A: yes, in the Mafia/ Crime Boss sense of “Don”, according to a seasoned, well-respected observer of US Presidential politics.
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Behold Donald Corleone, the US president who behaves like a mafia boss – but without the principles. Of course, one hesitates to make the comparison, not least because Donald Trump would like it. And because the Godfather is an archetype of strength and macho glamour while Trump is weak, constantly handing gifts to America’s enemies and getting nothing in return.
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All italicised quotations are from an essay published in the 08.03.2025 UK edition of The Guardian
Its author is not joking, nor is he intentionally employing hyperbole.
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Consider the way Trump’s White House conducts itself, issuing threats and menaces that sound better in the original Sicilian
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Both the substance and the style are pure mafia. Note the obsession with respect, demonstrated in last week’s Oval Office confrontation with Zelenskyy. Between them, JD Vance and Trump accused the Ukrainian leader three times of showing disrespect, sounding less like world leaders than touchy Tommy DeVito, the Joe Pesci character in Goodfellas.
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The essay’s headline declares, Donald Trump is turning the USA into a mafia state.
Its author is Johnathan Freedland, whose Wikipedia profile is here.
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See how blatantly he now charges individuals to dine with him at Mar-a-Lago: $5m for a one-on-one, $1m to be part of a group. In case you didn’t get the message, Trump has announced that the US will no longer enforce the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which prohibited Americans from bribing foreign officials, while his attorney general has dissolved all of the kleptocracy-related task forces at the Department of Justice. As for callousness, note Musk’s glee at feeding the US agency for international development “into the wood chipper”, thereby ensuring death comes to the sick and the starving who relied on US medicine and food.
At least the Corleones were guided by their own supposed code of honour. They believed an act of service had to be remembered and, in time, reciprocated. But Trump has gone to court rather than pay suppliers for work already done for the US government and has no memory of those to whom the US owes a much greater debt. How else could his vice-president so glibly forget the blood spilled by America’s allies, including the UK, when he dismissed the offer of “20,000 troops from some random country that has not fought a war in 30 or 40 years”?
These are despicable people, lacking even the morality of the hoodlum – and now they run the country we have regarded as our closest friend since the Edwardian age.
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Click this to read the full essay,
Footnote
I took the photo on 23 September 2023, whilst standing in a dilapidated courtyard (and eating a delicious snack) in Palermo – Sicily’s capital city.
The pointed “message on the wall” is present on more than a few walls in Italy.
Translated into English, it says “neither with the mafia, nor with the state”.
It implies that “the mafia” and “the state” are not entirely separate entities, that they are not 100% “mortal enemies, seeking the other’s annihilation”.
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