Jared Kushner’s surprise visit to Iraq yesterday, breaking with Pentagon safety protocol by being announced before he’d even landed and usurping a job traditionally performed by the secretary of state, was further proof of his outsized role in his father-in-law’s White House. Kushner is President Donald Trump’s Mr. Fix-It, the youthful prodigy tasked with all the hard assignments, foreign and domestic. Kushner’s towering workload has even become a standing joke. An Onion story mocking Kushner for his heavy workload—“Jared Kushner Quietly Transfers ‘Solve Middle East Crisis’ To Next Week’s To-Do List”—was “passed along” by White House staffers and other political allies, according to Politico.

Speaking on CNN last night, Daniel Drezner, a political scientist at the Fletcher School and Washington Post contributor, became exasperated as he listed off Kushner’s absurdly long to-do list. “I’m just assuming that Jared Kushner stayed at the best Holiday Inn Express imaginable last night,” Drezner quipped on CNN, referring to the famous ad campaign. “Because that’s the only explanation I have for why anyone would have the kind of hubris to think that you can solve U.S. relations with Mexico, U.S. relations with Canada, U.S relations with China, bring peace to the Middle East, solve the opioid crisis, solve the V.A. problem and, by the way, I believe reform all of the federal government...His one qualification is that he married well.”



.@dandrezner on Trump's 'secretary of everything': "This is insane... his one qualification is that he married well" https://t.co/P5oTQFCSQb — CNN Tonight (@CNNTonight) April 4, 2017

Other observers consider Kushner’s vast power not only absurd, but terrifying. After all, tin-pot dictators—not U.S. presidents—centralize power in the hands of unqualified family members. “I don’t think we’ve seen a family member with so much power and influence in the White House in a very long time,” said Nicholas Burns, a former undersecretary of state and NATO ambassador, told CBS News. “You do see this in foreign countries, you see it in monarchies, you see it in authoritarian countries where the brother or the son or the uncle of the leader has influence because of the relationship.”

Henry F. Carey, a political scientist at Georgia State University, worried in January that Trump’s fusing of his family and business with the operations of the state could lead to a system comparable to the “Sultanism” of pre-modern Turkey. “So what might happen in a presidential democracy, where the leader or those working for the leader are motivated by absolute personal or family loyalty and ignore legal requirements and procedural traditions?” Carey wrote at The Conversation. His answer: “The U.S. presidency has always been prone to sultantistic tendencies, but under a Trump presidency what were once isolated incidents could become a way of governing...Instead of a “team of rivals” under the rule of law, the Trump presidency may be akin to medieval monarchy, with decisions made by court politics, not legal procedures.”

It’s been an ongoing question whether the Trump administration will be ruthlessly authoritarian or just corruptly incompetent. But Carey’s essay is a reminder that it’s not an either/or question. The authoritarian tendency to concentrate power in the hands of family members will often lead to incompetent and corrupt decisions.