#nepotism

On the other hand, I think most people would absolutely do whatever they can to help their kids and family. So what makes some people’s nepotism driven success feel earned while others feels undeserved or even misplaced?

We criticize Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bull Gates, Trump, (pretty much any Fortune 500 list) for only being successful because their parents. But we generally despise these people.

On a more neutral end. You have actors and athletes. Even most “up and coming” movie or athlete stars now seem to have famous parents. Yet we still love the Skarsgardd or as the World Cup taught us, the goofy Viking Haaland who is a blue just like his dad.

And of course. You have the most beloved Nepo celebrities like Sam Reich or Australian royalty themselves, the Irwins

Like how can you hate this family?

Tl;dr: I don’t think most people really mind nepotism so long as you use it to make the world better and you demonstrate that you aren’t using it to make up for your inadequacies.

Harry Litman at Talking Feds:

The lower federal courts are holding strong; state AG’s are joining the fight; Trump’s numbers are tanking. Things seem to be looking up. Is it too soon to daydream? Picture the halcyon day after the new president, evoking Gerald Ford’s phrase the morning after Nixon flew into disgraced exile, tells us our national nightmare is finally over. Democracy restored, the fever broken, time at last to relax and take your first deep breath in many years. So you fly down to Florida for a few days in the sun. You land at—oh, hell—the Donald J. Trump International Airport. That’s ok, keep your head down.

You grab a rental and drive out of town to sun country. Crap—somehow you’re on the Donald J. Trump Highway. U-turn time, head north the hell out of Florida, pedal to the metal onto I-40. And cross—you got to be kidding me!!—the Donald J. Trump Bridge on I-40. Take the first exit and pay the toll with a $20 bill. And there it is: your change comes back in Donald J. Trump silver coins. WTF?!

Whatever you do, don’t even think of going to Washington, where his name is chiseled into the Institute of Peace and a triumphal arch bigger than Napoleon’s straddles the approach to Arlington. International travel is crimped as well—unless you don’t mind every time you use your passport having Trump’s mug stare at you from behind the text of the Declaration of Independence.

Like a dog marking every tree on the block, Trump is all in on a megalomaniacal project to seed the country with permanent reminders of his squalid rule. We continue to battle back against his list of grotesque vanity projects to disfigure Washington. Future seventh graders may wonder on trips to the nation’s capital whether Trump was the country’s first president. Their classmates who still read books may ask, upon what meat doth this our Donald feed that he is grown so great.

Trump’s efforts to plant permanent stink bombs in Washington are only a part of the story. States and localities have learned, along with every world leader, that the way to curry favor with Trump is to dedicate landmarks to him, the gaudier the better. (Or the tributes are sincerely fawning; it doesn’t change the calculus here.) We’ve had a flurry of new tributes. Palm Beach International, the airport nearest Mar-a-Lago, is now the President Donald J. Trump International Airport. Tennessee’s legislature attached his name to a bridge on I-40, one of the great arteries of the South, so that a few million people a year will cross the Donald J. Trump Bridge whether they care to or not. Palm Beach County carved a Trump Boulevard out of Southern Boulevard and a Trump Highway out of U.S. 98. Hialeah, a city in Miami-Dade County, renamed Palm Avenue for him.

They join the earlier tributes–tribute in the old sense of what the weak pay the strong. Oklahoma designated a stretch of Route 287 the President Donald J. Trump Highway back in 2021. Lyon County, Nevada, went with the Donald J. Trump Justice Complex—the county jail included. Trump at times openly pressures state officials for projects glorifying his name. In February, the administration went to Chuck Schumer with an offer: put Trump’s name on Dulles International Airport and on New York’s Penn Station, and the $16 billion in frozen federal money for the Gateway Tunnel—the desperately needed rail link under the Hudson, stalled since the government shutdown—would be released. That was less a tribute than a ransom demand.

[...] As with so much of his MAGA agenda, Trump’s naming campaign is pathological, un-American, and often illegal. And none of that is the worst part. The entrenched tradition of this country is that we honor presidents after they are gone, in part so that the nation has time to render its verdict. Reagan National was plain old National Airport until Reagan had left the stage. The Kennedy Center was built to an assassinated president’s memory, not to a living president’s ego.

Walk the stately National Mall at the heart of D.C., and you are taking in that principle: the Washington Monument, opened to the public in 1888; the Lincoln Memorial, dedicated in 1922, more than 50 years after the assassination of our greatest president; ditto the memorials to Jefferson (117 years), FDR (52), and Eisenhower (51). Every one of them is a considered tribute, rendered at a distance, by a nation that had time to weigh the man, not the present bending its knee to a tyrant’s power. Then there are the instances of illegality and clear usurpation of congressional power. Establishing and naming a national memorial is an act for Congress, the people’s representatives—not for a board of loyalists and certainly not for the honoree himself. So when Trump’s hand-picked trustees renamed the Kennedy Center after him, Judge Christopher Cooper ruled the move unlawful in plain terms: Congress named that Center for John F. Kennedy, and only Congress can rename it. The D.C. Circuit has twice refused to disturb that ruling.

[...] The currency is a special problem, legally and practically. Money is the one government artifact everyone handles every day. Washington on the dollar, Lincoln on the five—those faces do quiet, constant work, reinforcing across generations who those men were and where they sit in the nation’s story. That is precisely why the honor has been withheld from the living. A federal law dating to 1866, the Thayer Amendment, provides that only a deceased individual’s portrait may appear on United States currency and securities, and the instinct is older than the statute: George Washington refused to put his face on the first silver dollar, because the living sovereign stamped on the coin of the realm is what monarchies do, not republics. Trump’s signature on paper money, a first for a sitting president, walks straight into the prohibition.

[...] The discouraging prospect is that we see the same ongoing national bitterness as with the Confederate monuments, the source of sharp divides that still plague us more than a century and a half after the end of the Civil War. Those statues were mostly erected not in the smoke of the war but decades later, in the Jim Crow years and again during the civil rights movement. They hardened into a sort of cultural litmus test, along the same dispiriting red-blue lines that the country seems unable to move past. And so will it be for the Trump monuments sprinkled around the country.