Could there be such a thing as Trump indictment fatigue? Every week seems to bring a new set of charges; one might be forgiven for losing any sense of what’s what in the four major cases the former president now faces. (Of course, Trump himself has long perfected the art of sowing confusion through falsehoods in response to any criticisms, impeachments and now indictments – or, in the words of Steve Bannon, “flooding the zone with shit”.) What mitigates this risk, though, is that the different indictments illuminate very different aspects of Trumpism – and the way Trump operated as president, and now continues to operate in his campaign to regain the White House.
The Georgia indictment is particularly important: what many have long suspected – that Trump operates like a mafia boss – is confirmed by the ample evidence of Trump and his (increasingly bizarre and brutal) associates forming a criminal conspiracy to defraud the United States. Unlike mobsters, Trump used the power of the state itself to try to get his way, even if his making offers one couldn’t refuse ultimately failed. If Trump were brought back to power in 2024, there is every reason to believe that he would not only engage in all-out retribution for alleged wrongs against his political clan, but also erect what some observers describe as a mafia state.
Unlike Jack Smith and Alvin Bragg, Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis is employing what a Republican member of the House judiciary committee has described as a legal “nuclear weapon”: charges under the Georgia Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or Rico for short. The federal Rico law was passed by Congress in 1970 to make it easier to take down mafia organizations; dozens of states followed suit with their own statutes.
Movies and novels have long educated us on how fiendishly difficult it can be to touch the bosses who, after all, try not to get their own hands dirty; the point of Rico was to go after a whole organization, from the top down to the hitmen and enforcers in protection rackets on the streets. Whether the decline in organized crime can be attributed mainly to Rico is open to debate; what’s clear is that a certain Rudy Giuliani, as district attorney, used it to brilliantly dismantle various New York crime families. Giuliani also deployed it against Wall Street. More recently, a New York sex cult leader was convicted of racketeering.
It should have long been obvious that Trump operates with methods familiar from the mob: He tried to make James Comey kiss the ring. He demanded that Volodymyr Zelenskiy do him a favor. He threatens those who try to hold him to account for illegal behavior (“If you go after me, I will come after you”). This pattern is not unique to Trump; rather, it can be found among autocrats, or aspiring autocrats globally, who also happen to be kleptocrats. The Hungarian sociologist Bálint Magyar has coined the term “mafia state” to describe the creation of “political families” (which can include a ruler’s actual family, as in the examples of Trump’s, Orbán’s, Bolsonaro’s and Erdoğan’s children, with especially nefarious roles reserved for sons-in-law); these families then use the state to enrich themselves.
Unlike with ordinary corruption, envelopes with cash are not changing hands under the table; rather, the perfected mafia state is about using ostensibly legal procedures like public procurement where, strangely, only one bidder ever shows up. Yet the methods to keep such a system going are recognizably mafia-style: absolute loyalty is given in exchange for material reward and, equally important, protection for an indefinite future through capturing the judiciary. Unlike with the ideologically driven authoritarian states of the 20th century, the main aim is not, as a Hungarian observer put it, “To persecute the innocent. It is the power to protect the guilty.”
With protagonists like Sidney Powell, and stage settings like Four Seasons Total Landscaping, it is tempting to dismiss Trump’s conspiracy as a farce, more Corky Romano than The Godfather. Yet, as Willis’s indictment makes clear, it had real victims, such as the two Black election workers who were relentlessly intimidated by Trumpists. It’s crucial that these stories, with all their sordid details, come out. The law, as Gerald Ford, about to pardon his predecessor Richard Nixon, claimed, is not a respecter of persons, but a respecter of reality.
Except that reality neither explains nor interprets itself. The legal process can teach people to see not just isolated facts, but patterns such as a conspiracy, and make citizens comprehend that figures they think of as career politicians and law professors can act in concert like organized criminals. This matters not only to bringing perpetrators to justice; it also matters as people make future choices. After all, organizations can also learn. Although the conspiracy after the 2020 election was amateurish in many ways, Trump’s current campaign shows that Maga operatives are trying to draw lessons from previous failures. Another Trump administration may well succeed in creating a real mafia state.
Jan-Werner Müller is a professor of politics at Princeton University. He is also a Guardian US columnist
