The president is treating Venezuela like a truckload of Italian designer suits his gang can hijack from a rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike.
What is happening now in Latin America is not foreign policy. It is not military strategy. It is not statecraft of any sort. And it is certainly not a law enforcement operation. On the contrary, it is a mob heist. Nothing more. Nothing less. It is an effort by a bunch of lawless thugs to use muscle to take what isn’t theirs.
The only way it differs from the day-to-day behavior of the mafia itself is that the soldiers carrying out the boss’s orders are not high school dropouts from Brooklyn or Newark; they’re members of the U.S. military’s elite Delta Force doing so under the cover of the stars and stripes.
Every aspect of the operation is reminiscent of scenes from The Godfather, The Sopranos or perhaps your favorite Scorsese movie.
To start with, Trump looks and acts like a mob boss. In fact, it has often been noted that this president—who used to work in casinos and the building trades—has long emulated the style and affect of now-deceased Gambino family boss John Gotti. (More recently, he has started to resemble Genovese crime boss, Vincent “the Chin” Gigante, who was famous for wandering the streets of Greenwich Village in his pajamas mumbling incoherently to himself. Gigante’s mental decline was a ploy to avoid prosecution, of course, whereas Trump’s appears real—and he has avoided prosecution a different way, with the help of the U.S. Supreme Court, by becoming president.)
Trump’s mentor, Roy Cohn, often represented mobsters; Trump has reportedly employed mob-run construction companies in his businesses and had myriad other ties to the U.S. and Russian mob.
His approach to international relations is clearly inspired by the same wise guys. He sees the world divided into territories that, in his mind, should be under the control of various crime families (or administrations).
The capo di tutti capi to whom Trump regularly pays deference and who is himself well-known for his gangland ties is, of course, Vladimir Putin. It has even been reported that, in a deal pretty much like the one struck at the sit-down hosted by Don Barzini in The Godfather, Russia had informally agreed to give up protection of Venezuela in exchange for the U.S. letting it have its way with Ukraine.
While the U.S. tried to make the kidnapping of Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro seem legitimate by suggesting that he was himself the head of an alleged drug gang, Trump’s assertion that he and his captains—“Petey Walnuts” Hegseth, Marco “Little P---y” Rubio and Stephen “Bugsy” Miller—would be running the country from now on made it clear that was just a ruse covering up a play to control an even bigger chunk of the sale of the past century’s drug of choice, oil.
Rubio, seemingly made kingpin of the new operation, has subsequently downplayed the degree of active American control over Caracas, suggesting instead that the U.S. would use the threat of force to keep Venezuelans in line. His point: They’ll do what the Don wants if they know what’s good for them. After all, as Petey Walnuts made clear on the night the Maduro raid was announced, the Venezuelan leader had gotten crosswise with Trump—he “f---ed around” and “found out.”
Spoken just like a true thug.
Other threats have made it clear that the Trump Doctrine asserts that, mob-style, the territory on this side of the Atlantic was ours. Trump will take what he wants, when he wants, how he wants, because he has the might to impose his will.
Rubio has called out the leaders of Cuba. The Don suggested he wanted his gang to go after cartels in Mexico. (Who’s the criminal here? It’s getting so hard to tell.) He’s otherwise threatened that his next hit might be against the president of Colombia, who, Trump hissed, has “got to watch his ass.” And he’s said, again, that the U.S. “needed” Greenland —to traffic in its rare earth minerals and other valuable resources that aren’t ours to sell but could be if we knocked a few heads together.
Meanwhile, the Don’s kids are out running protection rackets all over the world, shaking down foreign leaders in exchange for their Dad’s favor, spinning up scams that pump money and crypto into far-flung Trump family bank accounts and generally behaving like… well, like just who they really are.
Am I saying that Trump and his administration are mobsters? Of course not. That would be reckless and irresponsible without the hard evidence of criminal wrongdoing that some future U.S. administration might compile. If we ever have one. However, I am saying that they sure are behaving like it—and worse, that the entire world is coming to see America’s actions to be those not of “the land of the free and the home of the brave” but instead, sadly, frighteningly, like those of a mafia state.
