The lamest mob boss ever
It’s never not weird that Giuliani started out as a scourge of mobsters and then turned into one. Maureen Dowd writes:
Giuliani went from cleaning up corruption to ginning up corruption, from crimebuster to criminal defendant in Georgia and unindicted “Co-Conspirator 1” in D.C. Rudy, the prosecutor who made his reputation aggressively pursuing RICO cases, is now Rudolph William Louis Giuliani, a defendant in the Georgia RICO case about the deranged plot to steal the election.
We have seen many cases of mobsters turning state’s evidence for prosecutors. But now we have the rare experience of seeing a prosecutor turn into a mobster.
After all those years spent prosecuting the Five Families in New York, Giuliani surrendered himself to the lamest mob boss there ever was: Don Trump.
We saw the coup attempt play out, but it’s startling to see the Georgia indictment refer to “this criminal organization,” “members of the enterprise,” “corruptly solicited” and “acts of racketeering activity.”
Trump, mentored by mob lawyer Roy Cohn, always loved acting like a mobster, playing the faux tough guy, intimidating his foes, swanning around like John Dillinger, Al Capone and John Gotti. He told Timothy O’Brien, the author of “TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald,” that he admired Gotti because the mobster sat through years of trials with a stone face. “In other words, tough,” Trump said.
Which Trump isn’t. He’s many things, but tough isn’t one of them. He’s sadistic, ruthless, self-dealing, callous, all that, but he’s not tough. He’s a big whiny baby.
“Trump both fetishized mobsters and did business with them,” O’Brien told me. “The way he fetishizes mobsters informs this fascination he has about Putin and Kim Jong-un. He loves ‘bad-ass’ guys who roll like they want to roll. He sees himself the same way.”
But he’s not bad-ass, he’s lard-ass.
And there’s Trump’s Mussolini pout. I’m surprised he has yet to affect some kind of military uniform replete with medals. Maybe he’s saving that look for his second term.
If he was tough, he wouldn’t have to work so hard to try to convince us he’s tough. We’d know it. I’ve known quite a few like him, men who are cowards through and through, but play act the Clint Eastwood persona. It’s usually not difficult to tell they’re not tough.
Maybe the thinks being “bad-ass” is simply a matter of being both bad and an ass…