But in other Justice positions, there’s the challenge of having to defend in court a president who seems bent on tweeting away his own defense. “I would’ve thought until just recently that one would be willing to take the job of solicitor general even in a Trump administration,” said Charles Fried, Ronald Reagan’s solicitor general. (Mr. Trump has announced a candidate for his solicitor general, but it is not officially filled.) Having watched Mr. Sessions struggle, “I would think a solicitor general today might worry about being asked to say all kinds of things and take all kinds of positions which are essentially unprofessional.”

There’s the State Department, where you’d have the opportunity to perform diplomacy under a president categorically uninterested in the practice. As Michael McFaul, former ambassador to Russia under President Obama put it, “Why would you want to go be the assistant secretary over there when a) it doesn’t look like you’re going to have much power or responsibility, and b) you do so at a tremendous cost to your reputation moving forward?”

Then there’s the national security team, whose leader, Mr. McMaster, was forced to defend the White House after Mr. Trump leaked sensitive intelligence to the Russian ambassador and then, it was recently reported in Politico, left stunned as Mr. Trump took crucial language about NATO out of a speech he’d labored over. “People I know, they look at what’s happening with McMaster and they think, well, if you’re the national security adviser and you can’t even get in that sentence, just an obviously low-hanging-fruit achievement, why should anybody assume you’ll have any control over major foreign policy decisions?” Mr. McFaul said.

Earlier on in the administration, there was a level of plausible deniability: You could tell yourself Mr. Trump had just been mouthing off during the campaign, but that he was likely to run like a normal business-friendly Republican. And there were many who felt a strong duty to serve, perhaps even more so if they had doubts about President Trump. Five months in, though, those people — both already hired and in the group that might be invited to be — are clearly feeling far more anxious.

Because of this, the field of potential job candidates — already restricted to those Republicans who hadn’t explicitly declared their opposition to Mr. Trump during the campaign — has severely shrunk. In terms of who might want her old job, Ms. Palmieri said, the most likely candidate now would be someone from Breitbart or Infowars, “a propaganda artist that you would normally not see in America at the very important position of the White House communications director.”

The people still willing to take political positions are likely to be more careerist, and in many jobs more ideological. They’re also likely to be older, Mr. McFaul said. Younger people are more likely to wait out the administration altogether and not get branded with a scarlet “T.” That may be overly optimistic — entirely avoiding the effects of President Trump’s bad management is not really an option for any of us.