Trump the mob boss wants protection

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-the-mob-boss-wants-protection/2018/08/23/55882f5a-a70c-11e8-8fac-12e98c13528d_story.html

Trump the mob boss wants protection
By Eugene Robinson
August 23 at 6:55 PM

There’s a reason President Trump increasingly sounds like the mob boss in a cliche-ridden gangster film: That’s basically what he is — and he must know how such movies usually end.

Early Wednesday morning — a day after his former campaign chairman was convicted of felonies in one federal courthouse, and his former longtime lawyer pleaded guilty to felonies in another — Trump issued this statement on Twitter:

“I feel very badly for Paul Manafort and his wonderful family. ‘Justice’ took a 12 year old tax case, among other things, applied tremendous pressure on him and, unlike Michael Cohen, he refused to ‘break’ — make up stories in order to get a ‘deal.’ Such respect for a brave man!”

A few days earlier, Trump had referred to John Dean, the White House counsel whose truth-telling was instrumental in President Richard M. Nixon’s downfall, as a “RAT.” And during a Fox News interview broadcast Thursday, he complained at length about defendants who “flip” and inform on higher-ups in exchange for leniency at sentencing: “This whole thing about flipping, they call it, I know all about flipping. For 30, 40 years I have been watching flippers. Everything’s wonderful and then they get 10 years in jail and they flip on whoever the next highest one is, or as high as you can go. It almost ought to be outlawed.”

Those are not the words of some two-bit hoodlum who feels the law closing in. They are the words of the president of the United States — who apparently feels the law closing in.

Trump speaks as though the Trump Organization, the Trump campaign and the Trump administration were one long continuing criminal enterprise. The man charged with faithfully executing the nation’s laws paints his own Justice Department as a villain and celebrates criminals who stoically go to prison rather than inform on higher-ups. Nixon talked that way in private, among friends and co-conspirators; Trump just blurts it out. He makes no bones about valuing loyalty over respect for the law.