Minor League Don

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If, as suggested in my previous post, Trump is less like a politician or run-of-the-mill capitalist than like a mobster, such as fellow native of Queens John Gotti, then many of his odder quirks begin to become explicable.

He hates the press, for example, except for the tame segments run by fellow oligarchs who are not interested in uncovering facts but in manipulating opinion, the better to publicize those who can help them and attack those they regard as enemies. So, Trump is cozy with Rupert Murdock’s Fox, the Mercer’s Breitbart, and protected from his own sleazy tabloid behavior by friendly tabloid CEO David Pecker.
Conversely, he is perpetually irate over investigative reporting by “The Bezos Amazon Post,” “The Failing New York Times” and “Fake News CNN”. What mobster wants inky scribblers poking their noses where they don’t belong? And clearly, Trump is afraid they will report actual news, defined by Bill Moyers as follow: “What people want to keep hidden. Everything else is publicity.”

If Trump, like any mobster, fears what the press might discover about his activities, he is really terrified of the forces of criminal justice. Friends and foes alike have been baffled by words and actions that have expressed contempt for the FBI, judges, courts, prosecutors and the intelligence community.

Most presidents, especially Republicans, are gung-ho fans of law and order and national security. Critics have supposed Trump’s fury over Jeff Sessions recusing himself, his firing of Comey, and the bashing of Rosenstein, McCabe, and Mueller reveal a guilty mind and collusion with the Russians to steal the presidency. Maybe so.

But it’s nothing new. Trump has spent almost 50 years litigating, bending if not breaking laws, delaying trials endlessly, refusing to settle until all other means have been exhausted, then paying the minimum and admitting nothing. On this subject he should be taken at his word. He really does have contempt for justice.

He is used to junk yard dogs like Roy Cohn crushing his enemies or Michael Cohen paying off bimbos and plaintiffs. Now that he is the boss of America, Trump has been stunned to learn that the Attorney General, the head of the FBI and federal judges won’t serve as his employees, as fixers.

In the wider world, foreign policy experts have been stunned that Trump has treated our traditional allies like dirt and long-standing agreements as negotiable or meaningless scraps of paper. Is this populism, nationalism, or the scorn of a mob boss for nickel and dime public servants who are at the mercy of voters, who stupidly play by the rules, and whose net worth is a paltry fraction of his own?

He has saved his regard for his peers, crooked kleptocrats and oligarchs who grab what they want and spit on the rule book. So, he’s praised Duterte of the Philippines for his strength in combatting drug dealers by personally assassinating malefactors. He’s overlooked Erdogan of Turkey’s scorn for democratic and NATO niceties and his jailing of political foes and dissident journalists.

For Trump, such thuggery makes them birds of a feather. As does the fact that somehow the head of Turkey has managed to pile up a fortune of around $200 million, matched by a like amount in the hands of the famiglia – his daughter and sons.

But of course, his most lavish praise and deference have been reserved for the real Dons. First, Ji Xinping, a lifelong “civil servant,” who has returned China to greater autocracy and, on a salary of $10,000, has amassed a net worth of at least $1.5 billion while his extended family controls billions more.

Not bad, but a mere bagatelle compared to Vladimir Putin, the capo di tutti capi. If he has political enemies or media critics, they die. His oligarchic friends kick back their profits to him. His oligarchic rivals are striped of their wealth and banished. His press is good since he controls the press, and his net worth is reckoned at between $40 and $200 billion, making Trump’s putative $3-4 billion look like chump change. Putin is what Trump wants to be when he grows up.

Is the feeling mutual, or is Trump a useful idiot? When Trump’s bankruptcies made him toxic to conventional lenders, Russian money came to his rescue. When he needed tenants, Russian oligarchs anxious to launder money via real estate investments bought into his buildings in New York, Panama, and elsewhere. When he was seeking office, Russian hackers offered him dirt on Hillary. She was his enemy, but also an enemy of Putin’s.

So, what do you think, would he turn down any of these boons, or would he, like Bonasera seeking justice, kiss the ring of the Godfather? Even though he surely knew what such a deal meant, that “someday, and that day may never come, I’ll call on you to do a service for me.”

And that day having come, is it any surprise that he would repay the debt? So, the party platform regarding assistance to Ukraine was changed, sanctions against Putin were quashed, despite mounting evidence of cyberwar Trump has denied it all and defended Putin, and has refused to launch an effort to make sure such election fraud never takes place again?

Even a minor league Don like Trump knows the rules of the game – loyalty and omerta. And he knows that Putin is more to be feared then the press, the law, or the voters. Trump also knows that he may need Putin’s help again, in 2018 and 2020. What he doesn’t seem to know is that he, personally, his election is Putin’s most destructive act of war against the United States. But Putin knows, and in Trump’s elegant words, “is laughing his ass off in the Moscow.” As for his fellow Americans, not so funny.

Mob Boss

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It begins to dawn on me that the trouble with Trump may not be his behaving like a real estate huckster, reality TV star, faux populist or narcissist. Perhaps the daily distractions that mesmerize the media are not the disease but mere side effects or a deliberate campaign of disinformation.

The fights with Congress, with Democrats, with his own party, within the West Wing, the porn stars, the clownish appointees, the abuse of women and beating of wives, the saber rattling tweets, divisive polarizing tweets, the boasts and exaggerations and lies in urgent need of fact checking, the political incorrectness and boorish shattering of norms.

His followers obviously love the circus and his detractors are appalled. Result? For the first time since his election Trump’s approve/disapprove numbers are 50/50. He’s accustomed the country to the dysfunction and vulgarity, and the same people who believe reality TV is real now believe Trump is presidential.

But perhaps the truth is that Trump is what he always was, the minor mob boss of one of the lesser crime families. He is a thuggish con man who has betrayed, exploited and abused women, who violated labor laws, civil rights laws, tax laws.

In New York real estate it is customary to reach accommodations with the mob, corrupt politicians, various zoning and regulatory authorities, to pay baksheesh or strong-arm as needed, to fight with unions, and always to litigate in order to intimidate. And Trump excelled, even turning serial bankruptcy into a profit center where he got the profits and his creditors got the shaft.

His mentors and role models were his ruthless, amoral father and Roy Cohn, a lawyer so corrupt he was eventually disbarred but only after becoming so feeble he was no longer feared. Trump’s businesses were always based on a con, a promise of more than would be delivered — real estate with a mafioso’s idea of class, casinos, books touting secrets of success, Trump University, branding in which he got an income stream and the franchisees took the risks. His motto isn’t “Make America Great,” it’s “Never give a sucker an even break.”

And now he is presiding over the same sort of criminal operation he has all his life. He has brought this skill set to the presidency. He ran as a populist to garner the votes of the marks, but he has passed only laws useful to he and his fellow oligarchs including deregulation of their industries, a calling off of the watchdogs, a cutting of taxes for the business class, a cutting of benefits for the saps.

We should not really be surprised, therefore, that he is the first president to refuse to reveal his tax returns or to divest himself of business interests in order to avoid conflicts of interest. No wonder, his presidency is aimed at monetizing conflicts of interest.

Ivanka promotes her gewgaws and extracts favorable treatment from foreign governments. Jared’s sister pitches their real estate properties based on favorable government treatment of foreign buyers’ visa applications. Trump’s Washington hotel is the salon where supplicants gather to transact business with administration fixers. Mar-A-Lago boosts its annual fees, since it now offers members close proximity to the president, the better to lobby him. And these are all in plain sight. God knows what septic transactions are hidden beneath the surface.

Nor should it come as any surprise that, not since Teapot Dome, have so many presidential appointees crossed so many ethical and criminal red lines with impunity. Trump has populated his government with fellow pirates whose wealth is founded on pyramid schemes, leveraged buyouts, foreclosures, predatory lending, or who have served as tools of the oil and gas industry, fighting regulation and denying climate change.

In Trumpian fashion, they have used the government and the public purse for their own benefit, taking private planes to Wimbledon, the viewing of lunar eclipses, on European vacations and honeymoon trips, insisting on first class travel and security guards unavailable to mere Senators, allowing family members to profit from their positions, to use information from work for insider trading. In any other administration, these would be firing offenses. In Trump’s, they are emulation of the boss.

It is no accident Trump is surrounded by such creatures. They are his kind of guys and he the leader of the pack, both role model and enabler. Thanks to him, the cop is off the beat and anything goes. Public service is an opportunity to book private profits. Waste, fraud and abuse are the perquisites of power. With all branches of government in pliant Republican hands, and the public distracted by the bread and circuses, the looting has begun.

America in Chains

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The Republicans, with the help of the Orwellian Frank Luntz, are fond of renaming things their rich donors dislike to make them sound bad enough for their poorer voters to oppose. So, the estate tax became the death tax, though the orphan tax would have been even better. Healthcare reform became a government takeover, and now bringing your family with you when you move is chain migration.

President Trump, who never met a lie he wouldn’t tell, denounced chain migration in his State of the Union, saying “a single migrant can bring in virtually unlimited numbers of distant relatives. Under our plan, we focus on the immediate family by limiting sponsorship to spouses and minor children.”

The “unlimited” claim is a complete falsehood, and what “our plan” would dictate is essentially what current law permits, though we do presently allow the spouses of married children to be considered as well as fiancées of citizens.

Then there’s the issue of restricting immigrants to people who score 30 more on a proposed point system which takes into account 1: Age (26-30 preferred, and worth ten points, over 50, zero), 2: English language proficiency, 3: Education (13 points for a Ph.D. in STEM fields, college graduate, 6), 4: Income (maximum pts. 13, for 300% of median income or more ), 5: Extraordinary achievement (25 pts. for a Nobel Prize, 15 pts. Olympic Medal), and 6: Investment (12 pts. for investing $1.8 million in American enterprises for three or more years).

So, if you are an under thirty, English-speaking, millionaire, PH.D. winner of the Nobel Prize whose income is 3 times $53,000 or $159,000, come on down. Ruth Marcus has wittily pointed out that Trump himself would have trouble passing this test, as would many of his voters. Surely, Frank Luntz’s chain-migrating grandfather would have failed, as would Trump’s grandfather Friedrich Drumpf. He emigrated illegally at 16, dodging the German draft, and made the beginnings of his fortune in the Alaska gold rush where he appears to have run a restaurant/hotel/brothel.

Trump’s system would allow more H2B visas to be issued for “seasonal, non-agricultural work in the US,” perhaps because his properties like Mar-A-Lago employ such persons who can be paid less than Americans and given no benefits. Whereas, the H1B visas that Silicon Valley relies on for person with specialized skills might not be treated so favorably. As usual, the kind of immigrants you want to admit are the kind you need in your business. The kind you don’t want are the kind who might do your job for less. Or vote for the other party.

Chain migration is nothing new, of course. James Boswell tells of relatives of 18th century Scots weeping and wailing as they watched their kin sail away to America, but a year or two later they waved good-bye to the next boatload without batting an eye since it seemed likely they would soon follow and be reunited on the other side of the Atlantic.

When the English passed laws discriminating against sects other than the Church of England, whole congregations and their ministers emigrated together. Many were Scotch-Irish Presbyterians whose skills, according to one of them, James Webb, were “fight, drink, sing, pray.” This would not have earned them 30 points on the Trump test, but it didn’t stop them from winning the Revolution in the South at battles like King’s Mountain, Cowpens and Guilford Courthouse.

Today, of course, it makes sense to impose limits on the numbers admitted each year and to require a slightly different skillset than a century ago, education especially. But Trump’s plan calls for cutting legal immigrants a year in half. Surely our aging population and low birth rate suggests more skilled taxpayers would be an economically useful import.

Finally, we forget our roots at our peril. Restrictions on immigration in the past have focused less on numbers than on undesirables – first the Scotch-Irish, then the Germans, the Irish, Jews, Catholics, swarthy persons from southern Europe, and Asian were all found inferior. Trump seems to be following in this unfortunate tradition of racial and ethnic bias with his antipathy for Hispanics and Muslims, his recent love of Norwegians.

Once the Republican Party was the party of business and entrepreneurial zeal. If it still wants to claim that distinction, it ought to also be the party of immigration. A study by the Center for Entrepreneurship found that 216 of the Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or the children of immigrants. Du Pont, Bell, Carnegie, Proctor and Gamble were immigrants. Walt Disney, Ford and Edison were the sons of immigrants.

You may say that was then, this is now. But Elon Musk, Sergey Brin of Google, and Jerry Yang of Yahoo are immigrants as was Intel’s Andy Grove. Amazon and Apple’s founders are children of immigrants. The men who made the companies that make American great, came not only from Trump’s preferred northern European countries, but from Syria, Cuba, Russia, Iran, South Africa, Brazil, Poland, Greece, Zambia, Turkey, Hong Kong, Taiwan and so on.

It is worth recalling that those willing to dare migrating are often not running to something better, but fleeing from something worse. And when they came here seeking a better life for themselves, they often helped make a better life for all of us. If we start turning strivers away, they will migrate elsewhere for opportunity, and make our competitors great. This doesn’t seem like a hard choice. For most of American history, it wasn’t. The lady in the harbor, “mother of exiles,” lifted her light by the golden door. And it made us what we became.

But the Republicans seem intent on pleasing their isolationist, nativist base. That may win some votes, but it also risks turning the GOP into a 21st Century version of the anti-Catholic Know Nothing Party. It’s narrow vision of America was rejected in favor of admitting the men and women who, by the sweat of their brows, fire of their ambition and power of their brains, turned the 19th century into the Gilded Age, and America into the largest economy on earth.