Trump and the Mob

Submitted by Ben Bache on

It's commonplace to say that if someone is involved with construction in New York City he or she will come in contact with organized crime. According to Pulitzer Prize winning author David Cay Johnson, Trump falls into that category, having hired "mobbed up" firms to build Trump Tower and the Trump Plaza apartment building. A federal investigation concluded that construction of the Trump Plaza building likely involved racketeering.

According to investigative reporter Wayne Barrett, Trump probably met with Genovese family underboss Tony Salerno at the home of Trump's then lawyer, Roy Cohn. Trump had met Cohn in 1973 when Cohn was defending Trump and his father against Department of Justice charges that they were discriminating against blacks in their real estate rentals. By then Cohn, who played a role in the sentencing of the Rosenbergs to death, and was counsel to Sen. Joseph McCarthy during the Second Red Scare, was consigliere to Salerno as well as Paul Castellano of the Gambino family.

Call It Racism

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"Throughout history, there are many examples of how the racism of white voters has been mobilized to favor a candidate for president," wrote Think Progress's Casey Quinlan the morning after the election. Quinlan cited particularly the candidacy of Barry Goldwater, and Richard Nixon's "southern strategy," which "took advantage of white people’s anxieties about the economic and social advancement of people of color."

Despite a persistent tendency on the part of mainstream media to omit the racial component and highlight economic anxiety of a so-called "working class," research and analysis has shown that this is inadequate. A Gallup study of 87,000 interviews conducted over the past year found that Trump supporters "on average, do not have lower incomes than other Americans, nor are they more likely to be unemployed." 

Among those who are similar in terms of income, education and other factors, those who view Trump favorably are more likely to be found in white enclaves — racially isolated Zip codes where the amount of diversity is lower than in surrounding areas.

In fact, as a number of studies showed, racial resentment correlated strongly with voters' support for Trump.

The For-Profit Presidency

Submitted by Ben Bache on
Trump's facile assertion on November 22 that "the president can't have a conflict of interest" drew immediate comparisons to Richard Nixon's 1977 response to David Frost's question about government-authorized wiretaps, burglaries, mail opening, etc. that "when the president does it it's not illegal." As the Washington Post's Glenn Kessler pointed out the next day, the "law doesn't say the president can't have a conflict of interest."

Chief Strategist Steve Bannon's Right Wing Nationalist Associations

Submitted by Ben Bache on

In the November 14 NY Times​​​, Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway denied that chief strategist Steve Bannon had a connection to right wing nationalists, or that he would bring those views into the Trump White House. Conway's protestations were as believable as Newt Gingrich, who asserted at about the same time that Bannon could not hold anti-Semitic views because he had worked at Goldman Sachs and in Hollywood.

Earlier this year the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) revealed that Conway and Bannon were both members of the  Council for National Policy, an association of conservatives so secretive that members may not divulge their membership or even the name of the group. Records from 2014 obtained by SPLC listed Conway as a member of the executive committee and Bannon as a regular member.

Cabinet of Deplorables

Submitted by Ben Bache on

Speaking at an event on September 9, 2016, Hillary Clinton said:

You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic -- you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people -- now 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks -- they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.

The Trump campaign criticized Clinton's remarks at the time, but it has become increasingly clear that Trump has not only "lifted up" the deplorables, he is enlisting them to build the executive branch of the government.

What's Past Is Prologue

Submitted by Ben Bache on

"What's past is prologue," Antonio tells Sebastian in Act 2 Scene 1 of Shakespeare's "The Tempest." Inscribed on the National Archive building, the phrase has come to mean that history provides a context for the present.

In this section we'll look to the past, to gain perspective both on Trump and his family, but also the political context that led to our current predicament.