Trump is not your Godfather

An offer we gotta refuse.

Today John Ganz over at Unpopular Front wrote an excellent piece on how America’s obsession with the Mafia is feeding into support for Donald Trump.

As a Sicilian-American with at least one “made man” in my family (I don’t know for sure, but then, I wouldn’t would I?), and as someone fascinated with ancient Rome—the system upon which the Mob’s structure was based—and as someone who likes to tease out how politics and pop culture inform each other, I have THOTS, as my old friend Sean Kelly used to say.

I’m old enough to remember how gangsters were portrayed in the media pre-Godfather, and how they have been since. The Godfather I and II (I do not acknowledge III, and neither should you) is part of the cinema cycle that began in 1967, with Bonnie and Clyde, where the audience is meant to identify with the outlaw. By 1972 that countercultural stance wasn’t so new. What The Godfather did, better and more seductively than ever before, is suggest that we viewers already identifying with the outlaw begin to see their gangster ethics as an somewhat valid reaction to being shut out of the mainstream, mostly by WASPy fat cats.

In this famous scene from Godfather II, Senator Geary not only tries to strongarm Michael Corleone, he makes fun of his heritage and insults his family. And because he is rich and powerful, Michael (and note how I shift into familiarity) puts the scumbag firmly in his place, to our delight. Nobody has ever watched this scene and rooted for the Senator.

In a weird way, this scene can be viewed as part of Italian-Americans’ assimilation process. In it, Michael Corleone isn’t one of them; he’s one of us. Since at least 1972, our pop culture has usually portrayed mobsters not as amoral sociopaths, but figures that could be weirdly aspirational; “men of honor” living by a different, but equally valid moral code. The gangster was no longer an outsider, but merely a different kind of American, maybe one more honest than our leaders themselves. An interesting idea in the early 1970s, and totally of a piece with the culture of that time.

In the 1980s, this idea was appended to Reagan-era “greed is good” ethos, and that’s how you get Brian DePalma’s remake of Scarface. What’s the difference between an amoral coke kingpin like Tony Montana and an amoral stock swindler like Gordon Gecko? Not much—the same guy even wrote both screenplays, just four years apart.

And how far a leap is it from Gordon Gecko to Donald Trump? They were, in the national imagination, practically the same guy.

I know next to nothing about hip-hop culture, but I think the War on Drugs turning a bunch of young men into criminals—mostly African-Americans and Latinos—was another piece of this. As with Prohibition, how could tons of people not identify with the noble gangster? By 2000, there were two paradigms for acceptable criminality, the white-collar kingpin I-don’t-pay-taxes-I’m-smart one from above, and the up-from-nothing one from below. They met in the psyche of the American male.

In the 1990s and 2000s, we’ve been treated to lots of extremely well-made movies and TV continuing on this path, getting more and more intimate. We’ve been endlessly encouraged to identify with gangsters, to see them as people just like us, only freer and stronger and more charismatic—Goodfellas, The Sopranos, and even Breaking Bad. This last shows a good law-abiding man basically pushed into gangsterism by—wait for it—a desire to provide for his family. Because he got cancer, because our society is unfair, because good people get screwed, WASPy Walter “White” has to go the route of the ethnic gangster. He doesn’t want to do it; he’s forced to.

Sound like any campaign you know?

• • •

Sometime around the time of OJ’s white Bronco, I remember walking into my little brother’s bedroom, and noticing that the twelve-year-old had hung posters for The Godfather and Scarface. This struck me; when I was Jack’s age, my posters were of The Beatles. Also, through a kink in our family tree, Jack is not Sicilian, but Swedish (quick, name a famous Swedish gangster). And then as now, Jack is a particularly kind and thoughtful person.

“Oh, that’s a great one,” I said, pointing to Brando. “What’s your favorite, I or II?”

“I haven’t seen them,” Jack said. “I just like it.”

My guess is that young Jack liked the masc-ness of it. The Mafia mythos is an assertion of male strength and privilege; whatever else it is, the Mafia world is a male one. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that young men have adopted Mafia pop culture at the same time as the mainstream has constantly put forward stories of female empowerment. In a world of Inside Out, Barbie, and Everything Everywhere All at Once, the mobster mythos exerts a powerful pull. For Italian- and Sicilian-Americans, it makes them white; for anyone who’s run afoul of our stupid drug laws, it makes them normal; and for any young man, it feels like old-fashioned instruction on How to Be a Dude. No more criminal than, say, Frank Sinatra—sharp-dressed “men of respect” who know how to drink and smoke and have sex, and aren’t afraid of any of that.

Plus, there’s the secrecy of it all. Fast-forward to this past March, when I was home for a visit. The moment my 16-year-old nephew got me alone, he had one question: “Are you in Skull and Bones?”

“I couldn’t tell you if I was,” I said.

“Come on,” Patrick said.

Probably stupidly, I admitted that I am not—but when I saw Patrick’s face fall I had to add, “But I know lots of people in it.”

“What are they like?” he said breathlessly. “What are the rituals?”

Such secrets are more than my life is worth (hi Peaches), so let’s move on. The Mafia is a über masc-coded secret society where young men are allowed to do whatever they want, as long as they don’t cross the older men. And everyone—even the Boss himself—is bound by ironclad rules to help and protect each other. The world isn’t random, and you aren’t on your own; you’ve got a strong, male-dominated system that you work inside that works for you. You have all the fathers and grandfathers you might need. Right and wrong are very clear; so too success and failure. And sometimes, you gotta die for what’s right.

This is about as cool a thing as you can imagine, to a certain type of boy. It’s very similar to patriotism, which is why Fascism and criminality are so close. (And why, the first thing Fascists do is kill all the criminals they can’t enlist.)

Some boys grow out of this weird stage; Jack certainly has. Of the two of us, I’m much more likely to suggest an, um, extralegal solution to any problem. Just Sunday I suggested the following to a very law-abiding relative: “I’ve got it. Transfer everything you’ve got to a Swiss bank account, change both your names, and move to Spain. You could be living in a palacio by Christmas, and f**k anyone who doesn’t like it.”

I was not kidding. In me that gene is clicked ON.

This isn’t to say that I have ever been a fan of the Mafia; even when I was a teenager, that was impossible, given what my relatives said about my potentially Mobbed-up relation. He was a colorful, interesting person, but he manifestly didn’t take care of his family, and I suspect the Mafia was a big reason why. If the Boss comes first—as he has to—and you yourself come second, and maybe having fun comes third, the wife and kids are well down the list. My guy Tony’s fun to think and talk about, but his own daughter practically spat whenever she said his name.

So that la famiglia stuff? Strictly Hollywood. The real guy died before I was born, but seemed to be pretty firmly a fellow who was good at telling you whatever you needed to hear to get what he wanted, hung out with sketchy types, never had a job-job, went back on his promises, and was out primarily for himself.

Sound like any ex-President you know?

• • •

I’m no scholar on this topic, but the genesis of the Mafia seems to have been this: because Rome in the 1800s was very far away from rural Sicily, and the local Sicilian gendarmerie were unable to enforce law and order on the island, local chieftains offered armed guards to the big citrus farmers. The farmers agreed, and soon the farms no longer belonged to the landowners, but the local chieftains. Who then branched out into all manner of businesses, legitimate and otherwise.

As Sicilians immigrated to America, these enterprising fellows saw an opportunity to expand. And 70 years later, The Godfather premiered.

Whether in Sicily or America, these chieftains used something very much like the old patronus/cliens structure of ancient Rome. Every morning in the Roman world, people would present themselves to their patron to ask for favors or help, and receive instructions. Then, the cliens would return to his own home, and receive the people under him. A good patronus would take care of his clientes, and in exchange, the clientes would deliver votes, do work, even protect the patronus with their lives.

BONASERA: Be my friend—[He hows to Corleone]—Godfather? [He kisses Corleone’s hand].

This interlocking hierarchy extended all the way down to the poorest of the poor, and all the way up to the Emperor. It was also used for whole countries; prior to the establishment of the Empire, cities, towns, and occasionally whole provinces were clientes of powerful men and clans, and those relationships were passed on after death. One of the biggest reasons Julius Caesar got into hot water is because most of Gaul had become his client-state, and the other powerful men and families of the Senate knew they were toast. And in the Empire that followed, the entire Empire functioned as a cliens to its patronus, the Emperor.

Even if the ties of mutual obligation are adhered to rigorously, there are hard limits to what such a system can do. It can funnel money and benefits upwards well enough to make the guy at the top extremely powerful and rich, but because it’s focused on one guy, it’s very inefficient at pushing money and benefits down and spreading it around. (You couldn’t, for example, run a modern social safety net this way.) In the Republican period, the Romans solved this problem by having a lot of families at the top of a lot of pyramids, plus guilds and all sorts of civic organizations to further carry the load. But as Rome grew, that broke down. In the Imperial period, the Emperors used armies of freedmen (and even Imperial slaves) to administer things. But the times when it worked best were when there were multiple people with lots of authority, and a calm, serene, not-crazy fellow overseeing them from the top. Augustus and Trajan were the opposite of Donald Trump.

Even in its most complex form, it’s a very delicate system, and requires a lot of self-restraint, and a level of forward-thinking that no person can sustain for long. Infirmity or insanity at the top was disastrous, and succession usually a bloody mess. Having this play out in the modern United States would be incredibly disastrous; and to have the most powerful country in the history of the world, one armed to the teeth with nukes, undergo an ancient Roman-style power struggle would probably end all life on this planet.

Conservatives included.

• • •

The thing is—Donald Trump doesn’t have a family, certainly not in the mafioso sense, and not even in the normal biological one. He is disloyal to his wives, insulting to his relations, and the only one of his children he likes, he seems to want to f**k.

I don’t mean to be crude, but the dissonance is that blunt. Trump is not Don Vito, surrounded by loyal lieutenants. You can’t imagine him playing with his grandkid out in the tomato patch. If you put a cat on Trump’s lap, he’d leap up and cuss you out.

And he’s not Michael Corleone either, a careful, almost scholarly man who wanted to live an honorable life among non-criminals, but was maneuvered by loyalty—and even Fate!—into accepting a destiny that he surely on some level despised.

Trump is a freak. The bonds of affection and custom are alien to him. Trump shows loyalty to no one; ask Michael Cohen, or Alan Weisselberg—everyone who gets close to him gets screwed. He’s no tough guy, either—he’s even afraid of germs! All this is why he’s such an easy mark for real gangsters like Vladimir Putin. And the only people who help him, like the House Republicans, will pull out stilettos as soon as it benefits them, and everybody knows that, especially Trump.

It’s not a system of government, it’s a snakepit. If Donald Trump ever helps anybody other than himself, it’s totally by accident. And if he notices he helped you, you’ll be squeezed for whatever you’re worth. There is no honor in this thief. The only way to make him into the leader of a movement is to ignore the real guy completely. You have swap out his entire being for someone in a movie, like Rambo, or Don Vito.

So why are we even considering this horrible man and his horrible, stupid, catastrophically unworkable vision of how things should be? I think it’s because 33% of the country has enough imagination to watch Scarface and think of themselves as Tony Montana, but not enough imagination to realize they’d really be the guy cut to pieces in a bathtub.

Even if Trump played by gangster rules, what he’s doing can’t work. Clans can give you an identity, they can fill a hole inside, but any leader that comes to power on the back of a clan—der volk—must inevitably whittle that clan down farther and farther. Finally, the truth is revealed: it is only ever been him, alone, feeding others to the wolves in a vain attempt to survive.

I’ll end with a thought that I’ve never seen anywhere, but seems too obvious to be original: The worldwide turn away from democracy—messy, slow democracy—is Homo sapiens’ primal reaction to global warming. Whatever they say in public, by now everybody with half a brain cell knows that global warming is real, and is going to kill many millions, maybe billions. In the face of this, some people will stop at nothing to keep living the same old way, and protect themselves and those they love. So they are turning to authoritarian characters, people who promise to keep things the same, protect people like them and sacrifice everybody else. “Stick with the Corleones,” they say, “and help us fight the Tataglias.”

But sooner or later, the Tataglias are YOU.

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Every so often, Godfather MICHAEL GERBER puts down his cat Max, and rouses himself to write something. He planning to write some long-threatened novels this summer on his personal Substack, which you can subscribe to here.