As President-elect Donald Trump contemplates his Secretary of State pick, we take a look at what his current cabinet picks might mean for the path ahead for the White House.

With Jeff Sessions as his pick attorney general, Stephen Bannon as chief strategist, Mike Pompeo as his choice for C.I.A. director, Trump has been quick to assemble his transition team with prominent, and sometimes controversial, Republican figures. The son-in-law of the president-elect, Jared Kushner, has reportedly shown interest in joining the new administration.

Ethics lawyers have commented that the move would violate a federal statute designed to prevent family members from influencing government decision-making. The law was put in place almost 50 years ago, after John F. Kennedy appointed his brother Robert F. Kennedy as attorney general. No public official is allowed to hire a family member, by blood or by marriage, to an agency under his or her authority.

Fill-in host Libby Denkmann checks in with Anna Palmer, senior Washington correspondent at Politico, and historian Josh Zeitz, on Trump’s cabinet picks and the history of nepotism in America.

Guests:

Anna Palmer, Senior Washington Correspondent at Politico

Josh Zeitz, historian; taught at Cambridge University and Princeton University; currently writing a book on the making of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society