Donald Trump’s Government of Gangsters

In early November, just days before the presidential election, Donald Trump received an endorsement from a figure who doesn’t usually dabble in national politics: Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano, former hitman and underboss for the Gambino crime family. In 1991, as part of deal with the federal government to testify against his former mob boss, John Gotti, Gravano confessed to 19 murders. But there’s ample reason to believe Gravano was responsible for even more killings. Making the case for Trump, Gravano said, “I’m gonna call him a gangster. We need a gangster.”

Gravano’s imprimatur might be dismissed as a quirky news story but for the fact that Trump is in fact assembling a government of gangsters. Trump himself is a repeat lawbreaker, who was convicted on multiple felonies by a New York court earlier this year and who had many ongoing legal investigations. Now that he’s won the presidency for a second time, Trump has almost surely escaped legal jeopardy—a distressing fact that also strengthens his hold on those who love him for being an antiestablishment rebel. The outlaw who outwits the system has long been a folkloric archetype, speaking to the pervasive reality that people often hate the legal system and the political establishment.

Gravano’s praise of the incoming president is a striking vindication of the single best book on Trumpism, John Ganz’s When the Clock Broke, which uses the popularity of John Gotti among some New Yorkers during his 1990s trial as an example of the anti-system sentiment that eventually erupted into Trumpism. (Fairness requires me to acknowledge that Ganz is a friend and he thanks me warmly in his book for assistance I gave. But the quality of the book is such that I would praise it even if Ganz were a sworn foe).

Trump’s MAGA movement is often compared to authoritarian political tendencies such as fascism or Peronism. But the Mafia is a more pertinent point of comparison for Trump, who got to see the Cosa Nostra up close thanks to his lawyer and mentor Roy Cohn, who was also an adviser to mob bosses like Paul Castellano (Gotti’s predecessor as head of the Gambino family) and Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno. As a real estate developer, Trump had repeated business dealings with mobsters, who long controlled aspects of the construction business in New York.

Trump operates like a mob boss, surrounding himself with family members and groveling loyalists, prizing fealty above all else, and practicing a transactional politics of favors and deals that shows little regard for legal norms.

On Saturday, Trump nominated Charles Kushner, the father-in-law of Trump’s daughter Ivanka, to be ambassador to France. In 2005, Kushner was convicted of multiple crimes, including tax evasion and witness tampering. One of his transgressions was particularly sordid and ornate. As the Associated Press reports, after he learned that his brother-in-law was cooperating with a federal investigation of his business affairs, Kushner “hired a prostitute to lure his brother-in-law, then arranged to have the encounter in a New Jersey motel room recorded with a hidden camera and the recording sent to his own sister, the man’s wife.” In 2020, in the last days of his first term, Trump pardoned Kushner.

Aside from Kushner, Trump’s circle of quondam cronies and former advisers includes many who have run afoul of the law: Steve Bannon, Roger Stone, Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, and Allen Weisselberg. And for the new government he is forming, Trump has shown a particular fondness for those connected to or accused of sexual offenses.

In The American Prospect, Maureen Tkacik has provided a horrifying list of Trump officials accused or guilty of terrible misconduct:

If Abraham Lincoln created, in the words of historian Doris Kearns Godwin, “a team of rivals” in his cabinet, Trump is creating a team of sexual predators, with himself as the miscreant in chief.

Why did the American people elect a government of gangsters and predators? Perhaps one reason is that crime and government are not all that far apart—especially in an age of elite impunity. Consider all the powerful people with more mainstream politics than Trump who have evaded legal punishment: the officials in the administration of George W. Bush who sold a war on lies and set up a torture regime in Guantánamo and secret prisons around the world, or the bankers who wrecked the world economy with the 2008 meltdown. There was a deliberate decision made by both Republican and Democratic administrations that no punishment would ever be meted out for these offenses. President Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter just adds to the sense of impunity for the wealthy and well-connected.

Explaining the popular protests in support of a Mafia boss in the 1990s, Ganz notes that at the time there was a widespread crisis of legitimacy—one that remade even those who had previously seen themselves as pillars of legal respectability such as the prosecutor Rudy Giuliani.

According to Ganz:

In 1993, Giuliani moved from being a law-and-order politician to a servant of mob violence, with his favorite mob being the New York City Police Department whose rioting and disregard for laws he cheered on. Giuliani’s transformation prefigured the transformation of the United States.

In Francis Ford Coppola’s classic gangster film The Godfather, there is a scene where the rising Mafia princeling Michael Corleone defends his family to his girlfriend Kay Adams:

If you are appalled by Trump’s government of gangsters, think of all the crimes the ruling class has gotten away with in the last few years, and then ask yourself, “Who’s being naïve?” Who indeed?