Trump's people problem goes far beyond RFK Jr.

The president-elect has 4,000 jobs to fill, and the early appointees are all over the map

In the summer of 1980, Ronald Reagan campaign coordinator Lee Atwater turned to an aide who was in his mid-20s.

“Can you find 900 people for us in the next 40 days?” Atwater asked. “I sure can,” said Scot Faulkner, recalling, decades later, his “youthful certainty” that he could staff the general election campaign against President Jimmy Carter.

“On August 1, 1980, I became the youngest director of personnel for a presidential campaign in the twentieth century.”

Faulkner grew up in New Hampshire, where his mother was a devoted Republican and the family displayed Barry Goldwater campaign yard signs and “Nixon-Lodge” buttons. In eighth grade, Faulkner began to read William F. Buckley and Ayn Rand, as he recalled in his book Naked Emperors: The Failure of the Republican Revolution.

With the 900 people soon hired for the campaign and tracking polls showing that Reagan was going to beat Carter, Faulkner’s job soon turned to finding people for the new president’s administration. “In December, …