Mobs beget mobsters

On Donald Trump, Kash Patel and gangsterism in the democracy.

Undated portrait of Donald Trump between 1980-1985, by Bernard Gotfryd. (Library of Congress)

I’ve been thinking about the quote Virginia Woolf wrote on the day Britain entered the war against the Nazis in 1939: “All the formulae are now a mere surface for gangsters.”

Over the weekend, Donald Trump picked a hardline loyalist, Kash Patel, to lead the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Last year, Patel, among many odd endeavors, had published a book called “Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for Our Democracy.” The choice of the word “gangsters” for the title caught me. So did Patel’s service for many years as a public defender locally in Miami-Dade County and then federally in the Southern District of Florida.

There are few jobs with harder lessons on true power than public defender. Prosecutors threaten vast prison terms to leverage plea agreements from nearly resourceless defendants. A lot are guilty, though not necessarily what they were charged with. Some are guilty of nothing at all. For all of them, the smarter play is usually to take the deal than to stack their own credibility against the government’s with a jury. If the point of a system is what it does, American criminal justice is designed to mass-produce sentences without requiring trials (on average, 98% of criminal cases end in plea bargains). And for those ministering over this process from the defense table, as the proverb goes, the ax forgets but the tree remembers.

“Mr. Patel developed a deep animosity toward the Justice Department prosecutors he found himself up against,” the New York Times reported in a profile. “The department, he wrote in his book, was a hotbed of ‘endemic corruption’ and prosecutors who ‘lie, leak, cover up or twist the truth to accomplish their mission.’”

If you were expecting a noble civil libertarian and an unvarnished champion for truth emerging from the defenders’ offices, look elsewhere. Sometime while bouncing through the Department of Justice and national security community, Patel became a reliable advocate for the innocence of Trump and his supporters against multitudinous charges of moral turpitude and insurrection.

“We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections,” Patel said on Steve Bannon’s podcast last year. “We’re going to come after you, whether it’s criminally or civilly. We’ll figure that out. But yeah, we’re putting you all on notice.”

One of the court records I scanned related to Patel’s pro-Trump advocacy contained an excoriating assessment from a Colorado district court judge evaluating whether Trump’s role in the January 6th, 2021, putsch had disqualified him from running for president under the insurrection clause of the 14th Amendment. Bolding mine:

“Kash Patel testified on behalf of Intervenor Trump. Mr. Patel was the former Chief of Staff to the acting Secretary of Defense on January 6, 2021. Mr. Patel testified that on January 3, 2021, then-President Trump authorized 10,000-20,000 National Guard forces. He also testified about his experiences with the January 6th Select Committee including that he gave a deposition to the Committee. The Court finds that Mr. Patel was not a credible witness. His testimony regarding Trump authorizing 10,000-20,000 National Guardsmen is not only illogical (because Trump only had authority over about 2,000 National Guardsmen) but completely devoid of any evidence in the record. Further, his testimony regarding the January 6th Committee refusing to release his deposition and refusing his request to speak at a public hearing was refuted by Mr. Heaphy who was a far more credible witness. The Court did not give any weight to Mr. Patel’s testimony other than as evidence that the January 6th Select Committee interviewed many of Trump’s supporters as part of its extensive investigation.”

The future head of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI really is a defense attorney, but you can’t call him a public defender anymore when there’s only one client: Donald John Trump. Maybe the insight here was that no one can match the overwhelming bargaining power of the state except the people running one.

Paging through the Federalist Papers recently, I was struck, like many other readers over the years, by the American Founders’ explicit distrust of direct democracy and popular persuasion as tools of the authoritarian.

While preparing their defenses of republicanism in an era of monarchs and aristocrats, Alexander Hamilton and his writing partner James Madison’s reference points in 1787 were “the turbulent democracies of ancient Greece and modern Italy,” where after “the whole body of the people assembled in person, a single orator, or an artful statesman, was generally seen to rule with as complete a sway as if a sceptre had been placed in his single hand.”

In Rome, the old rug that ties Western Civ together, empire began with Caesar thrice refusing the crown. The final tipping point was Marc Antony’s oily funeral speech, which turned the mobs against the strongman’s senatorial assassins. “We will be satisfied,” citizens shouted during the republic’s twilight, in Shakespeare’s treatment. “Let us be satisfied.” And so they were.

And thus the Electoral College was originally designed to temper the rise of executives with “talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity,” as Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 68.

As the second of the last four Republican presidents to be a member of the Screen Actors Guild, Trump also spent a lot of time around criminals before finally becoming one in New York criminal court earlier this year:

• The chief financial officer of Trump’s family business, Allen Weisselberg, ran it as a tax fraud scheme and lied under oath about it.

• Trump’s first campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, got bagged for bank and tax fraud.

• Trump fundraiser Elliott Broidy illegally lobbied the Trump administration on behalf of foreign nationals.

• Trump’s personal attorney and erstwhile attack dog Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations, bank fraud and tax evasion.

• Career ratfucker Roger Stone got bagged for obstruction of justice, lying to Congress and witness tampering.

• Trump advisors Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro ate short sentences for refusing congressional subpoenas related to the Jan. 6 putsch, where many Trump followers converted their Capitol tourism into longer-term getaways behind bars.

• Trump advisor George Papadopoulos lied to investigators.

• Trump advisor and campaign deputy Rick Gates pleaded guilty to conspiracy and lying to investigators.

• Trump allied attorneys Kenneth Chesebro, Sidney Powell and Jenna Ellis struck plea deals in the 2020 Fulton County, Georgia election fraud case.

Trump joined his consiglieres’ ranks in May, when he was convicted of felony charges related to unreported hush payments he made to a mistress during the 2016 election.

Trump’s conviction wasn’t a dealbreaker with voters. In fact, for some, it was part of the attraction. During a New York Times panel of undecided voters, one of them, Jonathan, approvingly cited Trump as “the antihero, the Soprano, the ‘Breaking Bad,’ the guy who does bad things, who is a bad guy but does them on behalf of the people he represents.” Another undecided voter replied, “And in 2016 I voted for him for that very reason. Drain the swamp.” A third: “As did I.” A fourth: “Me, too.” (In response to the panel, the writer Eric Levitz joked, “Resistance libs: Trump is a sociopathic gangster. Pro-Trump swing voters: Yes, exactly!”)

As the writer John Ganz wrote wrote in his piece, “The Shadow of the Mob”:

“Trump talks and acts like a mafioso. He’s not trying to hide it. He has compared himself to Al Capone frequently. … His lawyer and mentor Roy Cohn also served as house counsel to the Gambinos. The deal for the concrete for Trump Plaza was worked out with Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno, boss of the Genovese family, in Cohn’s living room. The Trump family’s political patron in Brooklyn was Democratic boss Meade Esposito, a close associate of Paul Vario, who was the basis for Paul Sorvino’s character in Goodfellas. … And that was Trump’s education in political philosophy, as it were: “This is how things work.” Everything’s a racket: You’re either on the outside, a chump, or on the inside, making it.

Mafias and the like are secret societies. Rackets work for a closely knit in group that exploits an outgroup. But what Trump offers is the clubbiness of the mob for the masses. He offers a big hug and a kiss. He brings you into his “family:” “I’m gonna tell you how it really works and with me you’re gonna be rich and powerful. And fuck everyone else.” He offers protection: as “Jonathan” remarks, he’s “the guy who does bad things but does them on behalf of the people he represents.” He might kick the shit out of the other guy, but to you, the guy on his side, he’s warm, gregarious, and fun: he winks and slaps you on the back.

Some primal politics lurks behind those “Scarface” posters in dorm rooms. Ganz wrote one of the most perceptive things I read recently about American politics in his new book “When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s,” about the far right’s fondness for mafia movies.

Reactionary American writers like Murray Rothbard and Samuel Francis viewed the fictionalized organized crime family of the Corleones as “essentially a right-wing utopia … Capitalist society as it should be: private interest ordered by firm but benign patriarchal rule.”

What reactionaries see in the mafioso is a present-day “noble savage” myth, an antihero pledged to the ancient code of the family and the judgments of the father over the soulless modernity of the bureaucrat administering the open society. A republic of blood standing against the republic of law.

Ganz dwelt on New Yorkers’ fondness for the charismatic mobster John Gotti in the 1990s, and the lessons that anti-corruption prosecutor Rudy Giuliani had been learning from his erstwhile targets as he ran for mayor:

“When New York turned its lonely eyes to John Gotti, it was longing for another kind of authority than the type Giuliani had represented up to that point. It didn’t really want the law, universalism, meritocracy, rationality, bureaucracy, good government, reform, blind justice, and all that bullshit. The institutions had failed, the welfare state had failed, the markets had failed, there was no justice, just rackets and mobs: the crowd didn’t want the G-man dutifully following the rules, and it didn’t want to be part of the ‘gorgeous mosaic’: it wanted protection, a godfather, a boss, just like the undertaker at the beginning of The Godfather. Gotti was not really a figure of revolt and anarchy at all, he was a symbol of order, the old order than many longed for still, an order more real and deeper than the law, upheld by brute power. The papers made much of Giuliani’s use of ‘obscenity’ in his speech. Giuliani understood that the voice of real authority was obscene.”