A PETTY GANGSTER PART 1

THANKS TO TURNER CLASSIC MOVIES, MY VIEWING of ’30s and ’40s gangster flicks leaves definitive impressions of the genre’s bad guys. Movie gangsters were cruel, conniving, and ruthless. However, rarely if ever did their actions display pettiness.

The Public Enemy, 1931. Image from Wikipedia.

Here in Parts 1 and 2 today and tomorrow, we glean tidbits contrasting our Petty Queens Felon with movie bad guys. 

By contrast, as noted by Tom Nichols in “Presidential Pettiness,” The Atlantic, July 21, 2025, “From his first day as a candidate, Trump has appeared animated by anger, fear, and, most of all, pettiness, a small-minded vengefulness that takes the place of actual policy making. It taints the air in the executive branch like a forgotten bag of trash in a warm house on a summer day—even when you can’t see it, you know it’s there.”

Nichols continues, “Trump’s second term has been a cavalcade of pettiness; his lieutenants have internalized the president’s culture of purges, retribution, and loyalty checks. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s insistence, for example, on renaming U.S. military bases after Confederate leaders has led to clumsy explanations about how the bases are now named for men who had names that are exactly like the 19th-century traitors’. This kind of explanation is the sort of thing that high-school teachers get from teenage smart alecks who think they’re being clever in class.”

James Clapper’s Rescue Dog. Nichols recounts, “My colleague Shane Harris recently reported an appalling story about how former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper sponsored a rescue dog to become a working animal at the CIA. He named the dog Susan, after his late wife, an animal lover who volunteered at a local shelter.”

Nichols continues, “Clapper was looking forward to attending Susan’s graduation ceremony at a CIA facility—but the agency, taking what it believed to be Trump’s lead, barred him from even setting foot on CIA property. (Trump despises Clapper, and blames him for what Trump calls “the Russia hoax,” among other slights against the president.) As Shane wrote: ‘The upshot is that an octogenarian Air Force retiree who spent half a century in his nation’s service was not allowed to attend a party for a dog he essentially donated to the government and named after his dead wife.’ ”

Sports Team Names. Continuing about petty retribution, Nichols relates in The Atlantic, “Now Trump’s attention seems to be on strong-arming the Washington Commanders and Cleveland Guardians football and baseball teams into reclaiming their old names, the Redskins and the Indians. It’s possible that Trump is responding to some hidden groundswell of nostalgia. He’s also not the first president to get fired up about Washington’s home team: Obama was clearly interested in getting rid of the Redskins name, and undoing anything Obama did is something of a Trumpian rule.”

A Petty Gangster Deal. Hannah Demisse writes “Trump ‘Won’t Make a Deal’ with Washington Commanders If Team Refuses to Change Name,” ABC News, July 21, 2025. Demisse describes, “President Donald Trump threatened the Washington Commanders football team, saying he will not facilitate a deal for the team’s new stadium to be built in Washington, D.C., if it does not revert to its former name.”

Geez. What with orchestrated massacre continuing in the Middle East and Putin’s continued assaults of Ukraine, you’d think Trump would have other priorities than threatening a stadium deal over a sports team name.

But then this is why the Petty Queens Felon moniker fits so well. ds

© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2025