Through the last 10 years of President Donald Trump’s dispiriting dominance of public discourse, I have caricatured him as a crazed king, a whining baby, a swamp creature, a cruel dictator and various other rude visual metaphors. But the cartoon image that captures the man most aptly is that of a Mafia don.
Trump’s personal style and methods are really much closer to John Gotti, Lucky Luciano and Al Capone than Benito Mussolini. Unlike Mussolini, Trump’s political goals are borrowed, provisional and ephemeral. He pays endless lip service to transforming the country — making America great again but never actually getting there — but his deepest motivation for holding power is to enrich himself and enhance his own delusions of grandeur.
Like a Mafia boss, he demands loyalty, quickly discards anyone in his service who is no longer useful, circumvents the law to add to his wealth and ruthlessly pursues vendettas against his perceived enemies.
And now, Trump may get his perfect consigliere. His personal lawyer, Todd Blanche, has been okayed by the Senate Judiciary Committee to become Attorney General of the United States.
As acting attorney general since April, Blanche has shown his willingness to run the Justice Department as if it is Trump’s private law firm. Blanche has brought legal actions against several public figures who have angered the president and he does not seem at all embarrassed to have all of those prosecutions thrown out of court by federal judges who have deemed them ridiculous and unworthy.
Blanche is the AG Trump has wished for through two terms in the White House because the man appears to have no ethical or legal code guiding or inhibiting his actions. Blanche’s only guide is the Godfather, the Capo dei Capi, the Don in the Oval Office to whom he will give his perfect fealty.
See more of David Horsey’s cartoons at: st.news/davidhorsey
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