WASHINGTON National Security Adviser Michael Flynn is gone that didnt take long but he leaves behind a famous and fateful question: What did the president know and when did he know it?

Donald J. Trump has been president for less than a month, and already the Watergate query is all the capital is talking about, and, as a result, there is a widespread sense of a White House in deep, perhaps cataclysmic, trouble.

The list of failures and missteps of the Trump administration is as well known as it is long: a litany of patently obvious lies to the public and the press; mismanagement and vicious infighting; several malodorous Cabinet choices; mixed messages from on high, many of them coming within minutes of each other; leaks that gush like a fire hydrant; national security lapses that would be comical if they were not so risky; and a job approval rating lower at this point than that of any new president in memory.

But all of that is as nothing compared with the conflagration now.

Flynn resigned after it became clear that federal investigators and the national media were closing in on his close relationship bought and paid for, it appears with Vladimir Putin and his henchmen in Moscow.

Then-acting Attorney General Sally Yates informed Trump and his circle weeks ago that the FBI had developed information that Flynn had been compromised by his close, and financial, Russian ties.