We begin today’s roundup with Joan Walsh at The Nation and her take on how Trump runs his business and the White House like a mob boss:
[T]his is the president we’re talking about here. His fluency in Mafia patois ought to rattle us, at least a little.
It doesn’t rattle his base, which shows no signs of abandoning him—yet. And I don’t know at what point they should be expected to. This has become a distracting journalistic exception that pushes us toward nihilism: Nothing Trump does seems to really matter to a segment of influential reporters and pundits, unless it rocks his strongest supporters. [...] Much more worrisome is the indifference of leading Republicans to the president’s mob-boss rantings.
Matthew Walther at The Week makes a similar point:
He is exactly what he has always appeared to be: a televisual parody of a loud-mouthed New York businessman, whose accomplishments in real estate and gambling were the result of marketing savvy more than genuine acumen and who later put these skills to better use as the host of a television program about fake businessmen running fake businesses. His personal obsession with the argot of outer-borough mafiosi circa 1960, filtered through past and present cronies such as Roy Cohn and Roger Stone, is a performance. The president has no interest in loyalty and even calls it is a meaningless principle, but he very much likes to imagine himself as the kind of TV character who might rant about it. "Rats" such as Cohen are necessary to the whole enterprise because without them there would be no occasion for theatrical denunciation of their conduct.