George Washington warned against nepotism in America, refusing to give his own family members plum jobs and commissions precisely because that represented everything the revolutionaries loathed about Europe. Even before taking office, he assured a friend that he would “discharge the duties of the office with that impartiality and zeal for the public good, which ought never to suffer connections of blood or friendship to intermingle.” He told another friend that he “would not be in the remotest degree influenced, in making nominations, by motives arising from the ties of amity or blood.” Even the Framers, all of whom were enmeshed and co-mingled and conflicted with other elite framers, understood that their children weren’t princelings and their families weren’t monarchs.
That’s a far cry from where we are now: in a place where every time a Trump family member sneezes, another Trump family member gets to put fresh hotels on Boardwalk and Park Place. Americans tend to balk at dynasties—whether its Clintons following Clintons or Bushes on the heels of Bushes. Even as we understand that Kennedys get better tables and people have been buying their children into Ivies long before Lori Loughlin got caught doing it, we don’t comfortably accede to the idea that those children should rule over us. The Trump family took something American elites have done in stealth and discretion for decades and tried to turn it into a sales pitch: “Nobody does nepotism like we do nepotism.”
Trump’s blatant nepotism might finally be too much to ignore.
