for mendacity, Washington would be a ghost town.

Flynn was outed by a rabid press corps with a seditious agenda.  Trump has been bloodied.  Sadly, Trump didn't cut his losses.  Like the man he replaced, the president simply folded like a cheap tent.

Adding insult to injury, Flynn, like Steve Bannon, is probably anathema to every Obama-era hack hired by Trump to date.  The establishment has no taste for parvenus.

Mike Flynn, of course, had his share of baggage, but if the truth be told, he was low-hanging fruit, an exposed position that the new commander in chief chose not to defend.  The tone is set from the top.

You can fib to anyone in D.C. but the home office.  Being called to account for candor by the Washington Post or CNN is a little like getting a chastity pitch from one of Marion Barry's hookers.

The so called "trust" issue is a hoot, too.  No soldier was more loyal to Trump in 2016.  Indeed, Flynn was one of a precious few prominent intelligence officials or flag officers, active or retired, to make Trump possible.

Fibbing is a venial sin.  Support for Donald Trump is almost literally a mortal sin.

Flynn knows that the real threat isn't Russia.  Flynn knows that Islamism is the real danger.  Flynn knows that Israel is our only reliable ally in a nasty neighborhood.  Flynn knows where the bodies are buried in a bloated and hostile U.S. national security establishment: the DOD and the intelligence community, in particular.

Flynn knows, too, that the national security community has unsheathed the long knives.  Leaked intelligence is a two-way street.  Oddly enough, Trump doesn't seem to realize that he, too, like Flynn, is on the regime change hit list after just a few weeks in office.

Political pathology at intelligence agencies like CIA is not confined to domestic machinations.

Shortly after his appointment, Mike Pompeo rushed off to Saudi Arabia to give Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef bin Abdulaziz al-Saud an award for "counter-terrorism."  Ironically, the award is named after former CIA director George Tenet, who, you may recall, was the author of the fake intelligence that underwrote two fake wars in Iraq.

If the CIA can honor the ideological authors of 9/11 with a medal, the revised edition of Mein Kampf should be in the mix for a 2017 Pulitzer Prize.

Clinton, Bush, and Obama have had a quarter of a century to pack Washington sinecures with like-minded drones.  Their politically correct, largely liberal District of Columbia zombies and media partisans will not go quietly into that night.

To such, Flynn was as dangerous as he was expendable.  Indeed, the general is now an ugly precedent, too, a loyal chump hung out to dry by Trump-era intelligence leakers.

Adding insult to bizarre injury, we now hear that David Petraeus is a candidate to replace Flynn.  You might recall that Petraeus was the Obama flag officer who had a yen for bimbo subordinates.  Before that, he was the intellectual godfather of three decades of losing strategy in the Ummah.  Petraeus still believes that the global Muslim jihad is a basket of unrelated local insurgencies.

If any name says more of the same, it is General David Petraeus.

Back on Team Trump, Steve Bannon is probably next on the hit list.  If the new president is naive enough to expect a partisan CIA or FBI to be honest brokers in any leak investigations, he needs to go back to selling condos.

By any measure, Donald Trump is an odd duck – not a lawyer; not a politician; and, apparently, not very savvy about the flora and fauna that breed in the Washington swamp.

The Flynn fiasco was never about Putin, Russians, sanctions, trust, or candor.  The hit on Flynn is merely the specter of Trump's future.

Flynn, like Trump, was in the crosshairs from the very beginning, because neither one of them wears a fuchsia pantsuit.  The president won a hard election and now loses an easy Round One to seditious Beltway louts who know how to hit below the belt.  Hard to believe that even a novice CEO can be that naïve.

If any moron at the NSA or CIA can drop a dime to the Washington Post and get someone fired, Team Trump is in for a thrashing.

Looming hazards to Trump are not so much his rubber knees or glass jaw as his future as a populist.  The people are a fickle bunch.  Early events suggest that Trump might not have anybody's back but his own.

If loyalty is not a two-way street, then all bets on Donald Trump, or real change in the nation's capital, are off.

G. Murphy Donovan is a former intelligence officer who writes about the politics of national security.