John Gotti would have OK’d the Trump-Vance mob hit on Zelensky

The late American architect Philip Johnson is famous for his iconic 20th-century skyscrapers, and also less well-known — while fascinating his biographers — for a 1930s flirtation with rising global fascism during which he also expressed his admiration for that era’s antiestablishment bank robbers like John Dillinger.

That’s some remarkable context for a 1992 encounter in which Johnson rode to Atlantic City with then-underwater developer Donald Trump, who thought some world-class architectural pizzazz could help rescue his struggling casinos. It probably won’t surprise you that, according to a New York magazine profile, The Donald launched into a monologue about how to mistreat women.

“You’d make a good mafioso,” Johnson blurted out.

“One of the greatest!” a beaming Trump is said to have replied.

That prescient quote is the last-page kicker to author John Ganz’s super-relevant, newish When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s. I heard it on Audible, fittingly, on Friday while in the Bronx, in the permanent traffic jam of the Major Deegan Expressway. I was blocks from the Fordham campus where the Jesuit teachings of Trump’s freshman professors went in one ear and out the other, my tires stalled on concrete that probably came from one of the Mafia families the developer made peace with.

Little could I have guessed that in a couple of hours, Trump would finally fulfill his 1992 ambition to act as a made man, but from the Oval Office. With underboss JD Vance and his foreign policy consiglieres, he pulled off a public shakedown, offering protection to recalcitrant citizen Volodymyr Zelensky and exploding with volatile rage when the Ukrainian president turned down Trump’s offer he wasn’t supposed to refuse.

The notion the Trump regime would pull a speedy U-turn after three years of solid and often substantial support from Joe Biden’s U.S. administration for Ukrainian troops fighting off the unprovoked invasion by Russian strongman Vladimir Putin wasn’t surprising. Nor was the blatantly transactional, protection-racket nature of this turnaround: vague security guarantees if Zelensky signed over valuable (perhaps) rare-earth mineral rights to the United States.

But most of the world and at least half of the American people (hopefully more) were shocked to watch this truly momentous event in U.S. history — the betrayal of a democratic friend, the realpolitik embrace of strongman doctrine, and a rejection of our global alliances — play out on 10 stark minutes of live TV. (Minus journalists from the Associated Press and Reuters, banned by a hostile-to-the-First Amendment Trump regime, yet witnessed by a reporter for the Russian news agency TASS who was mysteriously allowed into the Oval Office.)

» READ MORE: In attack against Zelensky, Trump and Vance shame America | Trudy Rubin

“You don’t have the cards‚” the 47th president exploded at one point in the lengthy argument that felt like the transcript of a 1980s FBI wiretap of a Brooklyn crime family being acted out on The Jerry Springer Show. The no-longer leader of the free world sure sounded more like Sammy “The Bull” Gravano when he rhetorically asked a journalist, ”What if a bomb drops on your head right now?” Vance’s incessant demand that Zelensky thank America for presumably saving him from getting whacked by Putin was only lacking a baseball bat.

These were 10 minutes that shook the world. Some 48 hours later, the WWE-flavored smackdown is still all anyone wants to talk about — from my new posse at the dog park, or on the phone with my 88-year-old dad in his hospital bed while I field holy-bleep texts from my offspring, and, of course, in the Saturday Night Live “cold open.” And yet, on a certain level, it’s hard to know what to say about what just happened that is new or insightful. We told you so? What were you expecting differently after living through four years of Trump 45?

Yet this was, to be sure, a moment of clarity for what America has become and how the rest of the world now perceives us. We’ve already watched our government reject the notions embedded in our boomer textbooks of the 1960s and ‘70s: that the United States is a welcoming place for refugees while slowly winning the tug-of-war between the morality of civil rights and our racist and sexist past — and a beacon of democracy for other nations to emulate. If America is still the world’s policeman, then we are Derek Chauvin with our knees on the neck of Ukraine or Panama, ripping off their “raw earth” or blackmailing them to take our shackled prisoners.

But why? One surprising explanation comes from the pages of Ganz’s When the Clock Broke, which calls back to the early 1990s as a moment when America turned its eyes away from the sometimes-twisted unity of the Cold War to look anxiously inward, in a moment of rising inequality and crime. The narrative melds the expected — the odd embrace of Ross Perot by the mad-as-hell talk radio crowd — with an unlikely detour into the mad, mad, mad world of New York City in the tabloid heyday of Trump … and mob boss John Gotti.

Gotti became head of the Gambino crime family in 1985 after ordering a hit on his low-key predecessor, Paul Castellano, outside Manhattan’s Sparks Steak House. Behind the closed doors of the Bergen Hunt and Fish Club in the low-rise outer expanses of Queens, Gotti was a street thug at heart, but his $1,800 double-breasted suits, knack for pithy quotes, and patriarchal grip on the Gambinos were straight out of the wildly popular mob movies at your local multiplex. Gotti, beaming from the front pages of the New York Post and Daily News, appeared to the unmoored masses to offer what at a time of a crack-driven murder epidemic and the Los Angeles riot was missing: order. In other words, he alone could fix it.

There’s no evidence Trump and Gotti ever met, but it’s clear that in many ways the so-called Dapper Don was a role model for developer Donald, who shared an attorney in Trump’s infamous mentor, the late Roy Cohn, as Trump navigated Gotti’s associates and his crew in the mobbed-up world of Manhattan construction and Atlantic City casinos. Indeed, the devil’s bargain of “raw earth” — overpriced Gambino concrete — in return for labor peace at Trump high-rise projects was clearly the blueprint for his Ukrainian extortion scheme.

“Trump comes from a New York where the mafia, business, and politics were intertwined,” Ganz wrote in an essay last year. “The political bosses — Donald Manes and Meade Esposito — the Trump family relied upon to clear construction projects were fully tied into the mob. And if Trump has a political theory at all, it’s one developed in this formative period of his life: the system is just an interlocking series of rackets and ‘this is just the way the world works.‘”

It took the twists and turns of three long decades, but Trump is now the boss, and he seeks to rule America not like the 44 presidents who came before him, but like the mobster who once competed with him for the Post’s daily front page. You see it in his Teflon Donald ability to duck prison, his skimming of tributes for his “legitimate businesses,” but mainly in his all-encompassing need to display domination. Gotti taught Trump to whack your opponents in front of the whole world, whether that’s during rush hour in Midtown Manhattan or live on CNN, and to dare his rivals to come for the king.

There’s no doubt a Gotti-flavored shakedown broadcast live from the Oval Office was thrilling for many of the 77 million who voted for Trump last November, who see a strongman while most of the rest of the world is horrified by their embrace of a bullying thug. The critics who today are saying it will take years for America to regain its position of leadership in a so-called free world of democracies are probably missing the point. The United States will never be the same — not after surrendering to mob rule.

You know who else was never the same after 1992? John Gotti. As any amateur cook can tell you, Teflon does wear off eventually. It took prosecutors a while, but the forces of a civil society eventually proved in court that there was no honor among the Gambinos’ murderous thieves, despite the silk, double-breasted facade.

Convicted of racketeering and his role in five murders during that pivotal year of 1992, Gotti died of throat cancer, alone, in a federal prison in 2002. The once-feared clout of the Gambinos and U.S. organized crime died with him. It’s hard not to imagine Trump could face a similar future, but only after the corpses of civil rights, diversity, democracy, and any last pretense to moral world leadership are pulled from the meat hooks and blood-splattered front seats of the American wastelands.

As Ganz notes in When the Clock Broke, the 1990s film Goodfellas exposes the occasional glamour yet underlying greed and savagery of the thug life that lurked behind the tabloid bravado of a Gotti … or a Trump. The film’s narrator, Henry Hill, makes a deal to survive, but to never again enjoy the front-row-at-the-Copa glory days. Just like the Goodfellas protagonist, America after Trump will get to live the rest of our life like a schnook.

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