Our Mob Boss President

Jamelle Bouie writes that each US president molds the presidency in his own image and Trump has constructed a “government as protection racket and the president as mob boss”.¹

So what manner of presidency has Trump devised for himself?

You could call it the pecuniary presidency, a presidency not devoted to the public good or to the preservation of the union or even to some narrow ideological crusade, but to the quest for personal enrichment. A presidency devoted to the aggrandizement of a single person, not to satisfy a grand design for the nation but to squeeze a few million here and a few billion there out of the public coffers for your own benefit.

This isn’t the “honest graft” of Tammany Hall — corruption as the price paid for public improvement. It is petty theft. It’s stealing from the Treasury and using your authority, enhanced by the baroque theories of your allies on the Supreme Court, to make yourself unaccountable. It is government as protection racket and the president as mob boss (a role that Trump has clearly embraced).

As I wrote last month:

I’ve found it useful to think of DJT’s 2nd term primarily as a heist: a theft of money & power from the American people by a con man who finally found the perfect score.

Trump feels like he’s running the largest casino in the world and he’s gonna take his deserved cut.

1. I love Bouie but “pecuniary presidency” isn’t going to catch fire in the public’s imagination. But I also do not have a better suggestion beyond “mob boss presidency”. And maybe it doesn’t matter much anyway. Even “liberal” Americans are still hesitant to believe that the high office of the US presidency, the duly elected “leader of the free world”, could be corrupted so completely that you can plainly and factually refer to him as a thief and mobster. ↩

• Donald Trump
• Jamelle Bouie
• politics
• usa