courtier

“Washington has become Nero’s court, with an incendiary emperor, submissive courtiers, and a ketamine-fueled buffoon in charge of purging the civil service.”

Praise for Trump’s tariff policy has been largely concentrated among his Cabinet members and other courtiers.

It’s worse than that: Like Stalin’s inner circle or a Bourbon king’s courtiers, Trump’s factotums seek to outdo each other in embracing absurd, impossible, offensive and dangerous ideas.

But there’s something dingy and gross, like mottled drifts of old snow, about the overweening influence of Trump’s courtiers and their grubbing relationship with a president so obviously enamored of money and flattery.

The courtiers have their divergent views and disagreements with each other and they have to get as close as possible to the man in the center of it all for their agenda to win out.