Here’s another excellent insight about Trump’s seemingly inexplicable appeal by Samuel Earle in the NY Times:
In recent months, Donald Trump has been trying out a new routine. At rallies and town halls across the country, he compares himself to Al Capone. “He was seriously tough, right?” Mr. Trump told a rally in Iowa in October, in an early rendition of the act. But “he was only indicted one time; I’ve been indicted four times.” (Capone was, in fact, indicted at least six times.) The implication is not just that Mr. Trump is being unfairly persecuted but also that he is four times as tough as Capone. “If you looked at him in the wrong way,” Mr. Trump explained, “he blew your brains out.”
Mr. Trump’s eagerness to invoke Capone reflects an important shift in the image he wants to project to the world. In 2016, Mr. Trump played the reality TV star and businessman who would shake up politics, shock and entertain. In 2020, Mr. Trump was the strongman, desperately trying to hold on to power by whatever means possible. In 2024, Mr. Trump is in his third act: the American gangster, heir to Al Capone — besieged by the authorities, charged with countless egregious felonies but surviving and thriving nonetheless, with an air of macho invincibility.
The evidence of Mr. Trump’s mobster pivot is everywhere. He rants endlessly about his legal cases in his stump speeches. On Truth Social, he boasts about having a bigger 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 mug shot — taken after he was indicted on a charge of racketeering in August — on T-shirts, mugs, Christmas wrapping, bumper stickers, beer coolers and even NFTs. They’ve sold off parts of the blue suit he was wearing in that now-infamous photo for more than $4,000 a piece (it came with a dinner with Mr. Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort).
He does seem to be fully embracing his mob boss image, doesn’t he? Why would he do that?
It’s a canny piece of marketing. A violent mobster and a self-mythologizing millionaire, Capone sanitized his crimes by cultivating an aura of celebrity and bravery, grounded in distrust of the state and a narrative of unfair persecution. The public lapped it up. “Everybody sympathizes with him,” Vanity Fair noted of Capone in 1931, as the authorities closed in on him. “Al has made murder a popular amusement.” In similar fashion, Mr. Trump tries to turn his indictments into amusement, inviting his supporters to play along. “They’re not after me, they’re after you — I’m just standing in the way!” he says, a line that greets visitors to his website, as well.
Mr. Trump clearly hopes that his Al Capone act will offer at least some cover from the four indictments he faces. And there is a twisted logic to what he is doing: By adopting the guise of the gangster, he is able to recast his lawbreaking as vigilante justice — a subversive attempt to preserve order and peace — and transform himself into a folk hero.
Criminal as folk hero? Why not?
In an essay from 1948, “The Gangster as Tragic Hero,” the critic Robert Warshow sought to explain the unique appeal of gangster fables in American life. He saw the gangster as a quintessentially American figure, the dark shadow of the country’s sunnier self-conception. “The gangster speaks for us,” Warshow wrote, “expressing that part of the American psyche which rejects the qualities and the demands of modern life.”
It is easy to see why gangster fables appeal to so many Republican voters today. They are stories of immigrant assimilation and success, laced with anti-immigrant sentiment and rivalry. Their heroes are creatures of the big city — those nests of Republican neuroses — who tame its excesses through force but never forget God or their family along the way. In many ways, minus the murder, they are ideal conservative citizens: enterprising, loyal, distrustful of government; prone to occasional ethical lapses, but who’s perfect?
Mr. Trump knows that in America, crooks can be the good guys. When the state is seen as corrupt, the crook becomes a kind of Everyman, bravely beating the system at its own game. This is the cynical logic that the gangster and the right-wing populist share: Everyone’s as bad as anyone else, so anything goes. “A crook is a crook,” Capone once said. “But a guy who pretends he is enforcing the law and steals on his authority is a swell snake. The worst type of these punks is the big politician, who gives about half his time to covering up so that no one will know he’s a thief.”
It’s a worldview powerful enough to convince voters that even the prized institutions of liberal democracy — a free press, open elections, the rule of law — are fronts in the biggest racket of them all. This conceit has a rich pedigree in reactionary politics. “Would-be totalitarian rulers usually start their careers by boasting of their past crimes and carefully outlining their future ones,” Hannah Arendt warned.
The gangster’s brutality also taps into what Warshow and others of his generation saw as the sadism in the American mind: the pleasure the public takes in seeing the gangster’s “unlimited possibility of aggression” inflicted upon others. The gangster is nothing without this license for violence, without the simple fact that, as Warshow put it, “he hurts people.” He intimidates his rivals and crushes his enemies. His cruelty is the point. The public can then enjoy “the double satisfaction of participating vicariously in the gangster’s sadism and then seeing it turned against the gangster himself.” “He is what we want to be and what we are afraid we may become,” Warshow wrote. Reverence and repulsion are all wrapped up.
[…]
“I often say Al Capone, he was one of the greatest of all time, if you like criminals,” Mr. Trump said in December. It was an interesting framing: “if you like criminals”? Mr. Trump has a hunch, and it’s more than just projection, that many Americans do.
This is so Trump. He’s been exposed as a criminal and instead of protesting it he says the system is rigged or the law doesn’t apply to him: “Yeah, I did it. Waddyagonnadoaboudit?
There are plenty of Americans who love sadism and see mobsters as folk heroes, especially since they’re cultural icons in the movies and TV. But Trump is something else as well — he’s a richie-rich, con-man liar which people don’t love nearly as much when they realize they’ve been had so it may end up working against him in the long run. Right now it’s working like a charm.
I will personally never understand how anyone can be taken in by that obvious imbecile. But there are reasons and I’m always interested to hear what they might be because I just can’t see it myself. I do know that many people revere criminals as folk heroes and he’s embraced the image, so that piece of it does make sense. Whatever it takes…