At the peak of the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, set in motion by Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s Justice Department, President Trump reportedly cried out, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?”
In 2025, having been burned in his first term by what he saw as an overreliance on establishment Republicans like Mr. Sessions, Mr. Trump is now filling his administration with MAGA loyalists — an army of Roy Cohns.
No one fits this pattern more than Mr. Trump’s nominee to head the F.B.I., Kash Patel, a fierce partisan who shares the president’s dream of using the federal government as an agency of personal retribution.
As Mr. Patel’s nomination comes under Senate review, it’s worth asking what exactly it means to have such a figure who appears to be handpicked to play a Roy Cohn role — a fierce courtroom brawler, but also a mob lawyer — as director of an institution as important, and as potentially dangerous, as the F.B.I. And why, for that matter, Americans knowingly elected a president who made no secret of his intent to govern in this way.
Mr. Patel has vowed to radically overhaul the agency because, in his view and in the view of Mr. Trump, it has been weaponized against conservatives.
Mr. Patel has been put forward as the head of an agency that abused power under its first director, J. Edgar Hoover. In the post-Hoover and post-Watergate era, the agency was dedicated to its independence within the executive branch.
For Mr. Patel, independence is to be actively rejected, since it is merely a guise used by what he sees as a covert permanent government, the “deep state.”
Mr. Patel wrote a children’s book celebrating the president as “King Donald.” In 2022, he published a roster of 60 people he suggested should be investigated, prosecuted or otherwise reviled — including Christopher Wray, who stepped down this month as F.B.I. director, and the former attorney general Merrick Garland.
Mr. Patel published a book in 2023 whose title says a lot about his views: “Government Gangsters.” This is meant to be an accusation against Mr. Trump’s foes, but, as so often in Trumpian rhetoric, the indictment reads like a barely disguised goal.
Certainly, Mr. Patel’s much touted loyalty to Mr. Trump puts him closer to a mob lawyer like Mr. Cohn than a lawman. Mr. Cohn’s clients included leading mafia bosses like Anthony (Fat Tony) Salerno and Paul Castellano, and on their behalf he went far beyond the noble service of providing the legal representation that was their constitutional due. To use the parlance of the mafia, he was a consigliere.
The danger of Mr. Patel’s nomination is that Mr. Trump would have a consigliere in a position that is almost uniquely easy to abuse, as we know from the sordid history of Hoover.
Several critics have made the accusation over the years that Mr. Trump is a mafia president. But that’s more than a convenient metaphor or even an apt account of his personal demeanor. The journalist John Ganz, in his recent book “When the Clock Broke,” sees mafia government as a symptom of a larger crisis of democracy.
As Mr. Ganz documents, in the 1990s, radical right-wing intellectuals like Samuel Francis and Murray Rothbard, then forging a proto-Trumpian politics called paleo-conservatism, were open in their admiration for the mobster antiheroes of the “Godfather” movies (and Mario Puzo’s novels). Mr. Francis and Mr. Rothbard thought liberal society was a sham that ripped off ordinary citizens while allowing crime and social disorder to flourish. By contrast, Don Corleone was an admirably old-fashioned paterfamilias who protected his community. This attitude found popular expression in the cult of the mob boss John Gotti, whose life sentence was protested by hundreds of New York residents in the 1990s.
Mafia politics is what you get when faith in the normal system of liberal democracy breaks down. This lesson can be found in “The Godfather.” The very first voice heard in the movie is not that of a mobster but an honest, ordinary American turning to a gangster for help: The humble, soft-spoken undertaker Amerigo Bonasera says, “I believe in America.” But America let him down. When two men beat and attempted to rape his daughter, the justice system let the men who harmed her free with a slap on the wrist. In that situation, what can a man do but turn to Don Corleone, the Godfather, for protection and justice?
Mr. Trump is a mafia president because America has become a nation of Bonaseras. But America is not alone. The British political scientist Jonathan Hopkin, in his book “Anti-System Politics,” has given us a far-reaching framework for understanding the wider shift in global politics since 2008. The economic meltdown of that year discredited institutions all over the world, a pivot point deepened by other examples of elite failure both earlier (President George W. Bush’s failed global war on terror) and subsequent (the social and economic upheavals of Covid).
Even more galling, thanks to America’s system of elite impunity, virtually none of the politicians and bankers responsible for these disasters has ever been held to account. This has made citizens of many democracies deeply cynical and open to an appeal of anti-system politics that promise to shake up the established order, whether by a return to egalitarian economics of class solidarity (as with Bernie Sanders) or a nativist politics of protection (as with Mr. Trump).
By picking Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris to be their standard-bearers, Democrats made a fateful choice to be a party of the establishment, the party of ancien regime restoration. Mr. Biden’s failed presidency and Ms. Harris’s election loss show that establishment restoration has a limited ability to win popular consent.
Sadly, elite liberals remain committed to the project of resuscitating the old order, as can be seen in self-defeating arguments being made against Mr. Trump’s gangsterism and the dangers of Mr. Patel’s nomination. The historian Beverly Gage, the author of a first-rate biography of J. Edgar Hoover, recently made the strange decision to criticize Mr. Patel by extolling the first F.B.I. director. According to Ms. Gage: “Hoover was never partisan in the ways that Trump and Patel are. He did not much care who won elections, as long as the winner promised to support the F.B.I.”
But as Ms. Gage herself documented in her biography, Hoover did on occasion use his office to covertly help friendly politicians (notably, Richard Nixon in 1960 and 1968).
Moreover, the term “partisan” evades the fact that Hoover’s reactionary politics were aimed squarely at antiwar and civil rights activists who didn’t run for office but exercised their constitutional rights to protest, most infamously Hoover’s vile campaign of personal destruction against the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
As Ms. Gage notes in her biography, “Hoover did as much as any individual in government to contain and cripple movements seeking racial and social justice, and thus to limit the forms of democracy and governance that might have been possible.” Yet Hoover is now extolled as an “institution builder.”
If liberals want to keep shedding the support of people of color, young people and the working class, there is no better strategy than a politics of nostalgia that upholds reactionaries like Hoover as emblems of a functioning system.
The danger of Mr. Patel’s directorship is not that he would betray the legacy of Hoover’s F.B.I. but that he would fulfill it. He could unleash the massive resources of the F.B.I. to turbocharge a reactionary political agenda. As with Hoover, this agenda wouldn’t just be partisan in a narrow sense but in pursuit of squashing progressive social movements Mr. Trump has openly threatened.
The governance Mr. Trump and Mr. Patel are promising will provide an ample target for anti-system rage. A revitalized opposition has to give up the fantasy of returning to the good old days before Mr. Trump, and before candidates like Mr. Patel were put forward for critical institutions.
Rather, the argument must be that Mr. Trump himself, and his gangster government, are proof that the current system serves the entrenched interests of the powerful and needs a radical overhaul.
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