The family
Trump has always drawn his closest aides and advisers from his offspring and in-laws. His daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner are at the center of the administration and ostensibly are the advisers with the longest leash. The family also includes Donald Jr, who is not part of the White House but who earlier 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 proven fickle. There is little reason to believe this will change any time soon.
The inner circle
Trump’s new communications director, Anthony Scaramucci, rocketed from relative obscurity to among the most influential people in Washington in less than a week, perhaps becoming the single greatest factor in the unceremonious ousting of chief of staff Reince Priebus on Friday. The feud between the two was well documented, as it spilled into media circles avid for such intrigue and drama.
Other inner circle loyalists, familiar from the earliest days of Trump’s run for the White House, include former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, adviser Kellyanne Conway and Hope Hicks, director of strategic communications and Trump’s longest serving political aide. Lewandowski left the campaign but never left the president’s thoughts; Conway has been bruised by the media but remains a favored presence and TV surrogate; Hicks, scandal-free, maintains a lower profile.
The outsiders
Trump’s affinity for generals, businessmen and others outside the traditional political realm produces a powerful group. Military men such as the newly appointed chief of staff, John Kelly, a former Marine Corps general, have outsize influence in the administration. James Mattis (defense secretary) and HR McMaster (national security adviser) are also generals, and business figures include the secretary of state and former ExxonMobile CEO Rex Tillerson.
There is chatter that Tillerson is becoming disenchanted with Trump’s behavior and could leave the job before the year is through. Mattis, meanwhile, was said to have been blindsided and “appalled” by Trump’s Twitter announcement of a ban on transgender people in the military.
Other senior advisers – chief economic adviser Gary Cohn and deputy national security adviser Dina Powell among them – are not members of the Republican establishment or, necessarily, natural Republican voters.
The establishment
The Republican party hierarchy, in and out of Congress, has taken the brunt of events over the past two turbulent weeks and is now effectively without a voice in the White House. The departure of press secretary Sean Spicer last week and Priebus on Friday seems to signal the end of an always shaky alliance between old guard and insurgence that was forged after Trump won the presidential nomination. The new press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, is the daughter of the former Arkansas governor and presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, a populist-tinged figure never beloved of party hierarchy himself.
It has been reported, meanwhile, that in the aftermath of the defeat of a ‘skinny repeal’ of the Affordable Care Act in the Senate on Thursday night – with the final vote delivered by Trump foe and 2008 presidential candidate John McCain – Trump is preparing to go to war with establishment Republicans and leadership of the congressional GOP. This may leave figureheads such as the House speaker, Paul Ryan, and the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, vulnerable to the kind of Trump tweet attacks he has unleashed on any number of former allies.
The ‘alt-right’
Led by chief policy adviser Steve Bannon, the “alt right”-aligned hardline conservatives in Trump’s administration have created constant tension with all other factions above. Bannon himself has had a well-publicised feud with Kushner, who he has referred to frequently as a closet Democrat and “globalist cuck”.
Now Scaramucci has jumped into the Bannon fray by inartfully remarking that he, unlike Bannon, was not trying to “suck his own cock” or ingratiate himself with the Washington media. If that weren’t enough of the phallically juvenile vernacular, Bannon was recently reported to have called Ryan a “limp-dick motherfucker” and a product or creature of the relatively mainstream conservative Heritage Foundation thinktank.
However, the far-right faction, which also includes 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 and never a darling of the Washington establishment, the former Alabama senator is seen by Bannon and others – and vociferously so by Breitbart News, once controlled by Bannon – as a key ally on crime and immigration issues.
