During these first days of Donald Trump’s Presidential transition, the elevator at Trump Tower has become a character in its own right. Whom does it carry up to meet the President-elect? Unable to get past the lobby, beat reporters have stationed themselves there and reported the comings and goings. Shinzō Abe, the Prime Minister of Japan, went in. So did Robert Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots, and the Republican Senator Jeff Sessions, of Alabama, Trump’s nominee for Attorney General. Out came Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, who reportedly has expressed interest in working at the White House, and the retired general Michael Flynn, Trump’s new national-security adviser. The lobby became a scene. The lefty filmmaker Michael Moore hung out there with a camera crew, and a professional skateboarder named Billy Rohan claimed that he, too, had met with the President-elect. The answer to the underlying question—what types of Republicans are entering that elevator and, therefore, likely to staff this Administration?—has proved elusive, because they don't come from a single ideological camp. Perhaps we are overthinking it, and their ideologies matter less than his. These are simply the Republicans who are interested in working for Donald Trump.

So far, the President-elect has leaned toward his campaign loyalists, heightening many of the fears that were provoked by his campaign. Last Sunday, there was the elevation of Steve Bannon, who did as much as anyone to invent the white-nationalist alt-right, to the role of chief strategist. Sessions, who has a long history of racism and voter suppression (as my colleague Amy Davidson noted today), will be litigating the relationship between the states and minority communities. Flynn, an Islamophobe and right-wing conspiracy theorist, will play a leading role in foreign policy. And yet Trump’s circle during the campaign was so small that he is fast approaching the limits of the group that could plausibly occupy government posts. If there has been any optimism since the latest staffing announcements, it has been about the fact that Trump may now have to turn to run-of-the-mill Republicans. “Trump has exhausted his bench of Full Trumpists,” the Times columnist Ross Douthat tweeted this morning. “What comes next will be interesting.”

Interesting, but probably not too surprising. Because many Republican élites found Trump’s rhetoric and personality abhorrent, they overstated the extent of their policy differences. But almost the entire Party shares Trump’s preference for lower taxes and fewer regulations on corporations. The President-elect’s alarmism over Sharia law coming to America, insistence that the science behind climate change is at best disputed, suspicion of the Black Lives Matter movement, and conviction that President Obama signed over national sovereignty to international institutions are common to many other G.O.P. members. However shallow the bench of what Douthat calls “Full Trumpists,” there is a party full of people with every incentive to squint, remember all the issues on which they agree with the President-elect, and conclude that he is on their side.

This squinting action has been apparent among Republican élites for a while now. Trump won the election with the support of a surprising number of prosperous, well-educated Mitt Romney voters. The stock market shuddered and dipped each time Trump edged closer to the Presidency, but after he was actually elected and gave a reassuring speech it held strong, and the talk from Wall Street was suddenly about the war on regulation to come, and not the possibility of irrational wars. As late as June, only one senator and a dozen representatives had endorsed Trump, but when they met for the first time after the election they donned red “Make America Great Again” hats. “It’s time to come home,” Mike Pence told dissident Republicans, at the end of the campaign, and for the most part they have.

One of Trump’s triumphs in the Presidential election was to put pressure on the character of each opposing candidate (“Lyin’ Ted,” “Crooked Hillary”). Now the first part of his Presidency seems likely to put pressure on the character of the Republicans around him, on what they will and will not tolerate. On what issues might members of Trump’s Cabinet be willing to take a stand against him? They may not matter much. On Thursday, there was a flurry of liberal optimism when news outlets reported that the President-elect would meet with Romney about the possibility of him becoming Secretary of State. But it is worth remembering that Richard Nixon had a moderate Secretary of State, William Rogers, who did little to restrain his foreign policy. George W. Bush had Colin Powell, and the moderate Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill. Bill Clinton had the left-winger Robert Reich. The personal convictions and qualifications of Cabinet members matter a great deal, but considerably less than the personality of the President of the United States. There, we know the score.