Trump’s goodfellas
by digby
I wrote a little piece about Trump’s “special counsel’s” tirade the other day for Salon this morning:
[N]one of Cohen’s comments are likely to hurt the Donald with his fans. Even if they think Ivana Trump was telling the truth in her original deposition, they would tend to think she had no right to deny him his marital prerogatives. This is why they like Trump — he takes what he wants.
As McKay Poppins wrote in this Buzzfeed article about Trump’s coterie of advisors, headline “Meet Donald Trump’s Proud Bullies, Goons, And Thugs“:
Trump’s key lieutenants tend to fit the same consumer profile as his discount luxury-brand targets: They are men with middle- and working-class roots; lacking in elite credentials; mesmerized by made-for-TV displays of lavish wealth. They are impressed with brashness and bored by subtlety. They are amused by dirty jokes and averse to irony. They are likely to buy a Trump-branded necktie sometime this year, and if they feel like splurging they’ll get the matching cufflinks, too.This isn’t a caricature I came up with; it is central to the ethos of Trump’s political operation. On the day after the 2012 election, one of Trump’s advisers described for me the billionaire’s appeal to blue-collar voters: “If you have no education, and you work with your hands, you like him. It’s like, ‘Wow, if I was rich, that’s how I would live!’ The girls, the cars, the fancy suits. His ostentatiousness is appealing to them.” That may be crass, but it didn’t strike me as elitist: Trump’s political advisers see themselves as descendants of this same tribe.
That description is very reminiscent of another tribe with which one might be familiar if you watched “The Sopranos.” The swagger, the ostentatious show of wealth — and the threats.
But if you recall Henry Hill’s narration in “Goodfellas,” you might also see the rather ugly subtext to that up-from-the-working class identification:
“To us, those goody-good people who worked shitty jobs for bum paychecks and took the subway to work every day, and worried about their bills, were dead. I mean they were suckers. They had no balls. If we wanted something we just took it. If anyone complained twice they got hit so bad, believe me, they never complained again…”
That’s what Donald Trump’s candidacy really promises. Goodfellas only look out for themselves.