The Godfather Presidency: How Donald Trump’s Governing Style Mimics the Mob

It was March 27, two thirds of the way through President Donald Trump’s first 100 days of chaos, and Maryland congressman Jamie Raskin’s office was abuzz. Less than an hour before, the White House had announced that one of Raskin’s antagonists in the House, Elise Stefanik, who represents a district in the far northeast of New York State, would not be Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations.

The reason was not that Trump had developed misgivings. On the contrary, Stefanik is one of his pet legislators, a former detractor turned loyalist. Nor was there any doubt of her making it through confirmation hearings. In a season of improbable appointments, some of them verging on the surreal, Stefanik, with a degree from Harvard and a firm command of policy, was the rare Trump appointee who might actually be up to the job.

No, the trouble was the Republicans’ tissue-thin majority. If Stefanik left the House, with tight off-year elections coming in closely contested districts, the GOP margin might shrink to four or even less. So Trump, in a bind, came up with a new UN appointment—Mike Waltz, the national security adviser few in the White House inner circle seemed to like—and Stefanik would have to stay put in the House. Instead of going to the UN and its luxurious apartment 37 floors up in midtown Manhattan, she’d be part of the increasingly robotic team in the capital, while also making visits back to the Adirondacks to deal—or not deal—with constituents like the ones who had angrily converged on the town library in Glens Falls to voice their complaints about the new administration to an empty chair and a poster of their absent legislator, Stefanik.

In our prolonged moment of performative politics, theater of this kind has its practical uses, and few are better versed in them than Raskin. First elected to the House in 2016 in the same tide that swept Trump into his first term, Raskin has been tied to him, oddly, ever since. He was the “lead impeachment manager” when the Judiciary Committee investigated the deadly Capitol riot. He is now the committee’s ranking Democrat in a new era rife with illegalities—and has felt with particular force the extent to which Trump 2.0 is, as Raskin observed, “a completely different operation, very swift in their authoritarian attacks—and smooth moving.”

Raskin had been in the news the previous weekend: He had filled in for yet another absentee Republican, this time at a town hall in Cambridge, Maryland, a two-hour drive from Raskin’s own district in Montgomery County, outside Washington. Montgomery has a considerable population of government employees, and they’d been badly hit by Elon Musk’s DOGE rampage. “I have 55,000 federal workers,” he told me in his office conference room in the stolid, storied Rayburn building. Those employees are disbursed throughout agencies like the National Institutes of Health and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, now accused of being hotbeds of waste, fraud, and corruption, plagued by “voluntary” dismissals and force-outs.

It was amid this disruption that Raskin got a glimpse of how the new regime was going to work. The tutelage came from a Republican colleague whose name Raskin was protecting and who likewise had been worried, he confided to Raskin, until rescue had come. Raskin’s impersonation went like this: “We’ve got this guy ‘Joe’ who’s been in the forestry service as a firefighter for nearly two decades, and he’s a loyal Republican. He’s always supported me, and he just got sacked. He had some promotion and was in the probationary period.” This was also the case, said Raskin, for “hundreds of people that I represent.” The Republican legislator reached the White House—something few Democrats are able to do—and asked for help. “Their answer was, ‘Here’s the phone number of the guy you need to talk to in Musk’s office.’ ” Start to finish—legislators reduced to supplicants; sources whose names weren’t being revealed—the episode was appalling to Raskin, who saw the partisan cronyism as an assault on the professional civil service and the rule of law.

If that’s the way things were going to be, then they would all be lining up for favors. Reflecting on this, he said, “You give me Elon Musk’s number. I’ve got families who are afraid they’re not going to be able to pay their mortgage because one person is on probation at NIH and one person’s getting sacked from USAID.” But, no. Help was on the way for Republicans only—“a back-channel appeal route based on party patronage politics.”

Raskin went on to mention a more publicized case. It involved one of the most respected House Republicans, Oklahoman Tom Cole, who is the chair of the powerful Appropriations Committee. Cole’s constituents were also now at risk. “They shut down a whole bunch of federal functions and programs in his district.” Cole did not quietly plead for help. “He raised hell with them behind closed doors and then he announces on Twitter that all of these jobs have been restored. Suddenly, there was no waste, fraud, and abuse there.”

The entire operation seemed perverse, not only because of the misspent time and accumulated waste in the name of “government efficiency” but, more striking still, the deliberate campaign to plant fear in the hearts of loyal constituents: The 14 counties Cole represents voted overwhelmingly for Trump (80 percent or more in some districts). The purpose, however, was not to inconvenience Cole, recently reelected to a 12th term. It was to remind weaker Republican legislators, backbenchers, that every GOP-sanctioned penny directed their way comes from one place. And no protest would be tolerated.

Raskin sympathized—or at least understood the position they were in. “If you’re a freshman Republican, and they’re telling you Elon Musk will spend $5 million in a primary to defeat you, and you’re already scared because you’ve only been in office for a year, two years, and you’re able to save some people their jobs or save some federal project that they were about to shut down, you’re not going to mess with them anymore. You’re just going to get in line like sheep. But remember, the longer it goes on, the more power they have over you.”

The question—ever present in the current frazzled moment—was, to what lengths would they go? Raskin has never met Musk and doesn’t expect to. Politics no longer works that way. Raskin and company, like most of the rest of us, live in a world of guesswork, speculation, and unverifiable rumor. One such rumor going around, Raskin told me, was “that they’re going to use their control of the Treasury’s payment system to pay the red states, pay their friends, and not pay the blue states.” Of the 10 states most dependent on federal dollars, at least seven are red. Supporters were being reduced to supplicants.

“That,” said Raskin, “is a Mafia operation.”

In my 35 years of writing about and reporting on US politics and ideology, I can’t think of another time when so many professional observers seem so utterly at a loss to analyze, or even categorize, the president’s MO. And most of them have gotten it wrong. Trump’s operating model is not, as some maintain, the foreign autocrat—even if he curries favor and sings the praises of Putin and Orban and Erdogan, and cozies up to Middle Eastern potentates. Neither is Trump’s model his crafty lawyer-mentor Roy Cohn—even if he practices Cohn’s mantra: Deny, deflect, delay. It’s a mistake, too, to think of Trump as a latter-day P.T. Barnum, a showman-salesman mugging for the TV cameras and effusing on Truth Social.

All that may apply to Trump the entertainer. But Trump the president is shaped by someone he observed at much closer range from childhood on: his father, Fred Trump, the great mid-20th-century apartment builder and developer of outer-borough New York. For many years father and son were partners who mastered the byways and back alleys of real estate at a time when, as two of the period’s best reporters wrote, New York was a “city for sale.” It was a brutish world of transactional power, of patronage, favors, cronyism, bribes, payoffs, pork, and spoils—as well as extortion, intimidation, and threat. It was a world ruled by Mob capos and political allies who at times were little more than frontmen.

And so it has continued. During his first term as president, Trump was often thought of as disorganized and ineffective—and a poor dealmaker. Maybe so. But with the passage of time, this looks mistaken. Even in his first term, Trump demonstrated canny backroom shrewdness. There was, for instance, his skirting of Senate “advice and consent” on major appointments through the succession of “acting” agency heads and Cabinet secretaries, who could be instantly installed and removed, with all power concentrated in Trump himself. In his second term he has come up with a further refinement of one-boss rule, this time piling jobs—or rather titles—on Marco Rubio, ostensibly his top diplomat but in reality an all-hat, no-cattle mouthpiece for Trump, like all the other president’s men and women. It feels improvised and probably is. But it has also been some years in the making.

When Trump lost to Joe Biden, he recalibrated. Exiled to Mar-a-Lago, he tightened his hold on both houses of Congress, consolidated the sometimes lockstep allegiance of the Supreme Court, and clawed his way back, despite having been impeached twice by the House, convicted on 34 felony counts, and found liable in an array of lawsuits. As if to make up for lost time, second-term Trump, operating with Mob boss impunity, has become the consummate party boss in the tradition of New York’s Tammany Hall, an era when pols bragged about how many judges they had in their pocket.

Self-assured and self-obsessed, fearless and fearsome, the interloper of 2015 has become the folk hero of January 6, 2021, and now is widely acknowledged to be the dominant American political figure of the 21st century, as mythically big as Franklin Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan were in the 20th. Trump’s success derives from his innate understanding of how to wield bare-knuckle power by creating his own kind of syndicate in the time-tested style of both the political clubhouses and the Mob-adjacent New York real estate business of his youth. He is, without doubt, the capital’s most effective and intimidating executive since LBJ. And to get at the nub of how it all came to be, I turned to some of the people who know that world best.

Half a century ago, in the 1970s, when Trump was learning to navigate New York politics, the city itself almost went bankrupt—it couldn’t afford to repay nearly $3 billion in federal loans. A whole universe of operators was bilking the system: a complex but largely hidden raft of bankers, investors, money lenders, and lawyers who were mismanaging the nation’s greatest city, the citadel of world finance, and getting money or power, or both, while they did it. In all, New York governance consisted of a thick web of 1,500 to 2,000 people, in the estimate of the journalists Jack Newfield and Paul DeBrul in their 1981 book The Permanent Government, a dissection of the city’s largely hidden political class. Trump appears in it as its youngest player, a rising star who, they write, at “not yet 35 is the city’s most aggressive and politically connected developer.” The key words are “politically connected.” The idea, espoused by Beltway sophisticates, that Trump was a political novice was badly misplaced. In fact, he grew up in politics, not so different from Washington’s own but more direct, or at least more candid, in its emphasis on money and access. In the 1970s, Trump and his father “donated or loaned money to almost every important elected official in the city and state,” the authors wrote. And the money went to the top.

An early good bet they made was on the Brooklyn politician Hugh Carey. When he was elected governor of New York in 1974, the Trumps, among his “biggest and earliest backers…put up $1,200 to get the first phone lines into Carey’s headquarters, cosigned a $23,000 start-up loan, and contributed outright another $35,000,” according to Wayne Barrett’s Trump: The Deals and the Downfall, his full-scale investigation of the exploits of the Trumps. Published in 1992, it remains the single indispensable book on the subject.

These great journalists studied Trump so closely because they knew from the moment he arrived on the scene he was destined to transform it—an audacious, almost unstoppable force pushing ahead, hour upon hour, with “maniacal drive.” It bears little resemblance to the TV huckster and cartoonish bully of World Wrestling Entertainment and The Apprentice, two virtual personas he developed after his first career dissolved in serial bankruptcy.

In 1973, when he was just getting started, Trump shrewdly hired Carey’s chief fundraiser, Louise Sunshine, the granddaughter of Barney Pressman, the founder of Barneys New York. Sunshine, who went on to operate her own real estate company, was the first version of Trump’s current chief of staff, Susie Wiles, the sensible den mother to a distracted Trump. “Donald was all of maybe 24 years old,” Sunshine later told PBS’s Frontline (actually, he was 26.) “He was spreading his dollars around political circles in order to be known and garner credibility in the world of business. And he chose politics as a route to gain fame.” This, while operating out of a tiny office. The staff, at first, consisted of two: Trump and Sunshine, his own “lobbyist.”

Already, he had figured out how the system worked—and how easily politicians could be bought. Barrett describes Trump showing up late for lunch at the Four Seasons with one of the many elders shepherding him through real estate deals. He’d been held up, Trump explained, because he was at a Carey campaign event. “ ‘Carey’s a wonderful guy,’ Donald announced in a booming voice that could be heard six tables away. ‘He can be trusted. He’ll do anything for a developer who gives him a campaign contribution.’ ”

Over the years Trump has zigzagged more times than anyone, himself included, can possibly count. But when the subject turns to favors and “trust,” he has been rock-solid. Forty-one years after that lunch, during the first GOP debate in August 2015—the one that set him on his course to victory—Trump, this time in a voice boomed out to the estimated 24 million viewers watching Fox News that night, a record for a primary-season debate, said this about his GOP opponents: “Most of the people on this stage I’ve given to, just so you understand, a lot of money…. I will tell you that our system is broken…. I give to everybody. When they call, I give. And do you know what? When I need something from them two years later, three years later, I call them, they are there for me.”

He would go on to admit—rather, boast—that he’d completed the same transaction with the Democratic nominee: “With Hillary Clinton, I said be at my wedding and she came to my wedding. You know why? She didn’t have a choice because I gave. I gave to [her] foundation.”

No one could remember a presidential candidate ever saying such a thing. “Shockingly insightful,” Vox allowed. We’ve heard all our lives that politicians lie. Trump may very well lie more than all the others combined. But in that moment of raw candor, he had spoken the truth known to every politician but seldom owned up to—that the system’s corruptions went to its root. “Legalized bribery,” The Intercept noted at the time. And once the visual evidence surfaced—wedding photographs in The Hollywood Reporter showing Hillary Clinton beaming radiantly at Trump while Bill Clinton and Melania stand near—the contemporary age of Trump had effectively begun.

It also cleared the path for all that followed, much of it done at the expense of the GOP. Trump was fast making his personal fief, ruling just as the bosses back in New York had done, ignoring rules and rituals, crashing through barriers, overstepping boundaries, sometimes with good reason. Since the mid-1980s, Republican office seekers had dutifully signed the Taxpayer Protection Pledge, the movement’s highest loyalty oath, a promise to oppose tax increases, that was composed by Beltway activist Grover Norquist at the peak of the Reagan Revolution. Trump simply blew the pledge off and knew that voters wouldn’t care—might even reward him for it. Such a move explains why Raskin says of Trump, “He’s got great political instincts.” We often hear those instincts described as the demagogue’s talent for stirring the depths of a restive electorate. But they also reflect the public’s own growing disillusionment with the increasingly stale dogma of a vanished time.

What looks anomalous in Trump and Trumpism—what we’re told time and again must never be normalized—has, in fact, a long history in American politics, and it is not in contradiction or defiance of our democracy but rather in fulfillment of the underworld or dark-alley version of it, “the terrible hounds of democracy,” as D.H. Lawrence called them a century ago. This form of democracy is as old as the founding and in some instances older. Long before the age of back-channel deals and smoke-filled rooms came the democracy of mob rule and lynch law, of tar and feathering, as well as of blackmail and extortion. These dark arts remain a recurrent threat because they spring from the central premise of democracy, the rule of the many rather than the few, though the few need little encouragement to join in.

Some of the most frightening things happening today—the raids and deportations, the attacks on universities, the silencing of critics from the media to Hollywood, the threats to judges and Democratic opponents—have summoned comparisons with the Communist hunting of the Joe McCarthy period in the early ’50s. What many forget is that a substantial majority of Republicans supported McCarthy, who was championed as well by conservative intellectuals and much of the electorate, the same constituencies Trump commands today.

Then again, the tradition of the witch trial is of older American vintage than our constitutional republic. In 1851, Nathaniel Hawthorne, himself a descendant of witch hunters of the 1690s, pointed out that “the influential classes, and those who take upon themselves to be leaders of the people, are fully liable to all the passionate error that has ever characterized the maddest mob. Clergymen, judges, statesmen—the wisest, calmest, holiest persons of their day—stood in the inner circle round about the gallows, loudest to applaud the work of blood, latest to confess themselves miserably deceived.”

Trump the election denier has precedence too. One of his favorite presidents, Richard Nixon, was convinced he had been cheated of victory in the 1960 election, and top Republican officials agreed. The claims of fraud and “irregularities” were so loud as the Electoral College certification day neared, there was talk it would be challenged, with Nixon himself, the sitting vice president, standing to gain the presidency should the results be invalidated (thus with even more at stake than Mike Pence 60 years later). In the end, Nixon called it off, though he remained persuaded the election had been stolen from him (with Joe Kennedy, the father of Nixon’s opponent, JFK—along with Chicago’s Democratic machine—purportedly putting thumbs on the scale). Nixon’s distrust of the system was one reason he later authorized criminal election proceedings from his own White House, ultimately giving us the Watergate scandal.

The preoccupation didn’t end there. In Game Change, their account of the 2008 election, John Heilemann and Mark Halperin describe the Clintons’ disbelief after Hillary lost to the upstart Barack Obama in the Iowa caucus:

How did this happen? the Clintons asked again and again…. The turnout figures made no sense to them: Some 239,000 caucus-goers had shown up, nearly double the figure from four years earlier. Where did all these people come from? Bill asked. Were they all really Iowans? The Obama campaign must have cheated, he said, must have bussed in supporters from Illinois.

Hillary had been worried about that possibility for weeks; now she egged her husband on. Bill’s right, she said. We need to investigate the cheating.

“It’s a rigged deal,” Bill groused.

This was the bitter outburst of unexpected loss (which set Hillary on the road to ultimate defeat six months later), and both Clintons accepted the truth. Trump, needless to say, did not—and to this day demands fealty to his big lie from virtually every appointee in his administration, a loyalty oath of the kind the Mob extracts.

The parallels between the democratic mob rule and the age-old methods of gangland rule begin with a shared ideal of justice rooted not in the procedural rule of law but of vengeance, as the great laureate of the Mob underworld, writer Mario Puzo, explained in his 1984 book The Sicilian. The Mob, as we know, dates from antiquity, when “the people of Sicily were oppressed mercilessly” by one invader after another, from the Romans through the Normans and the Spanish during the Inquisition. Out of these oppressions “the Mafia sprang up as a secret society of avengers.”

As Puzo recounts, “When the royal courts refused to take action against a Norman noble who raped a farmer’s wife, a band of peasants assassinated him. When a police chief tortured some petty thief…that police chief was killed.” Over time the avengers “formed themselves into an organized society which had the support of the people and in effect became a second and more powerful government.”

Trump 2.0, in other words, represents not the repudiation of what went before but the revival of something that had been latent all along—not so much hidden as unmentionable, like the cash disbursements Trump made to politicians in return for favors.

An intertwining of the legitimate and the corrupt, of machine and Mob, lies at the foundations of modern American politics and government. When Democrats met in Chicago in 1932 to nominate FDR, mobsters were very much on the scene. New York’s Five Families had been organized only the year before, but two of the most powerful organized crime figures, Charles “Lucky” Luciano and his underboss, Frank Costello, “accompanied the Tammany delegation,” The New York Times’s longtime Mob reporter Selwyn Raab wrote in Five Families. “Of course, the mafiosi could not cast votes at the convention, but they were treated like royalty by the powerful Tammany leaders. Lucky shared a suite with James J. Hines, a West Side district leader who would later be convicted of taking underworld bribes to fix police and judges in gambling cases. Costello’s roommate was one of their close friends and a high-powered political connection, Albert Marinelli—New York’s city clerk. His job “included supervising inspectors who tabulated votes in city elections,” and he was of particular help to the Mafia and other criminals because he oversaw the selection of grand jurors.

Once elected, FDR began his fabled first 100 days, the improvised programs quickly passed by congressional legislators who knew these were things the public was clamoring for as a response to an actual emergency, the Great Depression, which had thrown fully a quarter of the labor force, nearly 13 million people, out of work. For those who did hold on to their jobs, wages dropped on average by more than 40 percent. That did not include the many farmers who lost their land and homes to foreclosure.

FDR’s New Deal “was never a coherent, interconnected effort to deal with the various dimensions of the Depression in a systematic way,” the historian Allan Winkler told the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs in March 2009, in the midst of the next worst financial crisis in US history, the Great Recession (caused, like the stock market crash of 1929, by the absence of adequate regulatory oversight, this time of housing mortgages). Roosevelt’s solution was “a multifaceted attempt to deal with different elements of the catastrophe in ways that sometimes seemed haphazard and occasionally were contradictory.”

Eventually, his agenda took shape and yielded triumphs—Social Security (signed into law in 1935) and the creation of the National Labor Relations Board, the first time the federal government had openly supported unions. Employment steadily improved, year after year, but the crisis continued. As late as 1940, unemployment was near 13 percent. It was only after Pearl Harbor, with the need for massive wartime reindustrialization, that the economy recovered.

From the instant of its birth some 90-odd years ago, the American conservative movement brought together various factions united in their attempt to roll back the many programs begun under FDR. Too much government, the centralized state, or simply “statism” was the accusation in those years, forerunners of the “deep state” of our own moment.

The subject of my latest book, Buckley—William F. Buckley Jr.—was raised in this politics in the 1930s and ’40s. In his long career, the first crusade he joined, at age 14, was the America First Committee, formed to oppose any intervention in the Second World War in the belief that what FDR and Prime Minister Winston Churchill called the struggle for democracy was actually sinister camouflage for globalizing the New Deal. “They want to use the emergency of war,” wrote one skeptic, “as a reason for setting up a mechanism of highly centralized authority, which mechanism they would retain after the emergency as a new setup, economic and governmental—a regime for which the controversial term is Socialism or collectivism; or, more mildly, ‘planned economy,’ or the ‘new order.’ ”

The stronger case against FDR—in fact, it presages the one being made against Trump today—was that he was dangerously aggrandizing the office of the presidency and amassing excessive personal power. There was truth to the charge. While Trump has issued his share of absurd edicts—take over Greenland, annex Canada—few have been as brazen as Roosevelt’s infamous attempt to “pack” the Supreme Court by enlarging the nine justices to as many as 15 after its conservative majority’s rulings against several of his programs. In the 1938 midterm elections, voters punished Roosevelt and the Democrats for such proposed overreach. Still, he had humbled the judiciary, brought it to heel, quite as Trump has shown some signs of being able to do through the Court’s “absolute immunity” ruling in July 2024.

FDR’s second, even more audacious move, his decision to seek a third term—a prospect Trump also has floated—was an even greater transgression. At the time there was no law against it—the 22nd Amendment, establishing the two-term limit, was ratified later under Roosevelt’s successor, Harry Truman, as both safeguard and retributive measure.

But FDR was violating what today we call democratic norms and procedures, the “unwritten Constitution”—as Roosevelt’s predecessor, Herbert Hoover, said at the time. Less than two weeks before the 1940 election, Hoover went on national radio to sound the alarm. There was already under Roosevelt, he said, “a gigantic and insidious building up of personal power of the president during these two terms…. Many of these extraordinary powers have been obtained under claims of emergencies which proved not to exist or to have expired.” Moreover, Hoover went on, “Methods of intellectual dishonesty have been used in creating this personal power. A political machine has been built which places all free election in jeopardy.”

The difference between 1933 and 2025 is that the current financial crisis, a kind of nonstop roller coaster, has been of Trump’s own making—albeit with the assistance of the Republican Party. Why has he done this? Why would Trump, the clubhouse boss, inflict these wounds not only on the global economy but on his own voters as well as his own allies in government and business? Already, the cost is steep, in the fever charts Trump watches: the volatile stock market, consumer confidence forecasts, and his sinking poll numbers.

One reason is to create dependency, for, as Raskin and others have discovered, the helpless victims of the new clubhouse politics include not only those outside the orbit but also those within it.

Susan Faludi, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of major books both on feminism and the descent of the American male, has developed her own theory of Trump-style protectionism. In October 2024 she observed in The New York Times that the upcoming election was really a contest between two ideas of protection, “symbolic and practical.” The symbolic is performative. “Those who crave it don’t actually want effective measures to alleviate a threat. They wish to rage against the threat, and they seek a protector in chief who validates their wrath. For them, war’s the point, not victory—outrage, not outcomes, as victim cultures on both the right and the left amply demonstrate.” While Kamala Harris offered the practical protection of the veteran prosecutor, Trump drew on the other strain, the one that grows out of mob culture and Tammany culture. He is, noted Faludi, “a master of the protection racket. He takes the old domestic savior scam national.”

When I checked in with her this spring to see how her theory was holding up, she pointed to Trump’s strategic use of tariffs to contrive a real crisis. “First he forces the stock market to go down, and then it goes up, and he saves us.” It is analogous to the “small shopkeeper who paid the local mafiosi to go away.” Only it’s no longer the Mob that first threatens and then protects “but somebody with billions.”

There was further affirmation in the waning days of Trump’s first 100, when FBI officials in Wisconsin arrested Milwaukee County Circuits Court judge Hannah C. Dugan on charges that she had obstructed ICE agents by leading a defendant, an immigrant, through a side door so he could avoid arrest. The agents were waiting outside the courthouse and quickly apprehended him. (Dugan later pleaded not guilty to a two-count indictment handed down by a grand jury. A trial is set for this summer.)

It was one more small nightmare in the administration’s deportation frenzy, illustrating the widening rift between the judicial and executive branches, not to mention the conflict between state and federal power, the very essence of civil rights conflicts dating back many decades. But the incident also lent credence to Faludi’s thesis about the two forms of protection, as was clarified a week later when the administration deported a two-year-old and her mother to Honduras—illegally, since the child is a US citizen. Here, said Faludi, was a textbook case of the performative versus the practical: Dugan was humanely trying to safeguard the actual target of an ICE raid while “the Trump administration ‘protected’ us by deporting a two-year-old!”

On the higher scale of Trump-era favor dealing, according to writer John Ganz, “you have a series of patron and client relationships where the economic system is not a system as such” but merely an amalgam of people who “do you favors and get you stuff and you do things back for them.” In his critically acclaimed bestseller When the Clock Broke, Ganz paints a vivid panorama of underhanded power players in America in the 1990s: people like the former Klansman David Duke, who lost an election for governor of Louisiana in 1991 after finishing first among Republican candidates in that state’s open primary and then getting more than 60 percent of the white vote in a runoff against the eventual winner. Another in Ganz’s cast of rogues is John Gotti, the folk hero mobster, who operated out of Trump’s home borough, Queens, and whom the New York press—and this magazine—covered in the 1980s at the same time they were trailing Trump. Many remember Gotti as the well-dressed goon. Fewer recall the mass demonstrations held on his behalf when he was on trial or the politicians who spoke admiringly of him.

It is only now, in the opening innings of Trump’s second term, that the reality of Trumpism is coming home. It is politics as “protection racket,” says Ganz, who has coined the term “bossism” to describe the new authoritarian politics, its blend of old-time muscle and new-style method—more precisely, “a series of protection rackets, and nobody does business for free, you don’t do business on his turf without giving him a taste.” He quotes the famous lines from The Godfather Part II in which the turn of the 20th century Black Hand boss Don Fanucci explains turf rules to the young Vito Corleone: “This is my neighborhood. You and your friends should show me some respect. You should let me wet my beak a little.” A few scenes later, Corleone murders Fanucci, ensuring that henceforth the first beak moistened will be his own.

Which, in its way, hearkens back to Tammany—and, yes, FDR. One of the most fruitful partnerships in all of 20th-century politics came in 1912, when Roosevelt, a blue blood progressive reformer raised on an estate in Dutchess County, apprenticed under the Tammany giant Al Smith, product of the Lower East Side tenements who went on to become a four-time New York governor and Democratic presidential nominee in 1928. As Terry Golway writes in Machine Made, his stimulating revisionist history of Tammany Hall, it was Smith who educated FDR in “transactional politics, the notion that voters—even those born elsewhere with only the vaguest understanding of American politics—had a keen sense of their own interest.” The transactions sprang from earlier times, when immigrants were crowded into some of the most dangerous and vice-ridden places on the planet, and to be an effective machine pol was to keep a vigilant eye on the neighborhood, to know “who needed help paying the rent, whose son couldn’t make bail, whose widow had fallen on hard times.” What progressives deplored as vote-purchased patronage were in many cases the goods and services that ordinary citizens, especially those without money and power, came to expect from their leaders.

Much of it was corrupt—criminally so. That was the darker side of the openly transactional system that feeds on many democracies, with their promise that the good life, or a better one, is available to any who are unafraid to grab it. The astonishing self-dealing we’re seeing today is rife: from the payment exacted to purchase Trump’s meme coin (its most munificent buyers get invited to the White House); to relaxing the rules against accepting gifts from lobbyists; to the dismissals of nonpartisan inspectors general, meant to expose government corruption; to the weakening of laws designed to curb foreign investment. All of it may leave analysts aghast and befuddled, yet experts on the old patronage system know exactly what’s going on: graft, pure and simple. So, too, with the “deals” Trump has dangled before the leaders of nations he has threatened with extortionate tariffs. Set aside the “theory-washing”—rebalanced trade relations, the dawn of a new age of “industrial policy or restored manufacturing.” Instead, Golway advises, think “a total shakedown deal” of just the kind Tammany specialized in. “Probably, those old guys are smiling.”

Thanks to prosecutions begun under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), the Mafia is a much-reduced force in American life. But in the era when Trump rose to prominence, the last 30 years of the 20th century, America was saturated with true and invented tales of the Mob. Puzo’s novel The Godfather, published in 1969, was on the Times best-seller list for 67 consecutive weeks and in two years sold 9 million copies. Francis Ford Coppola’s epic film, released in 1972, with a screenplay he wrote with Puzo, grossed a million dollars a day and is consistently ranked as one of the finest American movies ever made.

This was also the time of Honor Thy Father, Gay Talese’s Buddenbrooks portrait of the down-sliding Bonanno clan. Taken together—with Martin Scorsese’s epic Goodfellas in 1990 and what many consider the greatest of all television series, The Sopranos (which commenced in 1999)—these crime noirs, stories of murder and sadistic violence, of extortion and blackmail, formed a kind of alternative history of America, a national epic, told through various Mafia narratives and spin-offs.

Gangster romance was also at the center of political life in New York. The mobsters’ social clubs—El Caribe in Brooklyn, the Ravenite Social Club in Little Italy, the Bergin Hunt and Fish Club in Ozone Park, Queens—acquired the same dark mystique, compounded by secrecy, danger, power, and violence that had accrued 100 years earlier and that emanates from Trump and his followers today.

In fact, the two power centers were fused together. Tammany controlled politicians, and the mobsters controlled Tammany Hall. The man sometimes described as Trump’s favorite politician, the Brooklyn Democratic boss Meade Esposito, reportedly had a secret partner, the Lucchese boss Paul Vario, the capo in Nicholas Pileggi’s Wiseguy (the basis of Scorsese’s Goodfellas). “Politicians—not all politicians, but lots of them—needed help here and there,” Vario’s protégé Henry Hill told Pileggi. “They got free storefront offices, they got the buses and sound systems they needed, they got the rank-and-file workers from the unions to petition when they needed it, and they got lawyers to help them poll-watch. You think politicians aren’t grateful? You think they don’t remember their friends?” The man behind it all was Esposito’s pal Vario, the wiseguy, someone few pols ever saw face-to-face. But in Pileggi’s telling, everyone owed Paulie. “This is all put together by businessmen connected to Paul. By lawyers indebted to Paulie. By building contractors, trucking company bosses, union guys, wholesale butchers, accountants, and people who work for the city—all the kinds of upstanding people who are totally legit. But behind it all is usually a wiseguy like Paulie waiting for his payday.”

Illicit power required high arts of concealment. “Paulie ran the whole thing in his head,” Hill recalled. “He didn’t take any notes. He never wrote anything down, and he never made a phone call unless it was from a booth, and then he’d only make an appointment for later. There were hundreds of guys who depended upon Paulie for their living, but he never paid out a dime…. All they got from Paulie was protection from other guys looking to rip them off…. The wiseguys divide whatever you stole for their own pockets.”

These are the practices that Trump, so undisciplined in so many other ways, mastered. It is what excited his former lawyer Michael Cohen, who grew up knowing mobsters through El Caribe, the pool club in Mill Basin owned by Cohen’s uncle and a popular Mob hangout in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s. Cohen worked at the club in his teens and 20s and was excited to find in Trump a boss who imported the same brashness and thug toughness to Manhattan boardrooms, with Cohen himself in the enforcer role of “designated hard-ass.”

In his memoir, Disloyal, Cohen deconstructs Trump’s Paulie style of bossism:

He used inferences, nods, silences, euphemisms, signals. It was similar to how Trump never used email, for the simple reason that it created a digital fingerprint that would permanently record his words—and thus potentially ensnare him. Like a crime boss, Trump wanted no evidence that could connect him to any of his deeds, or deeds that he indirectly or directly ordered others to do…. Trump’s mind was so permeated with deception and delusion—of others, but also of himself—that I had to be prepared to literally depart from reality and enter into a kind of fantasyland when I spoke with the President.

Boss Esposito was but one of many connections Trump cultivated in his New York years and one of many indicted for Mob connections captured on wiretaps by the then fanatically righteous crime buster Rudolph Giuliani. Another of the era’s culprits was Donald Manes, the president of Trump’s home borough, Queens, who committed suicide after he was caught in a parking racket, “stealing quarters out of parking meters,” as Golway says with a laugh.

Manes’s main confederate was Stanley Friedman, the law partner of Trump’s mentor, the tough-as-nails attorney Roy Cohn. Friedman was also the Bronx Democratic Party boss and later deputy mayor until he was convicted and sent to jail on bribery and kickback charges in 1987. Ten years earlier it was Friedman who secured the precedent-and-logic-defying decades-long tax abatement that made possible Trump’s first great project, the remodeling of the decrepit Commodore, adjacent to Grand Central, into the first Trump Hotel.

These were the kingpins who controlled New York politics in the 1970s and ’80s, the time of Trump’s early New York conquests. That is the America he yearns to make great again—the America of his youth. Trump Two feels less like an autocrat’s attempt to re-create, say, Mussolini’s Italy than a plan to scale up five-borough bossism. The methods and ambitions seem plain: the law of vengeance and also the payoffs that come with fealty and protection—not to mention, thanks to Trump’s friends in Qatar, the offer of a superluxury Air Force One, a flashy aeronautical pimpmobile that turned out to be a 13-year-old castoff.

The pattern was established under Trump One. It was “the life of lies,” as former FBI director James Comey would describe it in 2018 in his book A Higher Loyalty. Comey’s years prosecuting mobsters in the 1980s and ’90s were prelude to his dealings with Trump and those around him: “The silent circle of assent” was the same, as was the feeling of “the boss in complete control.” “Holy crap,” Comey recalls after an early meeting with Trump, “they are trying to make each of us an ‘amica nostra’—a friend of ours.” Trump first wooed Comey, then vilified him, then summarily fired him—and followed it all with a prolonged campaign of abuse, harassment, and intimidation that included an extensive IRS audit. Not to mention this past May, when Comey was interrogated by the Secret Service after posting an Instagram photo of beach shells spelling out “86 47,” social media code for removing Trump from office.

The question we should be asking is not why this president thinks he can do this, but why so many people outside of New York City—voters numbering in the tens of millions—seem to agree.

The Trump of his own golden age was schooled by the Trump of the ’40s and ’50s—his father. When Barrett, Donald’s tenacious biographer, asked Esposito what he knew about Fred Trump, “Esposito had a curt and unusual response: ‘He was my friend Willie Tomasello’s partner.’ ” Tomasello was a mobster, connected to both the Gambino and Genovese families, and the partnership had been formed during the late 1940s, when New York’s mayor was William O’Dwyer and, as Barrett writes, “having a Mob-connected partner was a way of doing business in New York.”

O’Dwyer, a former New York City cop, abruptly announced his retirement in 1950 to accept a position as President Harry Truman’s ambassador to Mexico. It soon emerged that Truman had given O’Dwyer the plum post to get him out of the country and spare him from incrimination in an emerging Brooklyn rackets scandal. Seen through today’s headlines, Truman’s O’Dwyer reassignment neatly foreshadows the Trump Justice Department’s intervention to protect New York’s currently embattled mayor, Eric Adams, like O’Dwyer a former cop, who was rescued when he became embroiled in corruption charges.

Truman’s intervention was a mystery at the time. As far as anyone knew, he didn’t like O’Dwyer, just as Trump doesn’t seem to like Adams particularly much. Then again, Truman had powerful illicit connections too—with the Pendergast machine in Kansas City, which imposed its will at election time through what David McCullough, in Truman, says were “strong-arm tactics at the polls, ballot-stuffing, ballot-box theft, the buying of votes with whiskey or cash, bloody, headlong street brawls, all the odious stratagems that had made big-city politics notorious since the time of Boss Tweed.”

New York remained the capital of bossist politics. It persisted through the ’70s and ’80s, through the mayoralties of Abe Beame and Ed Koch. (Little wonder that Giuliani, who rose to fame in part by prosecuting Manes, should become a consigliere to Boss Trump. In this he is merely reversing the familiar script of the criminal who “flips” to the other side, or the prosecutor who finds greater, or at least more lucrative, rewards in defending the criminally accused. This is the world Trump came of age in—more accurately, the world in which he really did achieve great things, and it’s no surprise he wishes to bring it back. On its own terms, it all works.

The examples abound. From the radio demagogue Father Coughlin in the 1930s to the Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver in the 1960s, strong and distinctly American voices have advocated for religious, racial, or political violence. In literary circles the sage of underworld democracy was Norman Mailer, whose work was filled with tabloid pictures of the darkening American dream. “Americans have been leading a double life,” he wrote in 1960, “and our history has moved on two rivers, one visible, the other underground; there has been the history of politics, which is concrete, factual, practical, and unbelievably dull…and there is a subterranean river of untapped, lonely and romantic desires, that concentration of ecstasy and violence which is the dream life of the nation.”

Mailer wrote this in the excited aftermath of the 1960 Democratic Convention in Los Angeles and its nomination of a libertine Mob-connected sexual predator, John F. Kennedy, whose playground included the Palm Beach compound owned by his financier father, five miles up South Ocean Boulevard from where Mar-a-Lago now stands. JFK’s career in the House and Senate had been lackluster, but he had the looks and style of a potential “existential hero,” Mailer wrote, a Hollywood-style good-bad loner in the mold of Cagney and Bogart, Brando and Sinatra, with his strutter’s vow to “love well and love many, be cool, be daring, be dashing, be wild, be wily, be resourceful, be a brave gun.”

Fanboy imagery aside, Mailer was right. Ecstasy and violence did in fact follow—violence by white sheriffs against civil rights demonstrators in Oxford, Mississippi, and Birmingham, Alabama; assassinations commissioned by the Kennedy administration (with the help of the CIA and the Mafia); silent coups; in sum, a White House–directed “murder incorporated,” as Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, said after the existential hero himself was slain in Dallas in a climax of ecstasy and violence—a climax achieved much sooner than even Mailer had supposed.

Mailer’s essay was titled “Superman Comes to the Supermarket.” In those years the supermarket was the transactional bazaar and also the national newsstand. On the racks near checkout counters, supermen were to be found on the front pages of the newspapers and covers of magazines published by the nation’s press lords.

But again there was a second stream. The most democratic of all American newspapers, the true vox populi for generations—avidly read by Trump—was The National Enquirer. We all heard about the Enquirer during Trump’s hush-money trial last year, but little was said about its powerful imprint on American politics and culture. Reportedly founded with New York Mob money, the Enquirer (accompanied some 50 years later by its conjoined twin, Rupert Murdoch’s Star) transformed journalism from the ’70s to the ’90s through stories of illicit sexual liaisons—and through the hidden system of blackmail its creators practiced to keep stories out of print (the “catch and kill” discussed at Trump’s trial). The same tabloids trafficked in conspiracy theories as well, widening the chinks in the wall between reality and fantasy, between news and nonsense. The publications also provided key hires for the original staff of Murdoch’s New York Post and Fox News.

In those years, Enquirer-style journalism crept ever closer to the mainstream. One reason Trump so blithely accuses the legacy media of fostering lies is his own successful history in using reputable publications to circulate falsehoods of his own (“Best Sex I’ve Ever Had.”) In Trump’s critical first years in Manhattan real estate, the best publicity he got came in the pages of the Times, one flattering story after another on Fred Trump and his wunderkind son, the potential savior of Manhattan. Long before Make America Great Again had come the romantic campaign—part flimflam, part pay-for-play dealmaking—to Make Manhattan Oz Again.

This was a belated instance of what Nathaniel Hawthorne had discerned all those years ago, the magnetizing effect on statesmen and magistrates, the guardians, the respected voices within “the influential classes,” who join “the inner circle round about the gallows.”

Now, of course, the price of all this is coming due. The president as celebrity, the tranced reporting of White House gossip, all of it soaked in the excitements of the tabloids of old—and finding newer life on the dark recesses of the web today—have always had a more chilling subtext, of retribution and exacted payment, of the favor expected in return.

It was ever thus. “The Puritans’ howling wilderness included a shadowy fever swamp from the start,” the historian Stacy Schiff has written in this magazine, comparing MAGA world with nefarious precolonial forces. “Conspiracies invite the arsonists to shout fire. It turns mobs into martyrs…. There is a bravado to it, without which it deflates into opera buffa. It is exhilarating on what seems to be a rational level; the pulse quickens as the pieces click into place.” Nearly three and a half centuries after Plymouth colony was first settled, another historian, Richard Hofstadter, would describe a parallel fanaticism, labeling it “the paranoid style in American politics.”

Ganz notes a second connection, the affinities between classic dictatorship and gangland rule. In both cases, it’s about getting “a piece of the action, power as domination.” Both also nurture “zero-sum attitudes toward the world.” And they make for natural partnerships. Vladimir Putin and Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, even as they may seek to manipulate Trump, feel a genuine kinship with him. “Fascists believe in some kind of national project, over and above the petty instincts of the gangster,” says Ganz. But at the same time “the gangsters see their [own] advantage.” The two “use each other.”

The difference is that Trump’s superpower depends, finally, on his supporters. He needs the democratic mob to pursue his own mobster-style ends. There, too, he is an innovator. He has taken the “existential” idea beyond Mailer’s romantic visions of the lone gunman: Mailer’s fantasies grew out of Old Hollywood and the TV Western, the solo actor and antihero, acting on his own. Social media, in our day, has brought us back to the original idea of the mob that Hawthorne gave us: people, lots of them, brought together in collective ecstasy but also despair. The great majority of the MAGA millions want what most of us do, a shot at the American dream, which they feel Trump’s policies might help them realize, the same promise made by the Tammany clubmen of old. Others, the faithful, believe that last July the president was literally saved from assassination by divine intervention. Still others are mischief makers, the doxers and swatters, the armed-to-the-teeth “patriots.” Each occupies a place in the great democratic panorama.

But there is also an unsanctioned force that the president has managed to assemble, one that is unique in American history. It is a network. And it is not unlike the vigilante militias Puzo described as “a second and more powerful government.”

A prescient observer of American gangsterism, nearly a century ago, was the novelist (and later screenwriter) Daniel Fuchs, who grew up in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, close by Al Capone’s old stomping grounds, in a time when New York’s poorer neighborhoods were fields of combat for youth gangs. In 1931, when Capone was already the most famous of all mobsters—the virtual monarch of Chicago, at last brought down on tax evasion charges—Fuchs reflected on the route Capone had traveled from boy gang member to adult gangster. The young Capone had been utterly unlike the terrifying criminal of the Prohibition era, a “nonentity, affable, soft of speech.” Capone was one of many, Fuchs wrote, who had been “able to use their boy gangs as a training school” for later organized adult gangsterism, in most cases “completing their records in jails, in gangs, in rackets and in graves, prosperous and poor, famous and unsung.”

Trump grasps the latent potential of those other ordinary people, most of them young men, members of the “manosphere,” who can be mobilized into a force. He tapped into this in the days and months leading up to the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. And upon taking office he pardoned more than 1,500 of them. They form one faction. He has also signed an executive order intended to allow the American military to perform police functions and granting police immunity from prosecution. He has enlisted law firms to promise to do pro bono work defending cops against accusations of strong-arm behavior.

As the Trump administration goes after attorneys and judges, opponents and enemies, real and perceived, one truly twisted idea still resonates. It is an idea he’d proposed during the campaign. It is an idea that would have given even Mailer a jolt. We need, said candidate Trump, “one really violent day” to eradicate crime “immediately.” Nominally, he was calling for a frenzied few hours in which police could have their way with shoplifters and others. But he was also summoning—in the minds of many—visions of Kristallnacht, of the bloody police crackdown outside the 1968 Democratic Convention, of Pat Buchanan’s war whoop at the 1992 Republican convention when he discussed how the National Guard had restored order after the LA riots: “The troopers came up the street, M-16s at the ready. And the mob threatened and cursed, but the mob retreated because it had met the one thing that could stop it: force, rooted in justice, and backed by moral courage.”

Consider “one really violent day” in the context of recent actions (deportations; detentions defying court orders about immigration policies) and recent propositions (reopen Alcatraz; expand Guantanamo; ship migrants to Libya and Rwanda) and one sees the possible groundwork for the ultimate in power politics: the potential contours of a police state.

Amid the DOGE deluge, people’s tax records and Social Security information and other data were shared with unauthorized authorities. Amid the restructuring of the executive branch, Trump took charge of two previously independent agencies: the NSA and the FBI. In advance of the nationwide Hands Off protests in April, security teams put up anti-scaling fencing around the White House. Timed to coincide with his birthday in June, Trump scheduled a full-on military parade. Since January he has declared eight national emergencies—from the “emergency” on the southern border to the fossil fuel “emergency.” This is the mentality of an outlaw, one well-versed in the legal extremes of martial law—in part because he just might need his enforcers in an emergency.

Like FDR before him, Trump has blundered into error. Time and again the courts, including the Supreme Court, have told him to desist, though they have no power of enforcement. There has been wreckage all along the way. But he also has achieved something no one else has. He has brought Tammany-Mob rule to the pinnacle of American politics and power. Even the mighty Capone was brought down by the government. Trump, in contrast, has made the executive branch, indeed the three branches of US government, his. And he has done so swiftly, effectively, and in a manner that makes him—to use a Prohibition-era phrase applied to Eliot Ness, the G-man who pursued the country’s most menacing gangsters—for now, at least, untouchable.

As for the fallout from all of this, that’s entirely another matter.