The Don and his Badfellas create alternative universe
Maureen Dowd
I saw Robert De Niro at a party in New York recently and approached him gingerly. I wanted some insight into gangsters.
What did an actor who has brilliantly portrayed mobsters make of a president who was doing a twobit imitation of a mobster?
De Niro, leaning against a wall and looking cool, took the question under advisement. I got my answer three days later when he took the stage at the Tony Awards and offered a succinct obscenity aimed at the president.
The Trumps have often been compared to a mob family. Certainly, in the White House, they have created a dark alternative universe with an inverted ethical code, where the main value is loyalty to the godfather.
Now our classy president is tweeting about Michael Cohen’s taxi medallion tomfoolery. After months of Trump distancing himself from Cohen, his ex-lawyer resorted to playing the role of Sammy the Bull. Cohen secretly taped an incriminating call with the Don featuring a staccato exchange about paying off a Playboy playmate — and an aside by Trump to someone to “Get me a Coke, please!”
As Michael Daly noted in The Daily Beast, “Traditionally, rats begin wearing a wire after they get jammed up.”
And as in “The Untouchables,” a bespectacled accountant is now at the center of the action. In the taped call, Cohen tells Trump that he has talked to the mogul’s trusted money manager and “Apprentice” guest star, Allen Weisselberg, about how to set up a company to reimburse David Pecker, the National Enquirer owner, for buying off Trump goomah Karen McDougal. Federal investigators in Manhattan now want to interview Weisselberg.
“Long term, this could be the most damaging,” Trump biographer Tim O’Brien told me, “because it gets into Trump’s wallet.”
CNN reported that Cohen the Fixer claims Trump knew about the Russian meeting during the campaign with his son and Paul Manafort. The president hit the mattresses on Twitter, denying it all.
This could be the ballgame, says David Corn of Mother Jones, who wrote: “This ex-consigliere poses a triple threat to the godfather he once ruthlessly served.”
If the White House seems more and more like “Goodfellas,” it is not an accident.
“Trump has a very cinematic sense of himself,” O’Brien said. He is driven to be the star of his own movie. He even considered going to film school in L.A. before he settled into his father’s business.
As a young real estate developer, he would hang out at Yankee Stadium and study the largerthan-life figures in the VIP box: George Steinbrenner, Lee Iacocca, Frank Sinatra, Roy Cohn, Rupert Murdoch. He was intent on learning how they grabbed the limelight.
“In his first big apartment project, Trump’s father had a partner connected to the Genovese and Gambino crime families,” said Michael D’Antonio, another Trump biographer. “He dealt with mobbed-up suppliers and union guys for decades.”
Trump’s like a mobster, D’Antonio said, in the sense that he “does not believe anyone is honest. He doesn’t believe that your motivations have anything to do with right and wrong and public service. It’s all about self-interest and a war of all against all.”