The members of Trump's cabinet face plenty of annoyances that are not new. Cabinet secretaries throughout time have felt marginalized by the West Wing, which is always greedy to run the agencies from the White House. But in this administration, leaders like Zinke face the new and Trump-centric frustration of dealing with a White House that often recklessly undercuts or contradicts its stated positions, sometimes in the same day they're announced. In early June, for instance, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told a scrum of reporters in the Treaty Room that he'd urged Saudi Arabia to ease its blockade of Qatar, to help the U.S. combat ISIS. Mere hours later, Trump urged the Saudis to instead sever their Qatari ties. Two weeks before, Defense Secretary James Mattis watched slack-jawed as Trump went off-script during a speech to enrage NATO allies.

It makes for a whim-driven administration that could complicate the path forward for someone like Zinke, who wants to emerge from this circus as more than merely unscathed. He wants to be a political star in his own right.

Thirty minutes into our ride, after snaking through another throng of tourists, we approach the Washington Monument—that stone memorial to the original military man turned president—and Zinke takes stock of these still-early days of the Trump administration. "The president is the best boss I've ever had," Zinke tells me, "but there's a lot of distractions and chatter." He tugs on his reins to pause for a moment and consider the structure, the city's tallest by edict. "You're just always looking for ways to stay above that."

To the extent that Ryan Zinke has made himself familiar so far to Americans, it's likely because of a moment last month, during the first full meeting of the cabinet. With reporters and cameramen craning their necks for a better view, the president asked each agency head to introduce themselves to the room. What should have been a breezy name-check devolved, however, into what can only be described as a bizarre Trump veneration session, in which his cabinet secretaries and his top aides waxed profusely about the "blessing"—as Priebus so pitifully put it—of working for him. Trump looked on, beaming.

Zinke managed to come off better than many of the others. Less sycophantic, at least. "Mr. President," he said, "as your SEAL on your staff…it's an honor to be your steward of our public lands and the generator of energy dominance. I am deeply honored."

The episode revealed quite a bit about how Trump views himself in relation to his cabinet—that is, the star amid a class of supporting characters who've realized that the gateway to Trump's favor, perhaps, is flattery.

Reflecting on the oddity of that meeting and the news it generated, Zinke, typically well-spoken with a tendency to filibuster, stammers a bit. "Uh, you know, it was impromptu," he says. "Each member was free to…to…say a short message, and more or less introduction. It was done fairly quickly, I thought."

I ask if Republicans would've recoiled had something similar happened in the Obama administration, especially given their criticism that his supporters attached a messianic status to the forty-fourth president. "It was, uh, you know, I looked at that as certainly…it must have been a slow news day," Zinke says.

Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke wears an American flag–themed tie before speaking at the Western Governors Association conference in Whitefish, MT.

For all that camera-ready affection for the boss, members of the Trump cabinet, Zinke included, admit to being frustrated with the White House, which they say has left them chronically short-staffed. According to the Partnership for Public Service, the White House has yet to nominate staffers for 357 out of 570 key agency positions. So far, only 50 nominees have been confirmed. (By this time in their first terms, President Obama had gotten 228 confirmed; George W. Bush, 208.)

One theory for the backlog? Trump's fixation on loyalty, which has short-circuited nominations from the State Department to Housing and Urban Development. "If you're blacklisted for having ever criticized Trump," one former State Department official complained to me, "then your government is going to be empty."

Another explanation is the inexperience of Trump's own staff, heavy with government outsiders. "Who's the experienced hand in the Trump White House who would know that this is what needs to happen?" says longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone. "When Reince agreed to become chief of staff, he agreed to hiring powers. This is a failing on his part. He really should go to Greece." (This, in reference to Trump's alleged threat to exile his chief of staff to the Greece ambassadorship. Priebus did not respond to requests for comment.)

Zinke, four months into the job, has been able to fill only two key positions that require White House approval, out of 15 vacancies. He notes that he's submitted the names of "awfully good, just super people," but that the past few months have been a waiting game. "Operating a business sometimes is a little different from operating in the Oval Office," Zinke says. "[In business], it's just 'All right, you're hired.' But I think the White House is running into the swamp…there's a bureaucracy there that's very difficult to determine." (Zinke may have himself to thank for recent inaction, though. The day after his unseemly call to Murkowski, the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, which the Alaska senator chairs, announced that hearings for a slate of Zinke’s nominees would be delayed.)

Another obstacle has been the infighting and leaking emanating from the White House. The palace intrigue, the fixation on loyalty, the need to hunt down the leakers—it's prompted Trump advisers to give White House aides unprecedented power to keep an eye on each of the cabinet departments. These liaisons were initially tasked with ensuring that agency heads and staff were committed to the president's agenda, and then reporting back. The arrangement created a kind of shadow cabinet that one Republican operative described to me as "zombies loyal to Jared."

Zinke insists that he and his team have gotten along just fine with their designated White House minder, but John Kelly, who served until last week as the secretary of homeland security, was a bit more candid when we spoke. "I don't need a lot of supervision," he told me. "Obviously the White House is getting its legs under it, but early on it was a bit of a pain. They were getting in other people's business a little bit too much." (Kelly's tune will presumably change: On Friday he was named White House chief of staff.)

"Zinke was Donny Jr.'s pick. I don't think Trump even knew who he was." —Roger Stone

Over the past few months, as tensions have risen, the White House monitoring system has broken down—and in many agencies, it's now been discontinued entirely. At the Environmental Protection Agency, for instance, relations became so strained between chief Scott Pruitt and his two White House monitors that Pruitt's chief of staff finally barred them from senior staff meetings, according to a source directly involved in the decision. The White House insisted that the setup was always intended to be temporary, but as one of the former aides told me, "We were prepared to stay and serve the president."