Opinion | Trump Does Not Want to Be Contained. He Wants to Be Obeyed.

This discord is a symptom of a deeper problem. The sociologist Dylan Riley, relying on a typology from Max Weber, has proposed thinking of Mr. Trump as a charismatic leader (deriving his authority from the force of his personality) whose model of governance is essentially patrimonial. In other words, Mr. Trump ran his White House more like a mafia boss (or a king) than a president, treating affairs of state as his personal affairs, as if he were managing his family — his patrimony.

During his first term, that mode of rule proved utterly incapable of running a large, rational, bureaucratic state apparatus. Mr. Trump’s personal network of friends, family and advisers, writes Mr. Riley, was “simply too small” to staff federal agencies with people who were both competent and loyal. Meanwhile, the bureaucracy treated Trumpian patrimonialism as a “foreign body” within its structure, a pathogen to be expelled. The friction that dynamic created, as incompatible modes of governance ground against one another, accounts for the dysfunction and, ultimately, the weakness of the first Trump administration.

Project 2025 represents an effort to reconcile Mr. Trump’s patrimonialism with the demands of governing a modern bureaucracy; personnel recruits are to be vetted and trained as technicians and true believers, experts at wielding the levers of state and members of the family (initiates, made men). Schedule F, meanwhile, would reclassify thousands of civil servants as political appointees, subject to the president’s whims, extending the logic of patrimonial loyalty to a larger portion of the administrative state — ideally, enough to overpower the inevitable immune response of the bureaucratic apparatus.

Will it work? In the end, it may be Mr. Trump’s charisma — not his corruption — that undermines the smooth functioning of his executive branch. The Heritage vision depends on seamless coordination, delegation and preparation; charismatic authority is hostile to methodical management and organizational structure. As Reinhard Bendix, a student of Weber, wrote, the charismatic leader “dominates men by virtue of qualities inaccessible to others and incompatible with the rules of thought and action that govern everyday life.” There’s no way to plan for Mr. Trump. He is the indispensable man, the one who can destroy it all. And he likes it that way. As a Trump adviser told Rolling Stone, “The thing A.F.P.I. and all of them need to remember is: You are not running the show. Donald J. Trump is.”

If he continues on as he always has, hiring loyal incompetents and business-world cronies all while refusing to cede control to the eggheads, the second Trump administration may resemble the first: with all the internal dysfunction and recrimination that hampered his agenda last time. That means four more years of bureaucratic paralysis and friction, lots of sparks and light but little fundamental change — a system of government too busy attacking itself to help most Americans, and just functional enough to bestow financial rewards on Mr. Trump’s friends while inflicting sporadic pain on his preferred enemies: immigrants, the nonwhite poor, trans kids and university professors.