So Trump’s insatiable need for total, uncritical admiration, or worship, is messing up that “fine-tuned machine” in a very tangible sense: it’s making it impossible for them to fill their thousands of vacancies.

During President Trump’s transition to power, his team reached out to Elliott Abrams for help building a new administration. Mr. Abrams, a seasoned Republican foreign policy official, sent lists of possible candidates for national security jobs.

One by one, the answer from the Trump team came back no. The reason was consistent: This one had said disparaging things about Mr. Trump during the campaign; that one had signed a letter opposing him. Finally, the White House asked Mr. Abrams himself to meet with the president about becoming deputy secretary of state, only to have the same thing happen — vetoed because of past criticism.

That’s a massive obstacle. There aren’t many intelligent people who uncritically worship Donald Trump. They’re narrowing their hiring pool down to a vanishing point. And there are a lot of vacancies still.

In some cases, the Trump administration is even going in reverse. A senior political appointee at the housing department, who had already started the job, was fired this past week and marched out of the building when someone discovered his previous statements critical of Mr. Trump. The State Department laid off six top career officials in recent days, apparently out of questions about their loyalty to Mr. Trump.

“Many tough things were said about him and by him” before last year’s election, Mr. Abrams, who served as Ronald Reagan’s assistant secretary of state and George W. Bush’s deputy national security adviser, said in an interview. “I would have hoped he would have turned toward just hiring the most effective people to help him govern rather than looking back to what we said in that race.”

But that’s not the kind of human he is…which is another reason intelligent people won’t want to work for him…so the hiring pool shrinks again.

The ill will between Mr. Trump and much of the Republican establishment works both ways. Many Republicans who might have agreed to work for the president have been turned off by what they consider his sometimes erratic behavior and the competing power centers inside his White House. After firing his first national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, Mr. Trump found that his initial choice for a replacement, Robert S. Harward, a retired vice admiral, would not take the job without assurances that the president was ultimately unwilling to make.

Harward said it was a shit sandwich.

Contributing to the discomfort among potential officials was Mr. Trump’s rambling, disjointed news conference on Thursday, which several Republicans said made them worry about what life in the White House or agencies would be like.

Right? Can you imagine wanting to work in his administration? Even if you agreed with him politically? Nobody wants to work for a giant furious baby.