Mob Boss

Trump's True Title

First of all thanks for bearing with me during the hectic past few weeks: we will now return to your regularly scheduled programming. Hopefully, I will also have some exciting things to share with you soon!

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In this morning’s New York Times, there’s a very good op-ed by Samuel Earle entitled “There Is a Twisted Logic to Trump’s Obsession With Al Capone.” I missed this, but apparently Trump has been comparing himself to Capone. Earle goes on to make several points that I think are absolutely correct:

Mr. Trump knows that in America, crooks can be the good guys. When the state is seen as corrupt, the crook becomes a kind of Everyman, bravely beating the system at its own game. This is the cynical logic that the gangster and the right-wing populist share: Everyone’s as bad as anyone else, so anything goes. “A crook is a crook,” Capone once said. “But a guy who pretends he is enforcing the law and steals on his authority is a swell snake. The worst type of these punks is the big politician, who gives about half his time to covering up so that no one will know he’s a thief.”

It’s a worldview powerful enough to convince voters that even the prized institutions of liberal democracy — a free press, open elections, the rule of law — are fronts in the biggest racket of them all. This conceit has a rich pedigree in reactionary politics. “Would-be totalitarian rulers usually start their careers by boasting of their past crimes and carefully outlining their future ones,” Hannah Arendt warned.

My only quibble with Earle’s piece is that he suggests that this is a new phenomenon, a transformation on Trump’s part. But he has long inhabited this role. Trump had actual connections to the mob through his lawyer Roy Cohn, who also happened to be house counsel to the Gambino family and Genovese chief Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno. As Wayne Barrett writes Trump: The Greatest Show on Earth: The Deals, the Downfall, the Reinvention:

FBI sources who questioned high-level mob informants about how Trump was able to win labor peace on his big New York jobs were told that he “did it through Cohn,” a mentor who could reach into the mob combines that controlled everything from the concrete to the drywall work. Cohn may have even arranged a meeting in the living room of his town house between Donald and Salerno at the very time S&A was doing the Trump Plaza concrete work, at least according to one Cohn staffer who says she was present.

Trump comes from a New York where the mafia, business, and politics were intertwined. The political bosses—Donald Manes and Meade Esposito—the Trump family relied upon to clear construction projects were fully tied into the mob. And if Trump has a political theory at all, it’s one developed in this formative period of his life: the system is just an interlocking series of rackets and “this is just the way the world works.”

Trump has also long viewed the role of capo di tutti capi as an aspiration. I was really struck by how he keeps calling Capone “the greatest:” “I often say Al Capone, he was one of the greatest of all time, if you like criminals,” Mr. Trump said in December.” Now, surely this is just Trump hyperbole he applies to just about everything without much thought. Sure, but if we look back at a New York magazine feature in 1992, we can see how Trump was talking even then:

Yes, that’s the famed architect Philip Johnson. Strangely enough, Johnson was once a young fascist who drove down to Louisiana with a friend to try to become Huey Long’s “Minister of Culture.” Here’s the quote he gave to the New York Herald Tribune, explicitly citing the gumption of Al Capone: “All you need is faith, courage, and loyalty. If you have them, you’ll get things done. That’s the terrible thing today, why the Dillinger and Capone gangs are the only groups that have got courage. Beyond that nothing is needed, not even consistency. The only necessary consistency is consistency of feeling.”

Samuel Francis and Murray Rothbard, who I consider to be theorists of Trumpism avant la lettre, were both obsessed with The Godfather, which they used as a political paradigm. I wrote about this back in 2018:

For Francis, the Mafia family lead by Vito and then Michael Corleone represented a natural, traditional, patriarchal form of community trying to secure itself against an artificial, modern, rootless American society. He used the German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies’s opposition of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft to set up this conflict: “The three pillars of Gemeinschaft—blood, place (land), and mind, or kinship, neighborhood, and friendship—are all encompassed in the family.” Very much by contrast, “the essence of Gesellschaft is rationality and calculation, expressed in such modern organizations as corporations . . . and the formal, impersonal, legalistic, bureaucratic organization of the modern state.”

In a way, Trump represents the culmination of the politics of gangster Gemeinschaft or what the sociologist Edward C. Banfield called “amoral familism.”

And, yes, here it comes: if you find any of this at all tantalizing, there’s much, much more about it in my forthcoming book When The Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s, where I devote an entire chapter to how John Gotti became a folk hero.