Sam Tanenhaus On Trump
The closest association he can draw between the Mob and Trump is with 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.
Wait a mement. The only thing Tanenhaus can hang on Trump is that Gotti was also from Queens. But think of the differences: Gotti was in prison at 51, dead ten years later. Since then, Trump has been a reality television star and twice electd president. Pretty much the only thing Mafia dons learned during Trump's lifetime was how to get gunned down or sent to prison. Trump must have had other role models. Tanenhaus tacitly acknowledges this:
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.”
So Trump's real role model was his dad, Fred Trump, who worked in real estate, which meant he sometimes had to deal with the Mob, but he also had to deal with politicians, competitors, unions, reporters, bankers, investors, whomever. In fact, for Tanenhaus, mobsters are an inadequate comparison. He's actually looking for something more like Milton's Satan in Paradise Lost:
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.
He's actually making my point for me here: comparisons with FDR, LBJ, and Reagan are certainly apt. But Lucky Luciano and John Gotti simply aren't in that league. Satan eats those guys for breakfast. If Trump isn't Hitler, he must be Satan. Let's keep these things in perspective.But there are pieces of the puzzle that don't fit Tanenhaus's model of a Trump who, like LBJ, has everyone's pecker in his pocket. Let's look at two things that happened over just this past weekend: Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carey's U-turn on the digital services tax, and Sen Thom Tillis's sudden decision to retire. I think we need to acknowledge that neither owed anything to Trump; trhey actively opposed him, and he didn't bribe either to do what they did. As of Sunday,
As expected given the nature of their dependency, the Canadian government has rescinded the digital services tax against U.S. tech companies.
The June 30th collection is halted and the Canadian government led by Mark Carney will be bringing legislation to rescind the tax entirely.
, , , In the bigger picture Canada has a serious problem.
Canada is entirely dependent on the USA; there is no part of the Canadian economic system that can survive without total dependence on the USA.
Or let's look again at Sen Tillis's decision not to run:
Apparently Tillis caved THE NIGHT Trump scorched him!
Tillis called President Trump and Majority Leader Thune on Saturday night and informed them he wouldn’t be running for reelection.
Both Carney and Tillis simply folded; they didn't have any cards to play, and Trump knew it. There was no back channel deal of any sort, they lost fair and square. A better metaphor for Trump here is the poker player, not the Mafia don. Tanenhaus's main point seems to be that politics is a rigged game, and Trump somehow learned to rig it better than anyone at his father's knee. This leaves out the manifest truth that poker is a game of skill, and some players are better at it than others.But even if Tanenhaus won't acknowledge this, his metaphors are off: Mafia dons were never that good at what they did. I asked AI if John Gotti was a successful don, and it replied,
John Gotti was a complex figure, achieving success as a media celebrity and crime boss through intimidation and violence, but ultimately his reign led to the downfall of the Gambino crime family due to his recklessness and eventual conviction.
His tenure as head of the Gambino family lasted only seven years; his career ended at 51. Tanenhaus keeps wanting to tie Trump to Gotti, but he spends more time comparing him to FDR, LBJ, and Reagan. Maybe he should have dropped the Mob and gone straight to Satan; at least he would have had his metaphorical structure more proportionate.