Team Trump: who’s in – and who’s out?

If Donald Trump wins back the White House next week, adopt the brace position. His opponents will go beserk, inevitably, and try once again to put him in prison. Yet Trump allies might go even more crazy as they scramble for influence.

Trump claims to have learned from the mistakes of his first term. But what counts as a mistake depends on who you talk to. And it’s impossible to even guess at what a Trump Redux might mean without some sense of who he talks to these days – and who might shape and influence his agenda if he is elected.

The awkward truth – for insiders anyway – is that King Donald and his clan hide in plain sight. Political busybodies on both sides of the Atlantic are always trying to peek behind the gaudy curtain, desperate to decipher who’s up or down, in or out. But anyone with eyes to see can tell that, while Trumpism is about America First, for the Trumps family always takes priority.

For instance, it wasn’t some Svengali in the Trump campaign team who persuaded the Republican presidential nominee to do a series of long ‘bro-casts’ with online male influencers, chewing the fat about wrestling, cryptocurrency and cocaine.