Gangster’s Paradise
Appearing with alleged gang members. Freeing hundreds of violent felons. Declaring open season on former government employees who are targeted by terrorists. How do you think this ends?
Today we’re going to the Bad Place. I’m sorry in advance.
The argument I’m going to walk you through is that President Trump keeps inching closer to violence and his decision to remove protection from former government employees who are being targeted by Iran is a message about his intentions.
How bad could it get? Well, people forget that once upon a time it was unthinkable that Vladimir Putin would kill a political rival.
Which brings us to worst-case scenarios and failures of imagination. If you were to go back ten years—or even ten weeks—and describe what we’re seeing today, people would have said you were crazy. That it could never happen.
It’s a lot to take in. But then, reality is a lot to take in these days. Don’t white-knuckle this on your own. Come ride with us.
1. The World Is a Dangerous Place
If President Trump cared about appearances, it would have been easy for him to make it seem like his decision to remove security protection for John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, and Brian Hook wasn’t about personal retribution.
Trump could have said:
I’ve reviewed the intelligence and believe they are not in danger. America thanks these men for their service and I am happy to announce that they no longer need Secret Service protection.
Of course, that is not what he said.
Instead, Trump said, “When you have protection you can’t have it for the rest of your life—do you want to have a large detail of people guarding people for the rest of their lives?”1
And then the president tipped his hand: “I mean, there’s risks to everything.”
Read that again:
“I mean, there’s risks to everything.”
The president of the United States is pulling security from former government employees whom the intelligence community believes are under legitimate threat of assassination by a hostile state. And his explanation is to smirk, “I mean, there’s risks to everything.”
Let’s speak plainly: Trump is inviting the Iranian government to kill these men. And he’s not even pretending otherwise.
Perhaps you are surprised. You shouldn’t be. Trump has been working up to this point for years.
You know the history of Trump’s incitements to violence. The calls at his 2016 rallies for his people to assault protesters; his promises to pay their legal bills; summoning thousands of people to Washington on January 6th and then directing them to march on the Capitol and “take back the country” “with strength.”
But over the last year Trump has taken a new approach.
Last May, before he became a convicted felon, Trump held a rally in the Bronx. At the event he called up on stage two gentlemen, Michael Williams and Tegan Chambers, to help him make America great again.
Williams and Chambers were better known by their rap names, Sheff G and Sleepy Hallow. But they were best known as gang members who were defendants in, among other indicted acts, a murder-for-hire scheme. From the Brooklyn DA’s indictment:
It is alleged that defendant Kamondre Dekattu is captured on surveillance video emerging from the sunroof of a white Infiniti and opening fire while other individuals fired guns from the driver’s side and rear driver’s side windows. An alleged Folk Nation rival, Theodore Senior, 23, was killed and five other alleged Folk Nation members were shot and injured. Dekattu is charged with the murder and his co-conspirators, including Michael Williams and his sister, Crystal Williams, are charged with being part of the conspiracy to commit murder, for this incident and others.
In particular, approximately an hour after that mass shooting, Michael Williams allegedly sent a text message seeking confirmation that the 8 Trey Crips and 9 Ways had scored against rivals. In separate messages to his sister, Crystal Williams, Michael Williams sent pictures of the victim and a news article about the incident and shootings that preceded it that day.
Two days after the homicide, it is alleged that Michael Williams hosted a lavish dinner with his fellow 8 Trey Crips and 9 Ways members, including Tegan Chambers, at a Manhattan steakhouse to celebrate the death of Theodore Senior and the injuries of the five other shooting victims.
Furthermore, it is alleged that Williams, who rented a large house in Short Hills, New Jersey during the conspiracy period, used the earnings from his music career to fuel gun violence in Brooklyn, by offering money and giving expensive jewelry to those who commit acts of violence. Williams’ involvement went beyond merely offering money to commit acts of violence. It is alleged that in one shooting incident Williams coordinated a group of three shooters, drove those shooters to the crime scene, and then acted as the getaway driver.
In case you’ve forgotten what it looked like, here’s Trump shaking hands with Michael Williams while Williams threw up some light gang signage.
Williams’s criminal trial is currently slated to begin in March.
In his first 24 hours as president, Trump issued blanket pardons/commutations for the 1,600 people who committed violence on his behalf on January 6th. He freed men who lead paramilitary groups and were convicted of seditious conspiracy.
And now he has pulled security for three former government officials and declared open season on them for no reason except that he judges them to have been personally disloyal.
Where might this road lead?
2. The Putin Principle
Today we joke about how dangerous staircases and second-story windows are in Russia. Everyone knows that to be a critic of Vladimir Putin—or even an ally who has become an annoyance—is to carry a death mark. The list of of Russians who fell out of windows, or “committed suicide,” or died in fires after falling asleep with lit cigarettes, or had “heart attacks,” or encountered some kind of rare poison is staggering.
There have been 64 random, high-profile deaths of people who inconvenienced Putin just since 2022. Sixty-four of them. This “sudden Russian death syndrome” is such an open secret that there’s a Wikipedia page devoted to it.
But we sometimes forget that once upon a time no one believed that Putin would actually have his opponents killed.
Putin became acting president in December 1999, after Boris Yeltsin suddenly resigned. Elections were held three months later. Almost from the start Putin was eyed suspiciously. He was, after all, KGB. And he dealt from the bottom of the deck: His opponents had prepared for elections in May; Putin pushed them to March in order to press his advantage as the incumbent.
Russia’s war in Chechnya was the dominant domestic issue of Putin’s first term. He was a hawk who enthusiastically supported the war; public opinion was largely on his side. But not entirely. There were internal critics. In April 2003, one of those critics, Sergei Yushenkov, was shot and killed outside his home. Yushenkov had just finalized his Liberal Russia Party’s registration to compete in the December 2003 parliamentary elections.
Three months later Yuri Shchekochikhin, another Russian politician who was critical of Putin, died of mysterious causes after a sixteen-day illness.2 Neither case was ever solved.
The Yushenkov and Shchekochikhin murders were a shock, but there was at least vaguely plausible deniability for Putin. Yushenkov was shot—random violence happens all the time in Russia! Shchekochikhin got sick—who knows what malady afflicted him! Putin won re-election less than a year later, at which point he stopped bothering with pretenses.
For several years Putin’s administration tried to intimidate journalist Anna Politkovskaya into abandoning her work and criticisms of Putin. In 2006 they gave up on the intimidation and executed her in her an elevator in her apartment building.
After Politkovskaya, it was off to the races. Former spy turned Putin critic Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned later that year. Human rights activist Natalya Estemirova was shot in 2009. Political rival Boris Nemtsov was shot in 2015.
Eventually Putin got to the point we’re at now: Every month or so some flunky, or oligarch, or critic “falls out a window.” As with Nemtsov—or more recently with Alexei Navalny—it’s not always clear that Putin personally ordered the murder. But that’s the point. The people who do violence know what the boss wants. Or are at least willing to kill on the off chance the corpse makes the boss happy.
The only difference between Vladimir Putin and Michael Williams is scale.
Williams allegedly has a crew of homeboys who take care of problems for him; Putin has the full resources of a nuclear-armed state.
Sorry—there’s one other difference.
Michael Williams is a gangster and proper naughty-boy. As such, he has to do his work under cover of night, because he is subject to the laws of the United States of America.
Vladimir Putin is gangster, but he is also the law.
Putinism is what happens when you put a gangster in charge of a state. Yet the great and good American people decided to put a convicted felon who consorts with gangsters in charge of their state. And they did this after their Supreme Court invented a writ of criminal immunity for him.
What did they think was going to happen?
3. Failures of Imagination
I understand that this sounds hysterical. It’s only been a week. No Trump critics have been poisoned, or shot, or fallen out of windows.
But humor me for a moment. Imagine it’s October 2024 and you’re having coffee with Hugh Hewitt.
Hugh is trying to cure you of your Trump Derangement Syndrome and convince you that a second Trump term will be fine. Because you’re a gentle soul, you try to meet him where he is. You outline three scenarios for him: low-, medium-, and high-risk to describe the first week of a second Trump administration.
Low risk: Trump appoints responsible people to his cabinet and takes office with a minimum of disruption. He reassures our European allies. He plans to pass legislation to construct his border wall and begins his deportation regime by focusing on undocumented immigrants who are currently in prison. He does not seek to apply Schedule F to the executive bureaucracy.
Medium risk: Some of Trump’s cabinet appointees are either radical or unqualified and he talks a lot about tariffs. But he extends an olive branch to NATO and appears to be ready to work with the Mexican government on border security and deportation. He pardons some of the people convicted for crimes on January 6th, but leaves the worst, most violent offenders in jail.
High risk: Even before taking office, Trump files a series of defamation/libel lawsuits against media entities, including a pollster. Three days before inauguration he launches a crypto token that allows the untraceable funneling of money to his pockets. He puts unqualified toadies in charge of the power ministries and frees every single January 6th insurrectionist. He demands the removal of the Republican chair of the House Intelligence Committee. He blames Ukraine for Russia’s invasion, saying that Ukraine should not have resisted Putin’s aggression. He institutes Schedule F and then illegally fires 17 inspectors general. He removes security protection for officials from his first term whom he views as disloyal, remarking that “there’s risks to everything.”
I think we can agree that, if you had spun this high-risk scenario to Hewitt in October, he would have told you it was impossible. Hugh might have said something like: These are the rancid fantasies of a Never Trump lunatic!
But I’d go so far as to say that twelve weeks ago even an unbiased observer would have judged the high-risk scenario to be unlikely. Not impossible, but certainly not the median outcome. Twelve weeks ago, if I had given you that readout you might have said, “This seems close to a worst-case scenario.” At least for the first week of the administration.
And here’s the point I want you to remember: When I say today, on January 27, that Trump’s gangster government is going to end badly—maybe even very badly—it sounds crazy and hysterical.
But if I described the state of affairs as they exist on January 27 to you twelve weeks ago, you also would have thought that I was crazy and hysterical. You would have said, “I guess that’s possible, but you’re talking about something close to a worst-case scenario.”
Yes, Putinism would definitely be a worst-case scenario.
But we are living the worst-case scenario right now. Maybe in the future something will slide us down the scale to one of the lower-variant scenarios. That would be nice. I hope it happens. But right now we are on track to a dark place.
If I had told you on November 1, 2020, that:
Donald Trump would lose the election
Attempt a violent coup
Hundreds of people would be convicted of committing violence on his behalf
The Supreme Court would invent a writ of criminal immunity to indemnify this coup attempt
Trump would win a second term in 2024 with even fuller backing from the Republican party
He’d make a weekend Fox News anchor secretary of defense and America’s most prominent anti-vaccine advocate secretary of HHS
He’d free every single insurrectionist from his coup attempt
And he’d pull security protection from two of his former advisors in such a manner as to practically invite the Iranian government to assassinate them
You wouldn’t have believed any of that. And yet, here we are.
We are one week into Trump’s term and our imaginations have already failed us. Which means that there may be things today that we say can’t possibly happen. But six months from now they might well be reality.
Start getting your head around this truth now. It’s going to get worse.
I’m telling you all of this because one of the lessons we should have top of mind today is that the worst never happens all at once. It develops over time. And at every step there are always people who insist that the worst can’t happen.
Right up until the moment they decide to make it happen themselves.
Trump, of course, is entitled to Secret Service protection for the rest of his life.
“Mysterious” because Russian authorities refused to autopsy his body and destroyed his medical records. It is fairly clear that he was poisoned.
JVL: "But if I described the state of affairs as they exist on January 27 to you 12 weeks ago, you also would have thought that I was crazy and hysterical. You would have said, 'I guess that’s possible, but you’re talking about something close to a worst-case scenario.'"
No, I would have said that given Trump's sociopathy and the temperament of his most radical enablers, the worst case scenario was very likely. When JVL does an analysis of Trump and his actions, he doesn't really get into his various character disorders as a driving factor in his decision making. When I look at Trump, all I see is character disorders. The truly dangerous part of all of it is given the large number of holes in his psychological makeup, no matter what he does, he will never, ever be whole. He will never be satiated. But he'll keep on trying, sort of like someone who keeps doing heroin in order to capture the bliss of using it for the first time but never quite getting there.
Never forget that 49.8% of the electorate looked at Trump's sociopathy and didn't give a shit. Also never forget that if one day Barack Obama "fell out of a window", somewhere in MAGAstan, Cletus would be cheering it on.
Let’s dispel once and for all with this fiction that Hugh Hewitt doesn’t know what he’s doing. He knows exactly what he’s doing.
Hugh Hewitt will insist, until the moment it happens, that the high-risk and worst-case scenarios are fanciful and absurd. And then, once they happen, he will say that he doesn't approve of the high-risk scenarios, that no one could have possibly foreseen the high-risk scenario even as you point out all the times you told him about the worst-case possibility, and that even though the high-risk scenario is bad, he is forced to do absolutely nothing to mitigate the worst-case scenario that he obviously never could have anticipated or approved of.
People tell me "never assume malice when incompetence will suffice." I can't help but notice that people get a lot more incompetent whenever incompetence serves as a shield for malice. Susan Collins keeps making assumptions about how Donald Trump will act chastened and wise in the future, and these assumptions are always proved false. This is assumed to be a mistake on her part. She always makes mistakes that help radical Republicans. She never makes mistakes that would help radical Democrats.
Hugh Hewitt knows that all of the things you point out to him now and could point out to him in the future are possible. He also knows that if he did anything to prevent those outcomes, he would have to say something like 'the enemies of Donald Trump deserve legal protection' or 'there is more to life and America than the temporary goals of the Republican party'. He has been trained, over years, since long before Donald Trump came down to elevator, to never, ever defend someone a Democrat wants to see defended. And so he claims to have no idea what's happening.
He knows what's happening. He's got a notion of the sons-of-censored that are huntin' people. He's seen the same things I've seen, and it's certainly made an impression on me.
Let's stop pretending that he doesn't.