On August 24, 2023, a headline blared “La Maga Nostra” over the front page of the New York Post.
Dominating the layout was a photo of then-ex-President Donald Trump, his chin slightly raised in veiled contempt. The comparison was unmistakable: Trump as Don Corleone, the shadowy figurehead of The Godfather.
An accompanying news box underscored the irony. Trump had been hit with RICO charges, a legal framework famously pioneered by his own lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, to bring down New York’s mafia families, including the infamous “Teflon Don,” John Gotti.
Trump didn’t introduce the corruption of power to America. He simply streamlined it, stripped it of its former subtleties, and branded it in his own image.
The former real estate mogul has long invited comparisons to the mafia. His favorite films include The Godfather and Goodfellas, and his personal style—big pompadour hair, boxy suits, and flashy red ties—reflects that influence.
Michael Cohen once described himself as Trump’s consigliere, akin to Tom Hagen in The Godfather. Former FBI Director James Comey, who spent part of his career investigating organized crime, remarked that Trump’s approach to cultivating loyalty gave him “flashbacks” to his days taking down capos.
Then who could forget Trump’s infamous dig at Chris Cuomo, calling him “Fredo”—a jab that prompted one of the cringiest displays of Italian American male insecurity in decades.
From his “Teflon” ability to evade legal consequences to his swaggering machismo and Joe Pesci-like fragile ego, the affinity is laid bare.
Recent attempts on his life all but cemented Trump’s image as a modern-day mafia man. Whether or not the Post’s editors realized it, they captured the essence of his appeal.
It’s often remarked that unchecked social and economic pain leads to the emergence of “strong men.” In the classic authoritarian model, outlined by thinkers like Theodor Adorno, the disenfranchised turn to leaders who embody defiance, control, and simplicity in the face of chaos.
For millions of Americans mired in debt, struggling to pay rent, and unlikely ever to own a home, calling our society “neo-feudal” hardly feels hyperbolic.
It also tracks with the history of the mafia. The mafia evolved out of feudalism’s wake in southern Italy. As absentee landlords managed vast estates from afar, a vacuum was filled by vicious overseers and middlemen—figures the Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia called “parasitic intermediaries.”
Sciascia is widely credited as Italy’s first “anti-mafia” voice, following his 1961 novel The Day of the Owl. He viewed the mafia’s emergence in Sicily, shortly after the country’s unification in 1861, as a metaphor for the modern corruption of power—representing a distorted “ideal” of justice that promises order and protection for society’s have-nots while thriving on internal exploitation.
That this distorted image developed within a historical context marred by colonization and exploitation in Sicily—where peasants often romanticized the mafia and longed for a return to monarchy—pained Sciascia.
Equally, he recognized similar patterns in other contexts.
Trumpism operates in a similar way—not as a rejection of power consolidation, but as its acceleration.
Recent developments in Trump’s second term illustrate how a cartel-like consolidation of power among billionaires is carving out fiefdoms and aligning their interests with Trump’s administration in ways that echo mafia-like dynamics.
Peter Thiel’s role in “disrupting” the establishment sees him pumping money into Trump-friendly candidates and tech ventures that favor the privatization of state functions—a classic power consolidation strategy.
Jared Kushner’s financial deals with Saudi Arabia suggest a patronage model where money secures access and influence. Saudi investments in Silicon Valley, defense, and U.S. real estate could be seen as a geopolitical deal—leveraging Trump’s power for long-term economic control.
Elon Musk’s role, however, may be the most revealing. If Trump is the Don, Musk is shaping up to be his new consigliere, not unlike the old mafia’s lawyer-fixers—except with a global tech empire at his disposal.
His control over X (formerly Twitter) allows him to dictate the flow of political discourse, much like a mafia boss controlling the press. If Cosa Nostra kept power through silence—omertà—Musk ensures loyalty through algorithms, shadowbans, and the subtle privileging of certain voices over others.
Federal deregulation benefiting Musk’s empire (Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink) might reflect the kind of crony capitalism once associated with political machines, but at a planetary scale. Meanwhile, Trump sides with Musk over H-1B visas, even as the MAGA rank and file rebelled, and Musk called them “retarded.”
The direction we are headed in is shocking. But it would be a terrible mistake to view it as aberrant. Trump didn’t introduce the corruption of power to America. He simply streamlined it, stripped it of its former subtleties, and branded it in his own image.
His rise exposes a sickening continuity. Former Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton played the game with suit-and-tie professionalism—the neoliberal, financialized version of patronage. Former President George W. Bush and former Vice President Dick Cheney did it through defense contracting and old-money oil interests.
Trump now strips this down to its rawest level: outright transactionalism, loyalty oaths, and a government that operates like a family business.
He presents himself as the “honest liar,” exploiting well-founded perceptions of corruption while openly admitting to behaviors that elites deny. His blatant displays of donor back-scratching feel almost refreshing in their vulgar transparency.
Just like the old Sicilian mafia called itself Cosa Nostra—meaning “our thing”—Trump presents himself as “Our Monster,” so to speak; a kind of anti-hero who embodies the public’s disgust with a distant and dismissive establishment.
Like Al Capone, who opened a soup kitchen in Chicago during the Great Depression, he swoops in to get “close” to the people. As a distorted Robin Hood-like figure, he plays up his everyman appeal, toggling between his gilded digs and disaffected base. His diction is street-level, his parlance tabloid. He eats the food (McDonald’s). He speaks the language.
Sciascia wrote about the insidious spread of corruption, describing how “the palm line”—as a symbol of mafia influence—creeps northward from Sicily to Rome.
In America, Trump represents its teleological end. He doesn’t need to resort to brute violence.
His power lies in painting a romanticized picture—MAGA—over a bleak reality—“American Carnage.” In an Italian context, Sciascia dubbed this Sicilianità: the tendency to “decorate” harsh realities and mask corruption with rhetorical flourish. The Democrats tried to do something similar with “Joy.” But it failed.
The one thing that Sciascia hated more than the mafia was fascism. Yet in a sense, he viewed them as codependent. Ultimately, he viewed the mafia’s power as resulting from a “historic failure, the failure of the Centre-Left,” and the ravages of “eternal bourgeoisie fascism”—the inability of elites to distinguish their dream-hoarding interests from the needs of the masses.
Which brings us to Musk—a billionaire who sells himself as a free-thinking outsider while constructing a world where he remains the gatekeeper of discourse itself.
If Trump’s rise was a mafia movie, Musk’s role makes it something else entirely—a Pirandellian farce, in which power’s corruption is so blatant that it becomes surreal.
We are now through the looking glass. And whatever comes next will be even more profane than the system Trump claims to oppose.
