It is impossible to understand the Trump administration’s cast of characters, their lingo, and their governing ethos without a working knowledge of La Cosa Nostra and its Hollywood lore. jonathanchait writes
Photo: Silver Screen Collection/Hulton Archive/Getty Images “Do a Frank Pentangeli.” That’s what Donald Trump campaign adviser Roger Stone urged an associate who was set to testify against him to do, according to a federal indictment. During the 2016 campaign, Stone was in contact with WikiLeaks, which had obtained stolen Democratic emails from Russian hackers through an intermediary named Randy Credico.
Stone’s case underlines a principle that’s long been clear: It is impossible to understand the Trump administration’s cast of characters, their lingo, and their governing ethos without a working knowledge of La Cosa Nostra and its Hollywood lore. If the Kennedy administration created Camelot, the Trump presidency has built a kind of cultural gangster state.
In his days as a builder — before he went bankrupt and transitioned into the branding business — Trump worked closely with mobsters, who controlled the city’s concrete trade and influenced its building contracts. Former FBI director James Comey said in a 2018 interview that Trump’s style was eerily reminiscent of that of the kingpins he had prosecuted. “I had a flashback to my days investigating the Mafia,” he recalled of his early meetings with the president.
Trump has done surprisingly little to cleanse his history. During the primaries, Trump boasted about using donations to buy politicians. He has bragged about the number of his business associates who have been prosecuted on the basis of testimony by their underlings, not normally a point of pride. “I know all about flipping — for 30, 40 years, I’ve been watching flippers,” he told Fox News.
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