THE king, wrote Charles de Marillac, the French ambassador to the court of Henry VIII, was so fickle he rendered even his word “as softened wax [that] can be altered to any form”. He was so suspicious he did “not trust a single man”. Some of the dramatic twists of Donald Trump’s month-old administration, including the removal on February 13th of Michael Flynn as national security adviser (NSA) after he allegedly made inappropriate comments to the Russian ambassador and fibbed about them, would have seemed familiar to de Marillac. They are not merely the teething troubles of an unusually messy administration, but seem rooted in Mr Trump’s idiosyncratic management style.

Demanding Mr Flynn’s resignation, due to an “erosion of that trust” which the president had formerly invested in the tough-talking former military-intelligence officer, was in fact one of Mr Trump’s better decisions. Abrasive, hot-headed and highly partisan, Mr Flynn was ill-chosen for the job. Yet the fact that Mr Trump so recently hired him, and the circumstances of his firing, which have flooded out of the administration in leaked reports from unhappy officials, are not reassuring.

The job of NSA requires a cool head, a big brain, excellent managerial skills and an even temper: few have excelled at it. Mr Flynn had little high-level government experience aside from a stint running the Defence Intelligence Agency, which ended in 2014 when he was sacked for poor management. He was appointed by Mr Trump, for whom he was an early, raucous cheerleader, because the president mistrusted many of the likelier alternatives, admired Mr Flynn’s tough-talking style and perhaps did not fully understand the requirements of the position. He sacked him, it seems, not because of his misdemeanour or because he was doing a bad job, which allegedly Mr Flynn was, but because he had become an embarrassment.

The relevant conversations between Mr Flynn and Ambassador Sergei Kislyak took place on December 29th, the day Barack Obama slapped sanctions on Russia in retaliation for its effort to rig the election in Mr Trump’s favour. After reports of these exchanges were leaked to the press, Mr Flynn publicly denied having discussed the sanctions with Mr Kislyak. He reiterated his denial to Mike Pence, the vice-president, who then spoke up for him stoutly.

Yet a few days after Mr Trump took office he was informed by the then acting attorney-general, Sally Yates, that Mr Flynn had in fact discussed the sanctions with Mr Kislyak and might therefore be in breach of the Logan Act, which forbids private citizens from trying to conduct foreign policy. According to his spokesman, Mr Trump’s response was to launch a careful review of the case against Mr Flynn before concluding, over two weeks later, that though he had broken no law, “the evolving and eroding level of trust as a result of this situation and a series of other questionable instances” had made his position untenable.

It seems likelier, on the basis of multiple leaked reports, that Mr Trump and his closest advisers, including Stephen Bannon, his chief strategist, reckoned that Mr Flynn could get away with it. A few days after Mrs Yates delivered her report, Mr Trump sacked her for refusing to support his immigration ban on seven mainly Muslim nationalities. He did not inform Mr Pence that he had been made a monkey of by Mr Flynn. He decided to axe his national security adviser only after the Washington Post revealed on February 13th, on the basis of yet more leaks, that the Justice Department considered that his lies had left Mr Flynn vulnerable to Russian blackmail.

Mr Flynn will not be missed. None of his mooted replacements, Keith Kellogg and David Petraeus, both retired generals, and Robert Harward, a retired admiral, looks especially promising; yet they would be better suited than he was. Mr Harward, said to have been offered the job, also has the advantage of having worked for James Mattis, the defence secretary, who is believed to have had a hand in the more conventional foreign-policy positions Mr Trump has recently started staking out.

Having dandled an idea of using relations with Taiwan as a bargaining-chip against China, on February 9th the president endorsed the one-China principle that has defined relations with China for four decades. Having questioned America’s commitment to Japan’s security, he reaffirmed it on February 10th during a visit by Shinzo Abe, Japan’s prime minister. Similarly, on the international deal to contain Iran’s nuclear programme, which he once swore to tear up but now seems to support, and on NATO, which he no longer calls obsolete, Mr Trump has swerved from bomb-throwing to orthodoxy.

But such statements, while welcome, do not constitute a full-bodied foreign policy, and Mr Trump appears to have little grasp of the painstaking processes policy-making entails. His flurry of executive orders, many of them badly drafted fulfilments of campaign promises, is symptomatic of this. So is the vast power he has awarded to a few trusted aides, including Mr Bannon, who has taken a privileged seat in the National Security Council. So, too, is the fact that the transition, including the roll-out of thousands of Trump appointees, is falling behind schedule.

Making administration great again

Mr Trump has so far nominated 35 people to fill some 700 senior positions that require Senate confirmation. On February 15th one of them, Andrew Puzder, his chosen labour secretary, withdrew his nomination after it became clear he would struggle to get confirmed. This poor progress is making it even harder for Mr Mattis and his cabinet colleagues, including Rex Tillerson, the secretary of state, to push back against the turmoil emanating from the White House.

Plenty of talented Republican wonks are in theory available to them. But many are former critics of Mr Trump, which appears to have put them beyond the pale. Last week the president refused to let Mr Tillerson have his choice of deputy, Elliott Abrams, after being alerted to some harsh words Mr Abrams had written about him during the campaign. Given that over 150 leading Republican national-security experts put their names to letters containing even sharper criticisms, it is hard to imagine Mr Trump forming a competent administration unless he relents on this issue. The greenhorns, oddballs and second-raters who were prominent in his transition effort seem unlikely to produce much good policy, bolster Mr Mattis and his colleagues and bring the leaky bureaucracy to heel. The over-promoted Mr Flynn’s struggles illustrated that.

There is still time for Mr Trump to salvage his administration. But this will involve him not only changing tack on issues, as he often has in the past, but expanding his view of the government and reforming his belligerent and highly personalised style of leadership. The qualities that made him a successful property developer are not translating well to running the government. But Mr Trump shows no sign of recognising this. He does not even appear to recognise the shambles his government is in. Appearing alongside Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, on February 15th (see article), he blamed Mr Flynn’s fall on the journalists who had reported his misdemeanours: “He’s been treated very, very unfairly by the media—as I call it, the fake media.”