Michelle Goldberg writes that Donald Trump's Maga Mob has embraced criminality. She refers to a recent interview with Peter Navarro from his Florida jail cell:
This week, Breitbart interviewed the former Trump official Peter Navarro, one of many criminals in the ex-president’s orbit, from the Miami prison where he is serving four months for contempt of Congress. While life behind bars is difficult, Navarro boasted that his stint has been smoothed by his ties to Donald Trump, which make him something of a made man. The former president, said Navarro, is beloved not just by the guards, but by the “vast majority” of inmates as well. “If I were a Bidenite, things would be a lot tougher here — and yes, they know exactly who I am and respect the fact that I stood up for a principle and didn’t bow to the government,” he said.
The entire Republican Party has embraced lawlessness:
One of the more unsettling things about our politics right now is the Republican Party’s increasingly open embrace of lawlessness. Even as they proclaim Trump’s innocence, Trump and his allies revel in the frisson of criminality. At his rally in the Bronx last month, for example, Trump invited onto the stage two rappers, Sheff G and Sleepy Hallow, who are currently facing charges of conspiracy to commit murder and weapons possession. (They’ve pleaded not guilty.) During Trump’s recent criminal trial, his courtroom entourage included Chuck Zito, who helped found the New York chapter of the Hells Angels motorcycle gang and spent six years in prison on drug conspiracy charges. (The Justice Department has linked his Hells Angels chapter to the Gambino crime family.) Trump, who has his own history of mafia ties, has repeatedly compared himself to Al Capone. MAGA merchants sell T-shirts — and, weirdly, hot sauce — showing Trump as either Vito or Michael Corleone from “The Godfather” movies, with the caption “The Donfather.”
A fascinating new book by John Ganz, “When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s,” offers a useful way to think about the value system undergirding MAGA’s romance with the mob. Ganz’s book excavates a prehistory of Trumpism in the angry, cynical period between the end of the Cold War and the full flush of the Clinton boom. You can see, in the rise of figures like David Duke, Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan, Trumpism in embryo. (The chapter on Duke, and the cultish loyalty he inspired, is particularly illuminating.) But the most revelatory section — some of which Ganz has adapted in a post for his Unpopular Front newsletter — involves the mystique around the mobster John Gotti and the Buchanan-style paleoconservatives who saw, in the mafia, an admirable patriarchal alternative to the technocratic liberalism they despised.
It's been a long time coming. But it's the symptom of a very sick society. And it's not new:
Societies fetishize Mafiosi to the degree that they lose faith in themselves. Writing about the ideology embedded in the classic crime films of the 1930s, the Marxist social critic Fredric Jameson noted that gangsters “were dramatized as psychopaths, sick loners striking out against a society essentially made up of wholesome people (the archetypal democratic ‘common man’ of New Deal populism).” When, in the 1970s, gangsters instead represented a fantasy of family cohesion, it was a response to a broader climate of social dissolution. It’s a sign that a culture is in the grip of a deep nihilism and despair when moblike figures become romantic heroes, or worse, presidents.
I'm sorry to end on such a pessimistic note.
Image: Wikipedia
8 comments:
Well, this might be tangentially off topic ....
Granted, tRump is terrible. But wrt making war, imo, Biden may be worse.
Jr. has made enough missteps to obscure his redeeming features and his legacy may well be the civic-destruction Lil'PP will bring under our fptp voting regime.
The Brits might finally chuck their CONs under Sunak, but get Starmer who looks to be a slightly lighter shade of CON.
Three countries that were onetime considered the to be among the apex democracies, actively embracing willful ignorance and committing social-self-destruction.
Contrast and compare these with two places in the 'global south': India and Thailand.
The wise Indian electorate, who we might think of as low-information voters, just nipped Modi's wings.
The Thai people have no access to open media. For 20 years prior to 2023, they were Red-Shirts supporters (Pheu Thai/PT) while the Yellow-Shirts had King and army coups to keep their side in power. In the last election a new party arose, the Move Forward Party/MFP.
MFP won a huge victory last year (38%/151 seats), PT came second (28%/141 seats).
The gov't/PM is chosen by a joint vote of the house (500 seats) and the Senate (500 appointed Yellow Shirts) and MFP was blocked and (despite solemn promises to the contrary) PT cobbled together a coalition with the Yellow Shirts. Then the comprimised legal system kicked the MFP leader Pita, out of the legislature and is now actually outlawing MFP on phony lèse-majesté charges.
Meanwhile, an opinion poll in the Bangkok Post last week, showed Pita/MFP at 50% and the current PT-PM (real estate tycoon Srettha Thavisin) at 7%.
As I have written before, PoV, political choices revolve around the lesser evil.
I find it strangely fascinating that people, if they vote for Trumnp in November, know exactly what they are getting, Owen. Perhaps this is the fate of all societies: to turn their backs on the foundations of what make their lives livable suggests a sick, almost suicidal, impulse for destruction.
Democrats need to ask themselves why in conditions of low unemployment, rising wages and low crime, polls show voters favour an adjudicated fraud, rapist and felon with declining mental facilities over their candidate.
It was Mark Twain, Lorne, who called us "the damn'd human race."
Good question, Cap. I've come to believe that there is such a thing as societal insanity.
Trump, who has his own history of mafia ties, has repeatedly compared himself to Al Capone.
I believe the US government got Al Capone on financial issues, so I guess Trump is a bit like Capone.
I think when we come right down to it, the US political scene Republican and Democrat, runs mainly on bribery and corruption.
All you have to do is look at the amount of money that is spent on elections. A single senatorial seat may have various competitors spending up to $100 million dollars in the campaign. There's no way unless you're wildly wealthy that it makes sense to pay that much money to become a senator. And except for the one or two very very wealthy candidates, candidates in and election have to be beholding to a lot of very wealthy donors.
I imagine if you look around, you see lots of examples maybe not quite so blatant but still there of the Democratic Party having just as many dubious hangers-on. Still I must be admitted, that Trump actually appears to think and act like a Mafia boss.
They finally got Capone on tax evasion, jrk. It appears that Trump did a lot of that, too.
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