OUR QUEENS FELON’S MOB

I’VE HARPED ON THE QUEENS FELON MOB all too often at this website (I’d much rather write about my usual topics). Nevertheless, I was gratified that I’m not the only one making this observation. The Guardian has offered “Donald Trump Is Turning America into a Mafia State,” March 7, 2025, and “Donald Trump, The Mob Boss With A Messiah Complex,” March 14, 2025. 

And recently, Sam Tanenhaus writes in Vanity Fair, July/August 2025, “The Godfather Presidency: How Donald Trump’s Governing Style Mimics the Mob.” The accompanying illustration is great.

This and the following illustration by The Red Dress in Vanity Fair.

A Mafia Operation. “Forget the comparisons to fascists and autocrats,” Tanenhaus writes. “The most accurate model for understanding the transactional tough guy in the White House is the politically connected underbelly of 1970s and ’80s New York real estate.”

Tanenhaus quotes Maryland congressman (D) Jamie Raskin: “One such rumor going around, Raskin told me, was ‘that they’re going to use their control of the Treasury’s payment system to pay the red states, pay their friends, and not pay the blue states.’ Of the 10 states most dependent on federal dollars, at least seven are red. Supporters were being reduced to supplicants.”

“That,” said Raskin, “is a Mafia operation.”

Not an Autocrat, Not a Showman. “In my 35 years of writing about and reporting on US politics and ideology,” Tanenhaus recounts, “I can’t think of another time when so many professional observers seem so utterly at a loss to analyze, or even categorize, the president’s MO. And most of them have gotten it wrong. Trump’s operating model is not, as some maintain, the foreign autocrat—even if he curries favor and sings the praises of Putin and Orban and Erdogan, and cozies up to Middle Eastern potentates. Neither is Trump’s model his crafty lawyer-mentor Roy Cohn—even if he practices Cohn’s mantra: Deny, deflect, delay. It’s a mistake, too, to think of Trump as a latter-day P.T. Barnum, a showman-salesman mugging for the TV cameras and effusing on Truth Social.”

Not Far From the Tree. Tanenhaus observes, “But Trump the president is shaped by someone he observed at much closer range from childhood on: his father, Fred Trump, the great mid-20th-century apartment builder and developer of outer-borough New York. For many years father and son were partners who mastered the byways and back alleys of real estate at a time when, as two of the period’s best reporters wrote, New York was a ‘city for sale.’ It was a brutish world of transactional power, of patronage, favors, cronyism, bribes, payoffs, pork, and spoils—as well as extortion, intimidation, and threat. It was a world ruled by Mob capos and political allies who at times were little more than frontmen.”

Funny, I had the same thoughts when composing “The Most Happy Felon—A Screenplay” and “A Petty Gangster.”

Capo di Tutti Capi. Tanenhaus continues, “In his second term he has come up with a further refinement of one-boss rule, this time piling jobs—or rather titles—on Marco Rubio, ostensibly his top diplomat but in reality an all-hat, no-cattle mouthpiece for Trump, like all the other president’s men and women. It feels improvised and probably is. But it has also been some years in the making.”

A Folk Hero of January 6. Tanenhaus identifies Trump: “Self-assured and self-obsessed, fearless and fearsome, the interloper of 2015 has become the folk hero of January 6, 2021, and now is widely acknowledged to be the dominant American political figure of the 21st century, as mythically big as Franklin Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan were in the 20th. Trump’s success derives from his innate understanding of how to wield bare-knuckle power by creating his own kind of syndicate in the time-tested style of both the political clubhouses and the Mob-adjacent New York real estate business of his youth.”

Tanenhaus goes into considerable analyses of Tammany Hall politics in the early 20th century, Thirties mobsters, FDR and his fabled first 100 days, and parallels with Trump’s second “first 100.” 

I highly recommend reading these analyses and conclude here with Tanenhaus: “Trump… has made the executive branch, indeed the three branches of US government, his. And he has done so swiftly, effectively, and in a manner that makes him—to use a Prohibition-era phrase applied to Eliot Ness, the G-man who pursued the country’s most menacing gangsters—for now, at least, untouchable. As for the fallout from all of this, that’s entirely a different matter.” ds

© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2025