Gangster’s Paradise

Kash Patel’s confirmation as FBI director on Thursday jogged my memory about the great “recess appointments” controversy of November 2024.

Remember that? It was the first sign that a second Donald Trump presidency would be more sinister than even the most neurotic Never Trumpers (cough) expected.

Five days after being reelected, Trump weighed in on the race to replace Mitch McConnell atop the Senate GOP conference. “Any Republican Senator seeking the coveted LEADERSHIP position in the United States Senate must agree to Recess Appointments (in the Senate!), without which we will not be able to get people confirmed in a timely manner,” the president-elect declared.

But Trump wasn’t actually worried that the Senate might drag its feet in confirming his Cabinet nominees. Why would he be? His party controls the chamber, and the filibuster for executive appointments has been dead for years. The Republican majority was free to move his nominations as quickly as it liked.

What Trump feared was that Senate Republicans, or at least enough of them, would reject some of his nominees outright as being unfit for office.

That’s the only way to explain why a new president would be looking for ways to sidestep a friendly Senate’s advice-and-consent power. He was planning to offer them a Cabinet menu so nauseating—Matt Gaetz, Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Patel—that he assumed they’d gag. His recess-appointment scheme was his version of a compromise: By agreeing with the House to adjourn, Senate Republicans would spare themselves from having to approve his nominees while allowing Trump to install them (temporarily) in key positions.

In other words, even Trump thought Republican senators would be braver about resisting him than they’ve proven to be.

Recess appointments weren’t necessary, it turns out. Of the five nominees I mentioned, only Gaetz failed to make it across the finish line. And Republicans’ objections to him obviously had nothing to do in principle with letting a slavish Trump crony turn the Justice Department into a tool of “retribution.” There’s no meaningful political difference between Gaetz and Pam Bondi; what the Senate GOP disliked about the former was his abrasive persona and, well, you know. 

Patel’s confirmation brought all of this home for me because, of the four survivors among the Febrile Five, he’s the truest gangster of the bunch. Hegseth is dissolute; Kennedy is nuts; Gabbard is a Russia simp. But Patel is a capo at heart, caretaker of the family’s enemies list and the sort of enforcer whose loyalty is so absolute that he’s trusted to do the boss’ dirtiest work. Putting him in charge of the FBI is tantamount to greenlighting the bureau’s transformation into a secret-police force for the White House. One person on Patel’s “enemies list” is reportedly so frightened by how he might abuse state power to target them that they’ve already moved their family to a secret location.

Senate Republicans knew all of this or could have easily found out—and chose to confirm him anyway. J.D. Vance wasn’t even needed to break a tie; Patel made it through on a 51-49 vote with Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski the sole dissenters among the GOP.

A Madisonian disaster is now upon us. Functionally, America will have only two branches of government (at most!) until January 2027 and possibly quite a bit longer depending upon how the midterms go. The people’s representatives in Congress have knowingly placed them at the mercy of gangsters.

Those representatives are villains of history. And in a just universe they will be remembered that way.

Threats.

I can count on two hands the number of cases I remember from law school. One is Watts v. United States, which sticks with lots of law students because the facts are so clear and vivid.

In 1966, during a Vietnam War protest, a young demonstrator was overheard saying, “If they ever make me carry a rifle, the first man I want to get in my sights is LBJ.” He was arrested and charged with threatening the president. Three years later, the Supreme Court set him free. True threats can be criminalized, the justices held, but intemperate political rhetoric can’t be. After all, “the language of the political arena … is often vituperative, abusive, and inexact.”

The bottom line is that the First Amendment gives Americans a very wide berth in using political speech, even when that speech flirts with violent incitement. Pretty straightforward.

On Monday, the same day Trump nominated him to be the U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., Ed Martin sent a letter to Robert Garcia. It’s come to my attention, Martin wrote, that in discussing Elon Musk’s work for the government you recently said, “What the American public wants is for us to bring actual weapons to this bar fight. This is an actual fight for democracy.” He gave Garcia one week to explain his “threat” against Mr. Musk.

Robert Garcia isn’t some unhinged rando. He’s a congressman. He made his comment about Musk in an interview with CNN. And it was clear in context that by “weapons” he meant that his party should show more indignation than it has thus far about the Trump-Musk effort to disrupt government. (The specific “weapon” in question in this case was him calling Musk a “dick.”)

On those facts, applying the holding in Watts, there isn’t a court in America that wouldn’t laugh Ed Martin out of the room. What Garcia said is considerably less inflammatory than what the protester in that earlier case said about LBJ, and even if it were a close call, his stature as a member of Congress would doubtless resolve the matter in his favor. The last thing judges want to embroil themselves in is policing how elected officials talk about politics.

And Martin understands that, no doubt. He didn’t send a letter to Garcia because he earnestly believes a crime was committed. He did it, assuredly, to impress the boss (and the underboss) and to show Trump’s political enemies that not even Democratic congressmen are safe from being frivolously harassed by the president’s goons in law enforcement. It’s gangsterism.

Martin, who’s always had a soft spot for political goonery, will soon come before the Senate for a confirmation vote. What do you suppose Republicans will do?

We got a clue a few days ago from Gabriel Sherman’s latest report for Vanity Fair, in which he claimed that gangsterism is influencing the confirmation process itself.

It ain’t just fear of a primary challenge that’s driven jellyfish like Sen. Thom Tillis to rubber-stamp embarrassments like Patel, Sherman alleged. Supposedly the FBI warned the senator of “credible” threats to his life while he vacillated on whether to confirm Pete Hegseth as defense secretary. Eventually, he provided the 50^th vote in favor, allowing Vance to cast the tiebreaker.

An unnamed member of Trump’s first administration explained Tillis’ and other Senate Republicans’ trepidation to Sherman succinctly: “They’re scared sh-tless about death threats and Gestapo-like stuff.” It’s one thing to be sent into retirement for opposing the president, it’s another to be sent to the morgue.

You can dismiss all of that as the mutterings of anonymous sources if it makes you feel better, but it’s entirely plausible that physical intimidation has driven Senate Republicans to capitulate feebly to Trump and Trumpists. It’s happened before: As Sherman notes in his piece, at least four current and former members of Congress have claimed on the record that GOP colleagues told them they were afraid to impeach or convict Trump after January 6 for fear of what might happen to their families.

Sit with that. Voters watched Trump’s gangsterism bear fruit in real time on January 6; they were warned repeatedly by insiders that their representatives were so frightened by it that some abdicated their duty to act in the nation’s best interest as a result; they chose to reelect Trump anyway; and then they watched his gangsterism bear fruit again last month when he jail-broke the same henchmen that had menaced members of Congress on his behalf during the insurrection.

I almost can’t blame Tillis and the rest for being cowards. Almost.

The dignified thing to do if you’re too scared to responsibly perform your duties as an elected official is to resign, call a press conference, and reveal how gangsterism is perverting the legislative branch. Doing so won’t put a stop to fascist intimidation, but it might embarrass anomic Americans into taking it more seriously than they have to date. Instead, Tillis is busily rubber-stamping his way to another six-year term of terror, with bouquets tossed at his feet by some of the worst people in Trump’s orbit for his hard work in placing authoritarian capo Kash Patel in charge of the FBI.

Gangsterism works. The mafia didn’t get rich by accident.

Shakedowns.

Threats are the means by which gangsters conduct business. Profit is the end. Here’s something nice that appeared in Wednesday’s edition of the Wall Street Journal:

A lawyer at advertising conglomerate Interpublic Group fielded a phone call in December from a lawyer at X. The message was clear, according to several people with knowledge of the conversation: Get your clients to spend more on Elon Musk’s social-media platform, or else. 

X CEO Linda Yaccarino has made comments that seemed like similar warnings in conversations with Interpublic executives, according to people with knowledge of those talks.

Interpublic leaders interpreted the communications from X as reminders that the recently announced $13 billion deal to merge Interpublic with rival Omnicom Group could be torpedoed, or at least slowed down, by the Trump administration, given Musk’s powerful role in the federal government, some of the people said.

As others have noted, if that report is true then “conflict of interest” is too quaint a term to describe what’s going on. It’s extortion. It’s the same sort of shakedown at heart that neighborhood toughs running a protection racket might practice on a local business: Pay up or expect to encounter “difficulties.”

The one difference, I suppose, is that in this case the threat isn’t backed by brass knuckles or baseball bats but by the federal government, Elon Musk’s personal muscle.

Frankly, Interpublic might be one of the lucky ones. Companies that made the mistake of cutting in on Elon’s own turf may discover that they can’t buy their way out of “difficulties” with the feds.

Shakedowns have been a hallmark of Trump 2.0 since before the inauguration, when tech gods began paying tribute by kicking in seven-figure donations to his inauguration fund. A truly efficient protection scheme doesn’t require going door to door, roughing people up, to compel them to fork over their cash. It aims to create a culture of fear in which everyone understands what’s expected of them and what the consequences will be if they fail to meet those expectations such that they’re motivated to pay up preemptively without needing to be “asked.”

That was another sign in hindsight that a second Trump presidency would be more malevolent than thought. When figures like Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg began lining up, seemingly unbidden, to hand over fat envelopes like guests greeting the bride and groom at a mafia princess’ wedding reception, it proved that even the most powerful figures in the culture believed that cooperating with gangsterism was the least bad option available to them. They recognized early that resisting Trump and appealing to the public’s civic conscience wouldn’t have worked for them.

How could it have? Americans knew who he was and reelected him anyway. There are no cops to call on the president.

Shakedowns are also the modus operandi of Trump’s foreign policy, although the press often does him the favor of euphemistically describing his approach as “transactional.” Grabbing Denmark by the lapels and demanding that they hand over Greenland isn’t a “transaction.” Pulling a knife on Canada with promises of crushing 25 percent tariffs if they don’t fork over their sovereignty isn’t a “transaction.” Transactions are what willing parties with roughly equivalent bargaining power engage in. When Trump makes draconian demands of weaker powers while going easy on stronger ones, that’s extortion. Gangsterism.

The ugliest shakedown in which the U.S. government is presently engaged is the attempt to squeeze Ukraine for mineral rights in exchange for military support. There’s nothing inherently wrong with asking for repayment for American assistance, of course, but the fine print of the White House’s proposal makes it less a matter of settling a debt than out-and-out loan-sharking. If you believe Volodymyr Zelensky, even the way the deal was offered to the Ukrainians stunk of pressure tactics. Supposedly, during a recent visit with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Bessent pushed a piece of paper toward Zelensky, told him “you really need to sign this” right now, and warned that “people back in Washington” would be upset if he refused.

You don’t want to make the boss mad. And you really don’t want to show disrespect, however richly he deserves it.

Once upon a time, Marco Rubio would have been one of the GOP’s more eloquent voices in arguing that U.S. interests in Ukraine are strategic, not mercenary. A weak Russia and a strong Europe with a robust American presence are good for our national security. But Rubio is a gangster now, so this week he’s taken to whining that Ukraine should sign the mineral deal and give the United States a “vested interest” in its survival—or else. Reducing the future of the liberal international order and the credibility of U.S. commitments overseas to how many bucks we can squeeze from a bleeding ally is gangsterism to the core, vaguely like a pimp warning one of his girls that his cut needs to be larger or else he won’t be motivated to protect his “investment.”

The thing about running the world like a protection racket is that there are other gangs out there. And the locals might end up deciding that they’re better off paying them for protection from you than paying you for protection from them.

Surrender.

If any further proof was needed that Senate Republicans intend to do nothing to resist gangsterism by Trump, Musk, Rubio, and the executive branch writ large, putting Kash Patel in charge of the FBI was it.

Congress has abdicated. The U.S. federal government will be a gangster’s paradise until 2027, possibly longer. The only political restraints on the president and his deputies will be those that Trump chooses to place on himself.

In hindsight, voters’ decision to hand control of the House and Senate to Republicans on November 5 will be seen as a cataclysmic civic disaster on par with their decision to reelect Trump himself. It takes a lot of cowardice across the breadth of government to midwife the authoritarian project to a successful birth. A lot of cowardice is precisely what Americans voted for when they elected Republican congressional majorities.

“History will see those Republicans as villains,” you might say, as I said earlier. Such thoughts are a comfort in moments of despair. The bad guys will get theirs in the end.

But will they? History is written by the winners, you know. Whether Liz Cheney is remembered as a hero and Thom Tillis as a villain depends largely on postliberalism’s staying power.

Case in point: On Thursday, in a speech to CPAC, Steve Bannon claimed that the “J6 Prison Choir” of convicted insurrectionists will soon play the Kennedy Center now that it’s fully under Trump’s control. The Kennedy Center typically hosts cultural luminaries; making it a venue for authoritarian propaganda is a naked attempt to lend further respectability to Trump’s 2020 coup attempt. That effort has been going on for four years and will continue for four more at the very, very least. It will inevitably affect public opinion.

In the fullness of time, as the American experiment is more aggressively defaced, we may find children confused as to why January 6 was considered disgraceful at the time and possibly even impressed by Trump’s resolute refusal to take the results of a questionable election lying down. They’ll admire the moxie he showed in insisting on running for president again despite the best efforts of “the deep state” to handicap him with criminal charges. They’ll sigh with relief that Kash Patel, the man who eventually put so many of America’s “enemies” in prison, survived a tough confirmation fight thanks to the patriotic mettle of Sen. Thom Tillis.

Maybe there’ll even be a statue of Tillis at the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library and Casino.

And so we end where we began, by acknowledging that Senate Republicans would be remembered as villains if we lived in a just universe. Dear reader: Guess what.