The Time 100 Is Extra Shitty This Year With Tributes to Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner

The Time 100 is the magazine’s annual list of 100 “titans,” “pioneers,” and influential “artists.” What it really gives us, though, is the kind of sinister power pairings that only Time (or, you know, the current world order) could bring together. Think of it as the evil saluting the evil.

2017’s list, published on Thursday, brings us an array of special gifts, including Wendi Deng Murdoch, a woman who’s rumored to have dated every powerful man from Tony Blair to Vladimir Putin and who was married to media magnate Rupert Murdoch, writing about her close personal friend, Ivanka Trump:

Ivanka continues to earn my respect and admiration for how she has chosen to use her new visibility. She has long advocated to empower women and girls and is now leading education initiatives and working to put an end to human trafficking. I am deeply impressed by her courage to leave behind life as she knew it and move her young family to Washington to pursue positive change.

Time helpfully tweeted this extremely inspirational quote from Ivanka to accompany the blurb.

Unfortunately, the first daughter’s apparent efforts to lobby her father on behalf of women have not yet yielded any tangible results, particularly for low-income women. But it sure sounds nice!

Perhaps more hilarious was cute-suit-wearing war criminal Henry Kissinger offering the faintest possible endorsement of Jared Kushner, the man Donald Trump has tasked with bringing peace to the Middle East, being a kind of show secretary of state, and generally advising his father-in-law.

Will Kushner wind up carving out a blood-soaked and villainous legacy on par with his elder counterpart? Well, Kissinger doesn’t seem to think so. After spending one of two paragraphs droning on about the complexities of shifting power from one party to another, Kissinger writes what’s basically the “I don’t know her” of politics:

This space has been traversed for nearly four months by Jared Kushner, whom I first met about 18 months ago, when he introduced himself after a foreign policy lecture I had given. We have sporadically ­exchanged views since. As part of the Trump family, Jared is familiar with the intangibles of the President. As a graduate of Harvard and NYU, he has a broad education; as a businessman, a knowledge of administration. All this should help him make a success of his daunting role flying close to the sun.

Kissinger casts Kushner as the over-eager college freshman who accosted the elder statesman, somehow got hold of his personal email address, and has been hounding him for a letter of recommendation for a White House internship ever since. But its Kissinger’s comparing Kushner to the mythological figure Icarus, whose hubris led to his tragic death, that really shines. RIP, Trump’s Kissinger.

Time also saw fit to fete White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus with a write-up from Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s former chief of staff who’s now busy running Chicago into the ground.

Emanuel does manage the difficult task of barely mentioning Preibus at all—save for the fact that they share “Midwestern roots and unique names” along with a “love of politics.” Doing daunting work 24/7 to carry out the president’s vision is daunting work, Emanuel writes, which is probably all the more true when you’re surrounded by preening assholes jockeying for favor with the orange toddler-in-chief.

In case everything about our lives in the modern age isn’t a powerful enough reminder that it’s a very good time to be rich, powerful, and demonic, we’ll always have the Time 100 to fall back on.