Trump and the Republicans: Part Mafia, Part Eastern Bloc Politburo, All Disaster

Everything is distrust, paranoia, and setting this one against that one.

Michael Tomasky

Published 10.04.19 5:15AM ET

Of course Donald Trump roped Mike Pence into the Ukraine plot! It’s one of the oldest Mafia tricks in the book, featured in a hundred movies starting in the 1930s right up through today. You’re a mob boss, you’re about to do something big—move on another family’s turf, order a hit. What do you as you prepare for it, within your own circle?

You get everyone dirty. You make them complicit—part of the plot. That way, they can’t sing on you. If they’re part of plot, they’re guilty, too, and they have to clam up and take part in the cover-up. It’s Corleone 101.

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No, Trump and his GOP sycophants are more like the Comrade Chairman and the Politburo of some pathetic, second-rate Eastern bloc country. Enver Hoxha comes to mind. Hoxha was the leader of the Albanian Communist Party for umpty-seven years, til it all collapsed. Once, on a whim in a used bookstore, with a friend and probably after one too many, I bought a small book of his speeches.

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America’s Republicans are applauding like Albania’s Communists. They marinate in much the same curdled, inebriated fear that Eastern bloc Communist Party apparatchiks once did, fear so consuming that they actually convince themselves that the things the Dear Leader says, whether it’s about crop yields or Adam Schiff’s alleged treachery, are true.

No, Trump can’t send them off to labor camps, but evidently, the possibility that he can call them losers or endorse a potential primary opponent is threat enough to get them to keep saying up is down and black is white. Did you see Kevin McCarthy on 60 Minutes? It was so bad I was almost embarrassed for him for about one-one thousandth of a second. Scott Pelley read him the famous Trump line from the call readout— “I would like you to do me a favor, though”—and McCarthy responded by saying: “You just added another word” (referring, of course, to the “though,” which is the word that gives the game away).

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https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-and-the-republicans-part-mafia-part-eastern-bloc-politburo-all-disaster