I’ve posted this article from May last year before, but it’s worth re-reading it in light of the new revelations - it’s uncanny how Ferguson was spot on.
http://www.niallferguson.com/journalism/politics/the-court-of-king-donald
As the 18th-century US statesman Alexander Hamilton always understood, the presidency as an institution is in effect an elective monarchy. However, not until now did Americans elect an instinctively monarchical figure to hold the office of president.
Unaccustomed to studying monarchy, professional commentators on US politics have overlooked this strikingly obvious feature of Trump’s personality. They insist — tediously — that he should behave more “presidentially”, which in practice means subjecting himself to the forms and procedures of a White House that over the past half century has become almost comically bureaucratic.
There are four characteristics of monarchy with which Americans urgently need to reacquaint themselves. The first is that the monarch’s personality and mood matter a great deal.
The second distinctive feature of monarchy is that politics is not ideological but a matter of court faction and intrigue. Though they had acquired party labels by the 1760s, “Whigs” and “Tories” were still closer in their roles to the courtiers of the 16th and 17th centuries than to the ministers of the 20th century.
In his classic account of the Hanoverian House of Commons, The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III, Lewis Namier showed how ties of royal and aristocratic patronage mattered much more than ideology or political principle at that time. At court, what mattered was who was in favour and who was out.
George III’s prime ministers were not like their modern-day counterparts, devising manifestos and campaigning for election. The likes of Lord Bute and Lord North depended more on royal approval than on majorities in the Commons. The Whigs were just as much a faction of aristocrats as the Tories. Finding themselves excluded from power, they denounced the king, accusing his government of bribery.
The press, which had at its disposal some of the most talented and cruel cartoonists of all time, lampooned Bute, accusing him of having an affair with the king’s mother. The maverick MP John Wilkes published the savagely critical newspaper The North Briton.
Does this not sound familiar? The court of King Donald is, if anything, more Tudor than Hanoverian. (It is no accident that his chief strategist Steve Bannon has likened himself to Thomas Cromwell.) In the White House today we see all the pathologies of court politics. Courtiers fight for access to the royal presence, crowding into presidential meetings for no reason other than to avoid being stabbed in the back.
Factions — the Bannonites and the globalists — vie with one another in the corridors of power, maliciously briefing journalists against one another. The royal family is mixed up in everything, above all the king’s favourite daughter, Princess Ivanka, and her ubiquitously scheming yet mysteriously silent consort, Jared of Kushner.
