The Would-be Don

What if I were to say that we could figure out the President’s thinking, predict his next moves in this ongoing drama, even predict how his tenure of office will conclude? You might conclude that I am shoveling the same rose fertilizer as those other nabobs of negativism (Spiro!).
I have considered Trump’s use of “tough guy” language along with his demand for loyalty and his apparent paranoia. A close parallel can be found in the film saga of the Corleone family. Yes, The Godfather, The Godfather II, and III provide a template for Donald Trump’s view of life in general, the world around him. I just think that he’s absorbed the wrong lessons and inadvertently adopted the less appealing of the personas contained in the Corleones.
Donald Trump’s behavior comes closest to modeling a combination of the two brothers, Fredo and Sonny, instead of the more effective Don and Michael. Impetuous, temperamental, quick to anger, he flies off the handle and hits back harder than the initial perceived slight against him. Like Sonny. He comes across as craven, needy, unable to maintain a position, prey to expediency, like Fredo. At no time has he displayed the strategic and tactical mastery of the Don or Michael. I can imagine a 26-year-old seeing the original Godfather, blown away by the story and characterizations. Here was the world that surrounded him, the world that he wished to dominate.
Sonny aptly demonstrated his contempt for the law – “fuckin’ FBI don’t respect nothing” at the wedding – and his eagerness to get out from under the Don’s authority in questioning the decision to not get into drug selling. Our President has questioned, loudly, the loyalty of anyone not willing to flout the law, especially the ethical stance of the Attorney General when he recused himself from the Russia investigation.
Donald Trump’s inability to refrain from vulgarity, in any situation it seems, is also a clue to his character. He’s behaving like that “tough kid” from the other side of the tracks; the one who’s secretly fearful of getting a beat down, so he curses and blusters and bows out his chest in what to him is a display of power. When his father is nearly killed, Sonny rejects any advice for reasonable action, instead moving into tit-for-tat petty warfare that is most likely to lose the overall struggle. It will lose because he has no instinct for strategy.
Fredo presents the son who feels as if he’s not respected in any real way and that leaves him open to misunderstanding what the real motives are when he’s approached to help set up his father’s murder. President Trump knows that he is not respected in D.C., that the political elite see him as little more than a bad joke. This leads him to respect and desire to mingle with the strongmen of the world, guys who can control their image at home as tightly as they wish and who no one back talks.
The anti-American aspects of this just seem to plumb escape him. We have come to expect his small-hours Tweeting to be the only window into the man that we are likely to get. The faithful are beginning to dwindle as they can only stomach so much, leaving the blinded zealots of crassness, the single-issue voters that prize the elimination of abortion at the expense of common values of decency and respect.
Trump is attracted to the methods of these two brothers because those of the Don and Michael seem completely alien to him. Stepping back and taking stock of the situation, thinking ahead of his opponents does not mesh with the Art of the Deal as he understands it. There is no strategic or tactical plan, preferring to play everything off the cuff because that is the limit of his deal-making abilities. He thinks that if he breaks something, he can charge the other side what he demands to repair his own damage. This might work in the fifth grade provided the other guy doesn’t just beat the snot of him and go about his day.
Michael realized that while revenge was entirely necessary, the direct attack would only prolong the war. Donald Trump, in the wall scenario, engages in name-calling and attempting to revise the narrative as if no one will remember his declaration of ownership. In fact, much of his communication retains the form of the insult and the threat. If he could lean on the teaching of a wiser, more experienced mentor, if he could simply admit when he is wrong and move in a direction towards real negotiation, this administration would be seen in a much better light.
In the film, the story is told by Michael to his fiancée Kay of the legendary contract signing. In sum, the Don made sure that the bandleader who owned Johnny Fontane’s contract would sign the release because either his signature or his brains would be on the contract. With Luca Brasi, who could instigate nightmares on appearance alone, holding the gun to his head, the bandleader wisely signed the release of services.
Donald Trump created the shutdown. He said on television prior to the shutdown that he would be proud to own it. Until he actually set it in motion. Then, it morphed into the fault of others and DT held the gun of furloughed Federal workers and disrupted government services to our collective head and demanded the money for The Wall as the price of ending his mess. What he did not seem to understand was that the gun was pointing back at him. Until he did and ungraciously put down his weapon.
So much of that gangster, or Big Operator, persona Trump has misunderstood and misplayed. Not making the transition from realtor to politician, not bothering to learn the rules of his new playground is what has stymied Trump. Washington D.C. is well known as a world unto its own; if you go there, the learning curve can be steeper than you first realize. Playing in that league requires a mentor, a godfather or godmother, to advise the player’s actions and decisions. Declaring oneself “a stable genius” without guidance virtually assures failure. Donald Trump does not appear to have learned this as yet.
Having sat through the grisly end of the Nixon administration and the comedy of errors that was Clinton’s impeachment, let’s hope that The Donald will see his way to resign from office rather than drag all of us through the stinking mud of a protracted trial in the Senate, watching the Republican Party, the Grand Old Party, gin up the nerve to claw this cancer from their collective body. Even if the excision is successful, the GOP will experience a long, painful recovery.