A friend asked the question: Should I? When a new administration takes over in Washington, there is a seismic shift in top-level staff. The new administration has to appoint something on the order of 4,000 people, but then there are emanations and penumbras from there, as second and lower level bureaucrats put their own people in place.

That’s a lot of jobs, and a lot of bodies are needed to fill those jobs.

In the ordinary scheme of things, this isn’t nearly as big a deal as it might seem. Political parties have their people, the staffers from prior administrations, the new people who come aboard, all clamoring for a post. And decisions are delegated to people who are trusted for their dedication to the party and trusted to be knowledgeable enough to do the job.

So when the friend asked the question, it should have been an easy one to answer. Should they accept a position in the Trump administration? The question is very involved and deeply problematic.

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.

There is no lack of smart, competent, conservative people out there to fill these positions. But no one who is smart and competent doesn’t view Trump with, at best trepidation. It’s unclear whether his presidential utterances are some game played to screw with the media and his opponents. America is used to presidents whose words are carefully chosen, sending subtle messages.

Trump’s words are consistently empty rhetoric, ranging from a bludgeon of shallow, petty, bizarre attacks to putative policy statements no deeper than the drunk guy at the end of the bar at the Tumble Inn. For those who try to explain away his irrational and seemingly psychotic utterances, as the difference between a frank businessman and a cautious politician, that doesn’t fly. While CEOs may be more extemporaneous than politicians, they’re not stupid and they certainly don’t want to appear stupid. The stuff coming out of Trump is, to be blunt, stupid, to the extent it’s not palpably false.

It’s impossible to not question, if not overtly challenge, the new president’s words and deeds. This isn’t the haters, who scream that every insignificant burp out of D.C. proves the sky is falling, but serious people who are inclined to look deeper, maybe under or behind, what’s being said, recognizing that this guy is president, like it or not. That means that there will be a track record somewhere of views that will show a lack of blind loyalty to Fearless Leader.

My friend said that the first thing to be done was to delete anything that might be construed as unloyal, as that would disqualify my friend from consideration. The vetting in Washington isn’t for quality, or even competence. It’s not for dedication to the cause or policy. It’s not service to the party. It is loyalty to the individual. Do you believe in Donald Trump?

Not having been invited to serve in an administration, I have no idea whether this requirement has played a role or not, or whether the role is primary or relegated to the minor position of, “as long as you’re not hostile to the administration.” But from what’s being said, this is unlike any prior administration.

Mr. Trump remains fixated on the campaign as he applies a loyalty test to some prospective officials. For their part, many Republicans reacted to what happened to Mr. Abrams with dismay, leaving them increasingly leery about joining an administration that cannot get past the past.

There may be people open to some of the underlying premises of Trump’s election, a clean break from “politics as normal,” a rejection of progressive policies, a populist president unfiltered by the ordinary expectations of intelligence and sanity. But are they willing to put their lives, careers and reputations at risk for this guy? They may agree with all the sound reasons not to have elected Hillary Clinton, but do they favor Trump instead? Do they favor him enough to close their eyes and take a leap off the cliff?

The president’s top Latin America official at the National Security Council was likewise fired after just weeks on the job for complaining about internal dysfunction at an off-the-record discussion at a Washington research organization, according to officials, who confirmed a Politico report. The State Department has laid off six top career officials in recent days, apparently out of questions about their loyalty to Mr. Trump.

The federal government is a huge Rube Goldberg machine. It shouldn’t be, but whenever you build something by sticking new doodads on the edges, that’s what you end up with. Insiders can explain all the reasons why it happened that way, without any grasp of why their very good reasons aren’t good reasons at all. But the fact is that it takes knowledgeable people to make the machine run.

Spouting empty rhetoric, like “drain the swamp,” may warm the hearts of the frustrated and disheartened, but the government can’t be rebuilt from scratch overnight and has to continue to work in the meantime. And frankly, if we had to pick a mechanic to rebuild the machine, nobody would choose someone who knows nothing whatsoever about the machine.

We can argue whether it would be best designed by an architect, an engineer or a politician. Granted, the people who built it before didn’t do as great a job of it as they believe they did, and that’s why a dissatisfied America elected an outsider to disrupt everything. But being disruptive isn’t the same as knowing what you’re doing.

There are a lot of businesspeople, and ordinary Americans, who believe that our government would function far more effectively based on business principles rather than politics. Partisan politics has produced congressional paralysis and circumvention of checks and balances. Radical policy choices have emerged when consensus couldn’t be achieved. This might appear to be a more “normal” government, but it wasn’t a good government.

Doing government the “right way,” according to what the political class believed,* produced dysfunction and misery for many. It may well be time to try something very different. But that doesn’t make Trump the right choice, the right person to decide how a new approach should happen. These are very different questions. And Trump’s loyalty oath means that people who might do things differently, but not necessarily the Trump way, have no place in his administration.

I told my friend that someone has to go to Washington to try to contribute to the welfare of a nation. If he screws everything up, people will suffer. Much as his enemies want to see him crash and burn, they are oblivious to the harm others will endure in the process. Despite the unreasonable demand of loyalty, someone has to serve for the benefit of the nation.

But that someone didn’t have to be my friend. I suggested that my friend call the 202 number back and politely decline. My friend would have been wasted and miserable there. And despite deleting everything on social media, it was unlikely my friend could pass the loyalty test anyway.

*Remember David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest?

The focus of the book is on the erroneous foreign policy crafted by the academics and intellectuals who were in John F. Kennedy’s administration, and the disastrous consequences of those policies in Vietnam. The title referred to Kennedy’s “whiz kids”—leaders of industry and academia brought into the Kennedy administration—whom Halberstam characterized as arrogantly insisting on “brilliant policies that defied common sense” in Vietnam, often against the advice of career U.S. Department of State employees.

The approach of putting all the smart kids in a room was tried. It was a disaster.