Extortionist-in-Chief

Trump’s mob-style shakedown of colleges, networks, law firms, and businesses is the through line of the Trump era.

Dictator or mob boss? President Trump seems to be leaning into “dictator,” but I’d argue that Al Capone and John Gotti fit better than Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. Of course, Trump could squeeze into their brown and black shirts, too, or at least Herman Goering’s.

On Monday, Trump told reporters, “A lot of people are saying maybe we like a dictator.” And on Tuesday, in that endless Cabinet suck-up show, he doubled down on the d-word: “The line is that I’m a dictator, but I stop crime…So a lot of people say, ‘You know, if that’s the case, I’d rather have a dictator.’”

Twice, Trump used his patented, “A lot of people say….” This is his way of signaling that the public supports him as he prepares to do something awful. And sometimes it does. During the 2024 campaign, he said he wanted to be a dictator just on “Day One,” which millions of gullible voters bought. Now, “a lot of people are saying” he can be a dictator for all 1,460 days of his presidency because crime hasn’t come down enough. Will that one fly, too?

I don’t think so. Trump is a talented bully, with mad skills at sensing weakness, whether the target of his intimidation is a political party or a person who has dared to cross him. And if Americans have to choose between a firm hand and crime, they choose the firm hand. Crime is only down if it feels that way where you live.

But if the choice is between a true dictator and maybe, possibly reducing crime a bit, and it’s all argued about in an obviously political context? Then the calculation that Trump says the public is making may come out in a different place. Trump is historically ignorant and doesn’t get that the word “dictator” has had a pejorative connotation in the public mind since before World War II.

Americans didn’t sign up for a police state. Voters wanted a secure border but weren’t expecting masked agents to be spread-eagling brown-skinned shoppers at Home Depot. Trump’s numbers on immigration are way down. Now it appears that the same thing is happening with crime. A Reuters/Ipsos poll shows only 38 percent support for sending the National Guard into Washington, D.C., which is almost exactly where Trump’s anemic approval ratings stand.

Trump has convinced himself that he’ll be greeted with hosannas on the South Side of Chicago. But there’s no sign amid $800 million in cuts to successful crime prevention programs that “African-American ladies, beautiful ladies, are saying, ‘Please President Trump, come to Chicago, please,’” as Trump implausibly claimed last week.

“Do not come to Chicago,” Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker warned in an impressively defiant speech.

If Trump does send in troops, he shouldn’t expect anything good to come of it for him, as the deployments this summer to Washington and Los Angeles suggest. National Guard forces, by law, must leave Washington, D.C. by September 6, and they will likely do so with little to show for their presence beyond picking up some trash. The 60-day occupation of Los Angeles ended with a whimper in July.

Trump may be hoping for a 1968-style confrontation to exploit in Chicago, but he won’t likely get his wish. Pritzker, who is popular on this issue, has told the public — unified and disciplined in its resistance to military occupation — that any Guardsmen who do appear from other states are just doing their jobs and could be court-martialed for disobeying orders. So they should not be harassed.

Can this refusal to be baited by Trump hold not just in Chicago but in other cities in blue states (no red ones, of course, with much higher crime rates) where even one incident could lead Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act? Not clear, but the future of the republic could turn on the answer.

In the Cabinet Room, Trump boiled down his view of the Constitution he took an oath to uphold:

“I have the right to do anything I want to do. I’m the president of the United States. If I think our country is in danger, and it is in danger in these cities, I can do it.”

Having just said he has the power of a king, Trump then tried to take a little of the dick out of dictator: “But it would be nice if they called and said, ‘Would you do it.’”

This latter line sounds as if he’s just responding to the people he is serving. But it’s really the kind of “nice” talk that often precedes a gangland-style execution.

We know that Don Vito Trump learned his knee-capping at Roy Cohn’s knee. Cohn often represented mafia clients (Tony Salerno, Carmine Galante, John Gotti), and he passed on some of their charming customs to his protege, who also no doubt learned from The Godfather, the quintessential movie for men of his vintage.

And of course, Trump, like his father, used intermediaries for business relationships (often involving concrete and other building materials) with mobsters in New York and Atlantic City, as I’ve explained.

Trump’s demand for loyalty and vig for his family are familiar from the underworld, but so is his model for running the government. Consider what mob bosses actually do all day. Whacking people is a small part of the job. Mostly, they run rackets. That’s why the use of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act of 1970 has crippled organized crime.

Rackets are managed through extortion, which is a threat that something ruinous will happen if you don’t capitulate. It’s more menacing than mere “leverage,” the word that MAGA types (and even some traumatized victims) like to use for Trump’s shakedown operation. Leverage is when Trump’s Big Ugly bill says that states will get more money for education if they choose to “buy in” to a new education voucher program, but won’t be penalized if they don’t. Extortion (generically, not legally) is when your funding for university cancer research will be killed if you don’t pay up. Or your law partners won’t be able to enter federal buildings to appear in court if you don’t pay up. Or your merger won’t go through the FCC if you don’t pay up. Or your tech CEO will be publicly humiliated if you don’t pay up.

Extortion is Trump’s modus operandi, and the “muscle” he uses to back up his shakedown outfit starts with Maoist public denunciations that carry a menacing message: If you have wronged me in the past or don’t bend the knee now, I’ll not just savage you on Truth Social, I’ll make you spend millions of dollars in legal fees defending yourself.

The weapon of choice is not the garrote or the gun hidden behind the toilet but the threat of investigation. Recall how Trump in 2011 falsely claimed to have sent private investigators to Hawaii to find President Obama’s birth certificate. He was impeached the first time in 2019 for asking Volodymyr Zelenskyy to announce that the Ukrainian government was “investigating” his presumed 2020 rival, Joe Biden. Now, Trump is using that weapon on anyone who dares criticize him. Even if Christopher Krebs, Jack Smith, and John Bolton are never prosecuted, he’ll keep sliming them in the guise of old-fashioned law enforcement. Of course in the old days—i.e. as recently as last year— government officials didn’t comment on pending DOJ investigations; it would violate basic fairness. Now they’re proud to do anything they can to satisfy the boss’s thirst for revenge.

That requires a new, expanded Trump crime family. Kash Patel and Tulsi Gabbard are using the vast power of the federal government to harass the “enemies at home” that Trump says are more threatening than anything overseas. Bill Pulte is abusing his position as head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency to malign Adam Schiff, Letitia James, and now Lisa Cook. They’ve all been accused of mortgage loan application fraud without any findings of fact. No matter. It’s just another day at the slime factory.

None of this will change until Trump dies or is forced to leave office. Until then, we should be “going to the mattresses,” as Clemenza tells Michael Corleone, to fight with any (non-violent) weapons at hand. Capiche?

Courage is Contagious.