There are so many bombshells in Michael Wolff’s new book, “Fire and Fury,” that smaller anecdotes are going largely unremarked upon, even if they offer disturbing insight into the presidential psyche. One of them is Mr. Trump’s penchant for hiring women into often vaguely defined but closely held roles.

“Women, according to Trump, were simply more loyal and trustworthy than men,” Mr. Wolff writes. “Men might be more forceful and competent, but they were also more likely to have their own agendas. Women, by their nature, or Trump’s version of their nature, were more likely to focus their purpose on a man. A man like Trump.” Mr. Trump, the author continued, “needed special — extra-special — handling. Women, he explained to one friend with something like self-awareness, generally got this more precisely than men. In particular, women who self-selected themselves as tolerant of or oblivious to or amused by or steeled against his casual misogyny and constant sexual subtext — which was somehow, incongruously and often jarringly, matched with paternal regard — got this.”

The term “emotional labor” gets vastly overused, but this is a textbook example. The women who work for Mr. Trump aren’t just required to perform their professional tasks; they also have to coddle and care for a volatile patriarch.

Donald Trump doesn’t just have a woman problem; he has a work wife problem.

At some point in the past few years, the terms “work wife” and “work husband” sneaked into the lexicon, describing what are typically benign workplace intimacies: a close co-worker with whom you share not only tasks but also complaints and office gossip. When these relationships reflect a modern marital dynamic of egalitarian husband and wife forging forward as a team, “work husbands” and their “work wives” can be healthy platonic partnerships. But as women who work know, egalitarianism is not always the norm, and many of us have found ourselves serving as the caretaking “work wife” to the emotionally needier male co-worker or superior. This is a common dynamic, if a seldom-addressed one (it certainly went unmentioned by the “Women Who Work” author, Ivanka Trump, who occupies this very role in her father’s professional world).