The Weekly Screed (#918)

Make America Gangland Again

By David Benjamin

“To me being a gangster was better than being president of the United States.”

            — Ray Liotta (Henry Hill) in Goodfellas (1990)

PARIS — It’s a photo that’s been sticking in my memory — Donald Trump toddling along meekly beside North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, blessing the ground of the last Stalinist police state left on earth. Perhaps that scene should remind me of Neville Chamberlain kissing Hitler’s ass in 1938, or FDR at Yalta ceding eastern Europe to Russia, or Barack Obama making his famous Cairo “apology” speech in 2009.

But no. The images that popped to mind were Don Corleone convening with Virgil Sollozzo in The Godfather, Tommy DeVito getting “made” in Goodfellas, Jack Nicholson channeling Whitey Bulger in The Departed. I pictured, in my imagination, Al Capone and Bugsy Siegel walking slowly hand-in-hand into a purple Las Vegas sunset, Bugsy idling flipping a thousand-dollar poker chip.

I mean, we’re talkin’ gangsters here. Donny Pink Eyes and the Fat Panda.

The weird confluence of Trump’s personal style with that of Don Corleone, not to mention Trump’s mob-based New York business (construction, waste management) associates, has been explored by other commentators. But it does captivate the idle fancy! Having watched most of the mob movies of the last few decades, it has always struck me that homicidal tyrants like Kim, and wannabe strongmen like Trump consistently behave not like ancient conquerors, 17th-century kings or the populist demagogues of Chautauqua times. They are the wild wild West, Great Depression bootleggers and the grand-daddies of Vegas. They’re mobsters.

Robert Mugabe, Abdel Fattah al-Sissi, Mohammed bin Salman, Hugo Chavez and Nicolás Maduro, Xi Jinping, Mobutu Sese Seko, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Victor Orban, etc. Mob guys. And, of course, the mobbiest of ’em all, Vlad “Biceps” Putin.

If you look at made (Putin, Kim) or wouldbe made (Trump) guys like these as presidents or statesmen, you’re looking through the wrong end of the proctoscope. It is entirely alien to the mob-boss tyrant’s ethos to bother with distractions like policy, programs, positions or governing plans. That’s what Robert Duvall is for.

 

A mob boss like Kim, who — in cinema context — is the grandson of Don Corleone, has one pathological focus. All his thoughts, energies and actions are directed toward survival, to stay in power at all costs. Power is foremost. Without it, he’s Il Duce hanging upside down in the Piazzale Loreto. The “nation,” for Kim, is the solid-gold Porsche that keeps him in the driver’s seat.

 

Whether you’re running a country or running rackets, the fundamentals of gangsterism are identical. Al Capone expressed this eloquently when he said, “My rackets are run on strictly American lines and they’re going to stay that way.”

 

The “American lines” to which Capone referred meant that his mob was privately held, unaccountable to shareholders, inaccessible to regulatory oversight, immune to taxation, and almost entirely family-run. Donny Pink Eyes’s MBA is from the Alphonse Capone School of Management.

 

As expertly as any gangster prior to Trump, Capone played to a crowd he held in contempt. Neither Capone in real life, Don Corleone in the movies, nor Kim on his throne in Pyongyang ever thought once about winning a popular mandate. In similar disdain, with only 46 percent of the vote in 2016 (2.9 million less than Hillary), Trump has made no effort to increase his market share. Rather, like a mob boss enforcing allegiance through bluster and intimidation— Capone again: “I have built my organization upon fear.” — Donny Pink Eyes has solidified his “base,” purged the disloyal and sensible (Comey, Priebus, Mattis, etc.) and shrunk his syndicate down to a bare handful of loquacious lickspittles and Trump whisperers (Kellyanne, Bill Barr, Stephen Miller, Mike Pompeo, etc.).

Trump understands, like all capo dei capi, that brazen criminality is a form of showbiz. Some of our fondest American heroes, from Billy the Kid to Pretty Boy Floyd to Cliven Bundy, were beloved by millions as Robin Hoods who seemingly advanced the cause — through bloodshed and larceny abetted by yellow journalism — of the “forgotten man.” They committed outrages most people dare not even ponder. They plundered with panache and they got applause. They challenged the institutions — banks, government, the police, the educated elite — that ordinary people would destroy if only we could drop our drawers and go hog wild. On a cornerstone of fear and loathing, they erected a cult of personality. They posed as noble savages. When Trump said, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters,” he was Clint Eastwood, John Dillinger and “Teflon Don” Gotti all over again.

It was Gotti who imposed into the conversation the ultimate sanction. In a cascade of tough-guy clichés, he once said, “When I go to war with my enemies, I raise the black flag. I ask for no quarter and I give no quarter. You kill me or I kill you. It’s just the way it is.”

This ethos defines the power of mob-boss tyrants like Kim, Mohammed bin Salman and Vlad Biceps. Indeed, Kim launched his regime by murdering an uncle, then killed his own brother, “purged” every general he didn’t trust and filled up his gulags with political enemies. And Trump “fell in love” with him. Why? Envy.

 

Putin, of course, kills at will. MBS does it with garrottes, bone saws and missiles made in the USA.

After a fashion, Trump has parroted Gotti’s sanguinary boast, warning, “When people wrong you, go after those people, because it is a good feeling. And because other people will see you doing it. I always get even.”

Notwithstanding his macho preening, Donny Pink Eyes has yet to attain the sort of president-for-life impunity that he covets. Despite his Scarface contempt for the law, Trump still hasn’t wangled from Mitch McConnell, Lindsay Graham and Justice Roberts the juice that would ensure no consequences for literally whipping out his .44 and popping his enemies. Right now, the only notches on his gun-butt are the little kids wasting away in his Mexican border concentration camps.

 

But he’s working his way up to grownups.

Like every mob-boss tyrant, he has turned the judiciary into his personal law firm and the military into a private militia that rolls tanks through D.C. and obediently unrolls razor-wire along the Rio Grande to hurl back the homeless and the tempest-tost.

 

Like Vlad Biceps or Big Al, Fat Panda or Lucky Luciano, Donny Pink Eyes has gathered ’round himself the nation’s plutocrats, bestowing favors and rendering them beholden to him for shreds of his power and access to America’s treasure. He has compounded the mindless fear of the many with the boundless greed of the few. Or as Trump subtly put it: “We got more money. We got more brains. We got better houses, apartments. We got nicer boats.”

He meant himself, not “we.” The survival of the boss is a matter deeply individual. Neither Kim nor Putin cares what happens to anyone, and certainly not to their wretched countries. Tyrants and mob bosses have no homeland. The only faith they value is the rigid, implacable, blind loyalty that followers give to them. Or else. 

The boss professes the family devoutly, but given a choice between son and survival? Remember what happened to Fredo. 

Note to Don, Jr.… Eric… Ivanka: Avoid Fifth Avenue. And stay out of boats.