The Family
Donald Trump has always drawn his closest aides and advisers from his offspring and in-laws. Daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner are at the centre of this part of the administration and ostensibly are the Trump advisers with the longest leash. The family also includes Donald Jr, who this month was found to have taken part in a previously undisclosed meeting with Russians offering information to help his father get elected.
Trump has stood by his family at every turn, even as his loyalty to others has proved fickle. This is unlikely to change any time soon.
The Inner Circle
Anthony Scaramucci, the newly appointed communications director, rocketed from relative obscurity to among the most influential people in the White House in less than a week, perhaps being the single greatest factor in the unceremonious ousting of chief of staff Reince Priebus on Friday. The feud between the two was well documented. Other inner-circle loyalists include the former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, Kellyanne Conway and Hope Hicks, Trump’s director of strategic communications and his longest-serving adviser. Lewandowski left the campaign but never left the president’s thoughts; Conway has been bruised by the media but remains a favoured aide.
The Outsiders
Trump’s affinity with military men, businessmen and others outside the traditional political realm produces a wide cast to fit this billing. The newly appointed chief of staff John Kelly, a former Marine Corps general, has outsized influence, along with other generals, James Mattis (defence secretary) and HR McMaster (national security adviser), and business figures such as the secretary of state and former ExxonMobil chief, Rex Tillerson.
There is chatter that Tillerson is becoming disenchanted with Trump’s behaviour and could leave the job this year. Mattis, meanwhile, was blindsided and “appalled” by Trump’s announcement on Twitter of a forthcoming ban on transgender people in the military.
The Establishment
The Republican party hierarchy has taken the brunt of losses over the past two weeks, left without a voice in the White House. The departure of Sean Spicer last week and Priebus on Friday seems to signal the end of an always shaky alliance between old guard and insurgents that was forged after Trump won the presidential nomination.
It has been reported by some in Washington that, in the aftermath of the defeat of the Obamacare repeal in the Senate on Thursday night, Trump is preparing to go to war with the establishment Republicans. This may leave leaders such as the House of Representatives speaker, Paul Ryan, and Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell vulnerable to the kind of tweet attacks Trump has unleashed on any number of former allies.
The Alt-Right
Led by Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon, there has been constant tension between the alt-right aligned in the president’s administration and all other factions. Bannon himself has had a well-publicised feud with Kushner, whom he has referred to frequently as a “globalist cuck”. Now Scaramucci has jumped into the fray by inartfully remarking that he, unlike Bannon, was not trying to “suck his own cock” or ingratiate himself with the media for attention.
As if that weren’t enough of the phallically juvenile, Bannon was recently reported to have called Ryan a “limp-dick motherfucker”. The alt-right faction, which includes Trump’s policy adviser and speechwriter Stephen Miller and adviser Sebastian Gorka, also has its reasons to be furious at Trump, over his recent exiling of the attorney general, Jeff Sessions. Something of a figurehead for the insurgent right, Sessions is seen by Bannon and others – and vociferously by Breitbart News, once controlled by Bannon – as a key ally on crime and
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