In the 1930’s, it was common for those opposed to the dictator states such as Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy to deride them as gangster regimes. In 2025, the sitting POTUS is using gangster tactics in his dealings with pretty much everyone. Yesterday, I wrote about Team MAGA’s attack on higher education and Harvard’s counterattack against gangsters in lawyer drag.
I wrote about the shakedown of Big Law last month. Once I learned that Trump’s current fixer and private lawyer Boris Ephsteyn was lead extortionist on Big Law issues, I began to wonder if this was being done for the Insult Comedian officially or privately. TPM’s Josh Marshall wondered the same thing and did some digging into the so-called agreements. They’re not valid contracts, they’re mostly bullshit:
“My own read is that the firms see this gambit as simply a necessary and mostly meaningless effort to get the White House off their back. I think they assume or hope that the political climate shifts and by the time it does they say these agreements were always BS. They’re unenforceable, made under duress and against threatened actions that were illegal. And that may happen. Who knows? Everyone is kind of hostage to fortune, or, in this case, public opinion polls.
Of course, inking the deals at all — or non-inking them, as the case may be — still achieves something very tangible for Trump: the appearance of the powerful and mighty all bending to his will. For Trump, that’s a big deal, both for his ego but also for the papier-mâché but real power he wields. If everyone agrees to pretend Trump is all powerful, then he kind of is. In a way, the firms are doing an incremental damage to the broader society and its relative freedom at little or no real expense to themselves. Or that’s the idea. The real issue is what comes next.”
There will be more. That’s how extortion rackets work whether they involve protection or blackmail. The Big Law scam involves both techniques. Blackmailers often start small but keep coming back for more even if they promised not to. Promises from criminals are worthless and that’s who the law firms are dealing with. Have they forgotten that President Pennywise is a convicted felon out for revenge? I have not.
Too many Big Law firms are treating the Trump extortion racket as just another cost of doing business. That’s the sort of short-sighted thinking that no one should want from their attorney. The big picture should matter even to filthy rich corporate law firms. Extortionists tend to be persistent; they’re not just flies to be swatted away, like termites, they infest and corrode everything they touch. In this case, they’re trying to intimidate law firms into NOT taking anti-Trump cases or clients. Who the hell wants a lawyer that’s easily intimidated?
Trump learned his extortion tactics from experts. The same people who have forgotten he’s a convicted felon have also forgotten his ties to the Mafia. I have not. The Kaiser of Chaos often cites Roy Cohn as his mentor. In addition to being a redbaiting McCarthyite, Cohn was a mob lawyer who represented the two gangsters flanking him in the featured triptych: Big Paul Castellano and Fat Tony Salerno.
Both Castellano and Salerno were involved in the building supply trade. Anyone who built anything in New York City back in the day dealt with them. I went into more details on the Trump-Mafia connection in a 2016 post featuring a short-lived nickname, Don Donaldo, Il Comico Insulto. It was just too long to keep typing so I moved on other nicknames but if the mobbed up shoe fits…
Now that I think of it, the Trump-Musk wilding is like a mob bust out. That’s when gangsters take over a business that owes them money then milk it dry. There’s a classic Sopranos episode Bust Out where Tony ruins a friend who owed the mob money after losing big at poker:
Back to the Big Law extortion racket. They seem not to understand who they’re dealing with. You and I know that Donald Trump is a gangster, but they pretend not to understand. They’ll get it when he sends Boris Ephsteyn around to wet his beak for a second time. The only way to deal with extortionists is to refuse to play ball. It’s the same with appeasement as Corleone captain and fictional gangster Peter Clemenza understood:
Nailed it. Big Law is just asking for big trouble.
Repeat after me: Appeasement never works.
Finally, Axios recently informed us that President Pennywise hates words starting with the letter E. Here’s one for him: E is for extortion.
That concludes this episode of Life Imitates The Godfather and The Sopranos.
The last word goes to the Steve Miller Band:
Another thing that bugs me is the fact that the felon likes to talk a big game outside the courtroom, but when he has to put it in actual lawyer language for a court pleading, suddenly there’s not much there there. Every day during his criminal trial, he yapped to the reporter gaggle about how his legal team was going to decimate the prosecution. And at the end of the day’s proceedings, he’d come out to meep about how unfair it all was, and everybody was weaponizing the law to try to convict him for his actions that broke those laws. Just because the felon says something doesn’t make it true.
Likewise, the flurry of executive orders (remember when Republicans just HATED it when a president signed an executive order, especially when Republicans reneged on their promises) includes lots of dire language about how (for example) DEI programs are “illegal.” But when one of the targets of the felon’s government by fiat* challenges the basis for his nonsense, the felon loses.
It’s irritating that big shot law firms and savvy political reporters make the same mistake, lending a patina of credibility to the felon’s lawlessness. As Adrastos correctly points out, appeasement doesn’t work, and every time a person or an entity who knows better allows the felon to take a little bite, it sets the table for a bigger bite later.
*More like government by Yugo, amirite?
Well said, sir.