In recent months, Donald Trump has been trying out a new routine. At rallies across the United States, he compares himself to Al Capone, an infamous American mobster of the 1920s and 1930s. “He was very tough, right?” Trump said at a rally in Iowa in October. But he “was only legally charged once; “They have accused me four times.” (Capone was indicted at least six times.)
The implication is not only that Trump is being unfairly persecuted, but that he is four times as badass as Capone. “If you looked at him the wrong way, he would blow your brains out,” Trump said.
In 2016, Trump played the reality show star and businessman who would rock politics, shock and entertain. In 2020, Trump was the strongman, desperately trying to hold on to power. In 2024, Trump is in his third act: American gangster, Capone heir—besieged by authorities, accused of countless crimes, but thriving nonetheless with an air of macho invincibility.
The evidence of Trump's mafia turn is everywhere. In his speeches he rants endlessly about his legal cases. In Truth Social, he boasts of having a larger team of lawyers “than any human being in the history of our country, including even the late, great gangster Alphonse Capone.”
His team has used his mugshot — taken after he was charged with organized criminal activity in August — on T-shirts, mugs, bumper stickers and even NFTs. They have sold portions of the now infamous blue suit he wore in that photo for more than $4,000 each.
Commentators have long noted that Trump behaves like a mafia boss: the way he demands loyalty from his followers, intimidates authorities and flaunts his impunity, is reminiscent of the thugs so well known from film and television. . As a real estate magnate in New York, he appears to have enjoyed working with mobsters and learned his vocabulary before taking his methods to the White House: telling James Comey, director of the FBI, “I expect loyalty”; imploring President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, “Do us a favor”; and pressure the Georgia Secretary of State: “Hey, I need 11 thousand votes.”
Trump's embrace of a criminal personality goes against conventional thinking. When President Richard Nixon told Americans, “I'm not a thief,” it was assumed that voters would not want a criminal in the White House.
Trump is testing this assumption. Capone, a violent mobster, laundered his crimes by cultivating an aura of celebrity and bravery, with a narrative of unjust persecution. The audience applauded him. “Everyone sympathizes with him,” Vanity Fair noted of Capone in 1931. Trump tries to turn his accusations into fun, inviting his followers to play along. “They're not after me, they're after you. “I'm just getting in the way!” he says.
Trump clearly hopes his Capone act will offer at least some cover for the four indictments he faces. By adopting the guise of a gangster, he is able to reframe his lawbreaking as the acts of a vigilante—a subversive attempt to preserve peace and order—and transform himself into a folk hero. A criminal conviction seems unlikely to derail his candidacy: not only because Trump has already shaken off so many other scandals, but also because, as Capone demonstrates, the convicted criminal can be as much an American icon as the cowboy. In this campaign, Trump's mug shot is his message — and the Capone references are there for anyone to see.
In a 1948 essay, “The gangster as tragic hero,” critic Robert Warshow saw the mobster as an essentially American figure, the dark shadow of the country's cheerful self-conception. “The gangster speaks for us,” Warshow wrote, “expressing that part of the American psyche that rejects the qualities and demands of modern life.”
Trump knows that in the United States criminals can be the good guys. When the State is seen as corrupt, the criminal becomes a kind of everyman who bravely beats the system at his own game. This is the cynical logic shared by the gangster and the right-wing populist: everyone is as bad as everyone else, so anything goes. “A thief is a thief,” Capone once said. “But a guy who pretends he's enforcing the law and steals with his authority is a full-fledged snake. The worst type of these is the big politician, who spends about half his time covering up so that no one knows that he is a thief.”
It is a worldview powerful enough to convince voters that even the cherished institutions of liberal democracy—the free press, open elections, the rule of law—are fronts for the greatest criminal activity of all. This presumption has a rich pedigree in reactionary politics. “Would-be totalitarian rulers often begin their careers by boasting about their past crimes and carefully outlining future ones,” philosopher Hannah Arendt once warned.
The gangster's brutality also taps into what Warshow and others saw as sadism in the American mind: the pleasure the public takes in seeing the gangster's “unlimited possibility of aggression” inflicted on others.
The gangster is nothing without this license for violence, without the simple fact that, as Warshow said, “he hurts people.” He intimidates his rivals and crushes his enemies. The cruelty of him is the point. The audience can then enjoy “the double satisfaction of indirectly participating in the gangster's sadism and then seeing that turned against him.”
“He is what we want to be and what we fear becoming,” Warshow wrote. Reverence and repulsion are intertwined.
Capone's story offers no happy leads for Trump's opponents. Dethroning a mafia boss is never easy. “He was the 1920s version of the Teflon man; no accusation stuck to him,” wrote Deirdre Bair in a biography of Capone. After his arrest in 1931 for tax fraud, his mafia continued to prosper for another half century, and Capone himself, who was released after six and a half years in prison for health reasons and died of a stroke and pneumonia in 1947, At the age of 48, he achieved a kind of immortality.
Trump will see many reasons to be happy in his history. “I often say that Al Capone was one of the greatest of all time, if you like criminals,” Trump said in December. It was an interesting way of saying it: “if you like criminals.” Trump has a hunch, and it's more than just a projection, that many Americans like them.
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