The campaign manager and communications director for the Ben Carson campaign have resigned, after Carson sort of promised to fire them, and then didn’t, earlier this month.

For a brief period last autumn, Dr. Ben Carson, a neurosurgeon who is running for president as a crank, was doing quite well in polls of Republican voters nationally and, especially, in Iowa. Since the end of October, he’s been steadily falling in those polls. Now everyone likes Sen. Ted Cruz instead. But Carson’s campaign is actually more of a telemarketing and direct-mail scam than a “traditional” presidential campaign, and no matter what happens next, Carson, along with “business manager” Armstrong Williams, will exit this campaign with a large and lucrative list of suckers:

The holiday shake-up also overwhelmed what might have been a good day of news for Carson. Watts’s final act was to announce that Carson had raised more than $23 million for the fourth fundraising quarter of the year, ending 2015 with more than 600,000 unique donors and at least one million individual contributions.

Carson is “more at peace than you can imagine,” Williams told the Washington Post.

Update 3:45 p.m.

A third staffer, Carson’s deputy campaign manager, has reportedly resigned as well.

Top image: An actor pretending to be Ben Carson pretends to stab a friend.