[custom_adv] Not every child who has been given a helpful push by a powerful parent gets her own hashtag, but that’s what happened last June, when, at the G20 summit meeting in Osaka, Japan, Ivanka Trump—thitherto not known for the depth of her expertise in geopolitics—decided to put in her two cents’ worth during a conversation with Theresa May, Justin Trudeau, and IMF head Christine Lagarde. [custom_adv] That may have gotten a laugh, but some experts wondered whether the First Father, already known for his penchant for bringing his children and children-in-law into his inner circle, in politics as in business, had at last crossed a line. As one national security official put it, “It reflects poorly on the United States that we’re too often represented by unelected officials without any relevant qualifications.” [custom_adv] He’s not alone in this. Recent headlines announced that New York mayor Bill de Blasio was hiring his 21-year-old son Dante as a policy analyst on his now-defunct presidential campaign, and that President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil intended to make his son Eduardo ambassador to the U.S. [custom_adv] Portugal’s ruling party is so riddled with relatives in official posts that the country’s opposition leader joked that if everyone who worked in the government alongside a family member were fired, there’d be no one left. [custom_adv] Quite the contrary. Sputter as the pundits may, the fact is that nepotism has been a part of politics as long as there has been such a thing as politics. The term itself, which is derived from the Latin word nepos, which means nephew, goes back to the early Renaissance, when ambitious popes, who (at least in theory) did not have offspring, appointed their nephews to positions of great power within the Catholic Church. [custom_adv] Take the Borgias: After his election to the papacy, one member of that infamously power-hungry family, Callistus III, made two of his nephews cardinals. One of them went on to become pope, and once in power he made his teenage son, along with the son’s teenage friend, cardinals. Things got so bad that a later pope had to issue a bull limiting the practice, although it was largely ignored. Blood, it would seem, was thicker than holy water.
