When Trump cultists and various tea-party types took to the streets in Michigan, Ohio, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and Kentucky to protest the Covoid-19 lockdowns that are designed to keep us safe, I flashed on some stray lyrics written by virus victim John Prine:

“The dark and distant drumming / The pounding of the hooves… / The coming of the caravan of fools.”

And what fools they are – a subspecies of human known as ignoramus Americanus – parading in their MAGA caps, storming state houses, blocking traffic so badly that an ambulance couldn’t get through (that says it all). This was surely inevitable – given the fact that many Americans insist on the unbridled “freedom” to do whatever they want regardless of the consequences to others; that Fox News on a daily basis pumps sewage into their heads; that a fake president lies and dithers and disrespects science – and we’re likely to see this backlash metastasize.

Melissa Ackinson, a conservative Ohio state Senate candidate, joined the protest in her state capital and brought her 10-year-old son. She denounced her state’s stay-at-home order as government overreach. (Ohio’s governor, who issued the order to safeguard public health, is a Republican.) She said that the order “enrages something inside of you.” She said she has “no fear whatsoever” of getting the virus, and she dismissed it as hype.

Seriously, what is wrong with these people?

Tracy Keenan Wynn
3 hrs ·
IN THE EARLY 1980s it was decided — by whom, and for what ultimate purpose, we can’t say for sure — that Donald John Trump would build a casino complex in Atlantic City, New Jersey, probably the most mobbed-up municipality in the state. Dealing with the mafia might have dissuaded some developers from pursuing a Boardwalk Empire, but not Trump. He was uniquely suited to forge ahead.

Donald’s father, the Queens real estate developer Fred Trump, had worked closely with Genovese-associated and -owned construction entities since building the Shore Haven development in 1947, when Donald was still in diapers (the first time around). Fred was an early mob adopter, the underworld equivalent of an investor who bought shares of Coca-Cola stock in 1919. The timelines is important to remember here.

Organized crime did not exist in any meaningful way in the United States until Prohibition. Born in 1905, Fred Trump was just two years younger than Meyer Lansky, the gangster who more or less invented money laundering. Thus, Donald Trump is second generation mobbed-up.

When Donald first ventured from Queens to the pizzazzier borough of Manhattan in the seventies, he entered into a joint business deal with “Big” Paul Castellano, head of the Gambino syndicate, and Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno, of the Genovese family he knew well through his father and their mutual lawyer Roy Cohn.

Notes:

This piece was written under the expert guidance of Lincoln’s Bible. If you don’t already do so, please follow her on Twitter, and check out her own mafiya reporting at Citjourno.

I encourage everyone to read the State of New Jersey Department of Gaming Enforcement investigation report on the allegations against Donald John Trump in the Wayne Barrett book Trump: The Deals and the Downfall.
The late Bob Levinson was the FBI’s best Russian mob fighter. His Ivankov testimony is also essential reading.

— Greg Olear, Substack