Political nepo babies: Nepotism has always suited the extreme right, whose members see themselves as an entitled clan or tribe, minus the warpaint. This administration is rife with such figures, either linked to the president by family or paid professionals in his keep. In fact, many cabinet members have no political lineage, recruited instead from the ranks of reactionary mass media, the Defense or War Secretary a good example. The son of a presidential lawyer and one-time New York City mayor is a key member of a task force intended to root out the World Cup “unwanted.” Another presidential lawyer will likely soon take over as attorney general. At the festering center of this underworld is the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, already busy planning a much-criticized Albanian seaside resort (witness the Flamingo Rebellion), a European project with Cuba in mind since the president and his developer friends dream of a Havana Gold Coast when the Cuban regime is starved out of power.
So much of what this White House does has the flavor of a nonlethal mob hit, decisions made by the inner sanctum to avoid inconvenience while silencing potential critics. It is the ways and means of the president’s barely legal New York City real-estate world transported wholesale to Washington, D.C. It is what he knows. And it is, by any measure, amoral and ugly.