John Ganz has a very perceptive essay on the scum who make up the MAGA base, and prop up Trump’s thoroughly criminal regime:
I’m sure by this point we’ve all seen some horrific videos of ICE abductions of migrants. Something looks off about those guys: They don’t look like feds or even cops; they look more like Proud Boys or Jan 6ers. That makes sense, since DHS is using white nationalist propaganda in their hiring drive. Proud Boys in Ohio publicly brag about being “high on the hog” because of the new hiring spree. Many of the videos portray them not just as menacing thugs, but also as incompetents, clearly unprofessional, out of shape, and sometimes unable to make arrests. Commentator Adam Johnson had a sharp tweet about it: “There are many ways of looking at ICE’s recent terror campaign, but probably the most salient is a bunch of people who can’t get real jobs harassing and kidnapping people with real jobs.”
Another way to put this is that ICE is a central part of the Trump regime’s overall organization of the mob. They are drawn from what Marx called the “scum, offal, refuse of all classes,” Engels called “the depraved elements of all classes,” and what Arent identified as “declassés of all classes.” In fact, a great deal of Trump’s political apparatus is drawn from those ranks. Arendt summed up the lives of mob leaders as characterized by “failure in professional and social life, perversion and disaster in private life.” Semi or even open criminality and the adoption of mob attitudes and behaviors are practically job requirements for service in the administration. Just look at Paul Ingrassia, White House employee and, until some hours ago, Trump’s nominee to lead the Office of Special Counsel, whose leaked texts revealed a “Nazi streak.” He’s represented accused rapist and pimp Andrew Tate and had connections to the antisemitic demagogue Nick Fuentes.
If you needed any additional evidence that MAGA is more of a kleptocratic demimonde or criminal racket than a political movement, look at how Steve Bannon gravitated to Jeffrey Epstein just as the stench of disgrace became unbearable for most others. Or look at Trump’s otherwise inexplicable commutation of the sentence of fraudster George Santos. Marx wrote that the mob was drawn partially from “discharged jailbirds”—in Santos’s case, it’s literally true. The message there is clearly: “Support me, and I’ll take care of you.”
There’s a socially and politically unhealthy tendency in American life in general, and on the political right in particular, to glamorize criminality, especially when it manifests itself in hyper-reactionary authoritarian forms such as Mafia-style gangs and the like. You can even find right wing ideologues who affirmatively praise the world view of the Corleones in the Godfather movies, because at least the Don upholds “traditional family values,” unlike trans Marxist lesbian atheists such as Joe Biden et al).
Donald Trump is above all a highly successful career criminal, and any analysis of him that doesn’t start from that fact is already going off the rails. Any attitude toward him that doesn’t begin with the query, “why is this serial rapist and thief who tried to overthrow the government not in prison?” is already asking the wrong questions.
Ganz sums this up well:
A contradiction within the Republican Party is between the mob elements and relatively respectable bourgeois conservatives who are still uneasy with the overt presence of these disreputable characters. One can see this in Senate Majority Leader Thune’s rejection of Ingrassia. But Trump knows he can’t ever totally jettison the mob, since it represents his core supporters. And we’ve seen that he’s willing to sic them on cowering Republicans if need be.
Any strategy that takes on Trump must find a way to incorporate and exploit this truth: Trump and his key followers are criminal parasites on American society.
Treating Donald Trump as respectable is EXACTLY THE SAME as treating John Gotti or Jeffrey Epstein as respectable. Those two now dead men were granted a glamorous cultural sheen before their many crimes finally caught up with them. That Trump has been elected president twice in no way alters the central fact about him and his minions, which is that he and they are criminal parasites on American society.