The Mafia Presidency

By Adam Serwer

Saturday, November 08, 2025

 

The Sunday before the New York City mayoral race, President Donald Trump told New Yorkers he might withhold federal funding if Zohran Mamdani won.

 

“It’s gonna be hard for me as the president to give a lot of money to New York, because if you have a Communist running New York, all you’re doing is wasting the money you’re sending there,” Trump told CBS’s 60 Minutes. Mamdani responded to Trump’s threat of extortion—vote for my preferred candidate or else—by pointing out that said federal funding was not Trump’s to give. “This funding is not something that Donald Trump is giving us here in New York City,” Mamdani said. “This is something that we are, in fact, owed in New York.”

 

It was not the first time Trump treated federal funds as his personal property that he could use to extort political opponents or reward political allies. Trump has approved disaster aid for red states and denied it to blue states. In the midst of the government-shutdown fight with Democrats, he is refusing to disburse rainy-day funds for food stamps, saying (falsely) that the lapse will hurt “largely Democrats.” The Trump administration has cut funding for projects in states with Democratic majorities. It is withholding federal funding from colleges and universities that do not submit to ideological control by the federal government over whom they hire, what they teach, and what sort of students they admit, and rewarding those that comply.

 

Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, in an attempt to overturn the election on Trump’s behalf have received pardons, as have Republican officeholders convicted on corruption charges. Wealthy donors who funneled money to Trump’s family businesses have also been pardoned, such as Changpeng Zhao, the former CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange Binance, who pleaded guilty to fraud charges in 2023. Trump’s selective pardons are balanced out by his selective persecutions. His political opponents, such as New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey, have been slapped with flimsy indictments. Cities and states that Trump sees as bastions of his political opposition are subject to occupation by masked federal agents. As soon as Mamdani won, many New Yorkers began bracing for Trump’s retaliation.

 

Incidentally, Trump’s “border czar,” Tom Homan, was caught accepting $50,000 from federal agents in a bribery sting—and was not prosecuted. (The FBI and Justice Department “found no credible evidence of any wrongdoing, said Attorney General Pam Bondi.) Although Trump frequently accuses others of corruption, he seems to define the term not as profiting from one’s office—something he apparently has zero objection to—but as defying his will.

 

Elections in democracies determine who administers the government; they do not alter whom the government is for. Under any administration, Republican or Democratic, the United States government exists to serve the people of the United States, regardless of their partisan affiliation. Besides, Americans are not as easily divided as Trump might think. Millions of Republican voters live in New York, just as millions of Democrats live in Texas. He cannot tell whom he is punishing by glancing at an electoral map. But even if he could, Trump’s acts of extortion have no place in a democracy. They belong in a protection racket: If you support Trump, you are protected; if you do not, you are vulnerable. If you donate enough cash to Trump, you may receive favorable treatment, including immunity from the law. If you oppose Trump, you may be prosecuted.

 

This is not how a representative government works. It is how the Mafia works.

 

As the Italian historian Salvatore Lupo writes in his History of the Mafia, the core of the Mafia business is protection, which is to say, extortion. Emerging out of the chaos of post-feudal, post-unification Italy, the Sicilian Mafia began as a number of small organizations that could retrieve stolen property or prevent it from being stolen in the first place. Eventually, with the fledgling Italian state unable to impose order, these organizations began to compel legitimate businesses to use their services, and then demanded a greater and greater share of those businesses.

 

Want your citrus groves to turn a profit? You’re going to have to hire my guys and also let me skim off the top. You want your cattle back? I’ll get them for you, but if you don’t want them stolen again, you should probably cut me in. Mafia organizations turned out to be stubbornly adaptable: When a right-wing government cracked down, they exploited the strong hand of the law to take out rivals; when a left-wing government tried to build infrastructure, they made sure they got their cut.

 

Their entrepreneurial use of violence boiled down to: If you don’t want to get hurt, you’ll do what I say. The businesses they attached themselves to, and by extension, the larger economy, ultimately suffered as a result of the parasitic drain on efficiency, innovation, and profit caused by having to cater to these masters in the shadows.

 

I doubt that anyone would look at that system and think: Now, there’s a great model for the U.S. government. And yet here we are. If you are aligned with Trump, you can expect public services to function normally (although they often don’t), and you may be entitled to exemption from laws and regulations. If you are opposed to Trump, you have to worry about being crushed by the fist of the state.

 

Trump likes to argue that his intercession in the rule of the law is necessary because Democratic cities are war zones, and because “good” Americans are being persecuted. This, too, is a common ploy; Mafia organizations present themselves as “an expression of traditional society,” as Lupo puts it. “Every eminent mafioso makes a point of presenting himself in the guise of a mediator and resolver of disagreements, as a protector of the virtue of young women. At least once in his career, the mafioso boasts of the rapid and exemplary execution of ‘justice’ against violent muggers, rapists, and kidnappers.”

 

Such rhetoric is a way of presenting an avaricious and exploitative organization, in populist terms, as a protector of the people. But it’s a fraud. “Greed and ferocity,” Lupo writes, “are intrinsic characteristics of the Mafia,” and its leaders are plenty capable of ignoring “their codes of honor” whenever they become an obstacle.

 

One could similarly observe that the suffering the Trump administration has chosen to inflict on the American people in an attempt to extort its opposition is a more frank expression of Trump’s beliefs and ideology than his constant bleating about law and order.

 

The longevity of the Mafia in Italy also serves as a warning that, once these practices embed themselves in the state, they are very difficult to extract; the Italian government’s battle against the Mafia continues to this day. After Trump is gone, restoring integrity to the U.S. government, and curbing the sort of flagrant corruption that has suddenly become commonplace here, will be a monumental task. But for now, Trump’s extortion attempts are offers he has no authority to make, and the American people have every right to refuse them.