Kevin Drum at Mother Jones offers up a useful reference guide to Trump’s key advisors. I found this both pretty funny and pretty chilling:
Jared Kushner = Rasputin
Michael T Flynn* = Dick Cheney
Reince Priebus = H.R. Haldeman
Steve Bannon = Louis Howe
Mike Pence = Cardinal Mazarin
Kellyanne Conway = Baghdad Bob
Sean Spicer = Ron Ziegler
Mick Mulvaney = David Stockman
I’ve added links to the Wikipedia entries for the people in question, but in brief:
Rasputin: Weird and famously unkillable advisor to Tsar Nicholas II and family
Dick Cheney : W’s VP and older version of The Penguin from 1960s TV Batman
Louis Howe : FDR’s political mastermind
Cardinal Mazarin : De facto ruler of France under Louis XIV (age 5-23)
Baghdad Bob : Saddam Hussein’s spokesweasel, famous for hilariously obvious lies
H.R. Haldeman, Ron Ziegler, David Stockman : Nixon associates
*In Drum’s posting he has “James Flynn” as Trump’s equivalent for Dick Cheney. I’ve changed this to Michael T Flynn since as far as I know there’s no James Flynn in Trump’s inner circle. Then again, Flynn is less evil than Cheney (he’d have to be) and he’s loonier. (At least I don’t recall Cheney’s tweeting random conspiracy theories as Flynn is wont to do.) So the comparison is flawed. There’s a James Mattis, Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Defense, but he’s even less like Cheney.
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