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Yes, and it's about the Mob

Before there were the Russians and the fundamentalists, there was the Mob, the connections that enabled Trump to achieve what he did as a businessman, the basis for the assessment by his supporters that he's a success, that he knows how to do deals.  Undoubtedly some talent for deal-making there must be to work with organized crime while keeping up appearances; that's not a deal-making talent I'm interested in seeing in leadership, but it is a talent, and I can sort of understand why the people who like and support Trump see it as such.

Trump's deep Mob ties have been documented in many places, notably for my own reading pleasure in The Making of Donald Trump by David Cay Johnston and Mafia Don: Donald Trump's 40 years of Mob ties by H.S. Glushakow.  On the one hand, his facility in dealing with the Mafia in the course of doing his business (big buildings, casinos, wrestling and reality television) acts for his supporters as the symbolic shadow of his repeated statements that as a businessman he has always taken advantage of any subsidies or loopholes offered by the government, so that as it were he knows where the bodies are buried and can act to get rid of them.

But that of course is the thinking that excuses any malfeasance by Trump or the like while screaming "lock her up" in conditioned response to the word "Hillary".  It's moral exceptionalism of the worst order, not unrelated to the salvation-grabbing of the fundamentalist Christians.  For the rest of us, the salient analogies between Trump's existence as a Mob wheeler-dealer and his existence as political leader are the absolute need for loyalty, and the punishing of "betrayal," interpreted however the Don chooses to do so.

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