The entire operation seemed perverse, not only because of the misspent time and accumulated waste in the name of “government efficiency” but, more striking still, the deliberate campaign to plant fear in the hearts of loyal constituents: The 14 counties Cole represents voted overwhelmingly for Trump (80 percent or more in some districts). The purpose, however, was not to inconvenience Cole, recently reelected to a 12th term. It was to remind weaker Republican legislators, backbenchers, that every GOP-sanctioned penny directed their way comes from one place. And no protest would be tolerated.

Raskin sympathized—or at least understood the position they were in. “If you’re a freshman Republican, and they’re telling you Elon Musk will spend $5 million in a primary to defeat you, and you’re already scared because you’ve only been in office for a year, two years, and you’re able to save some people their jobs or save some federal project that they were about to shut down, you’re not going to mess with them anymore. You’re just going to get in line like sheep. But remember, the longer it goes on, the more power they have over you.”

The question—ever present in the current frazzled moment—was, to what lengths would they go? Raskin has never met Musk and doesn’t expect to. Politics no longer works that way. Raskin and company, like most of the rest of us, live in a world of guesswork, speculation, and unverifiable rumor. One such rumor going around, Raskin told me, was “that they’re going to use their control of the Treasury’s payment system to pay the red states, pay their friends, and not pay the blue states.” Of the 10 states most dependent on federal dollars, at least seven are red. Supporters were being reduced to supplicants.

“That,” said Raskin, “is a Mafia operation.”

In my 35 years of writing about and reporting on US politics and ideology, I can’t think of another time when so many professional observers seem so utterly at a loss to analyze, or even categorize, the president’s MO. And most of them have gotten it wrong. Trump’s operating model is not, as some maintain, the foreign autocrat—even if he curries favor and sings the praises of Putin and Orban and Erdogan, and cozies up to Middle Eastern potentates. Neither is Trump’s model his crafty lawyer-mentor Roy Cohn—even if he practices Cohn’s mantra: Deny, deflect, delay. It’s a mistake, too, to think of Trump as a latter-day P.T. Barnum, a showman-salesman mugging for the TV cameras and effusing on Truth Social.

All that may apply to Trump the entertainer. But Trump the president is shaped by someone he observed at much closer range from childhood on: his father, Fred Trump, the great mid-20th-century apartment builder and developer of outer-borough New York. For many years father and son were partners who mastered the byways and back alleys of real estate at a time when, as two of the period’s best reporters wrote, New York was a “city for sale.” It was a brutish world of transactional power, of patronage, favors, cronyism, bribes, payoffs, pork, and spoils—as well as extortion, intimidation, and threat. It was a world ruled by Mob capos and political allies who at times were little more than frontmen.

Illustration by The Red Dress.

And so it has continued. During his first term as president, Trump was often thought of as disorganized and ineffective—and a poor dealmaker. Maybe so. But with the passage of time, this looks mistaken. Even in his first term, Trump demonstrated canny backroom shrewdness. There was, for instance, his skirting of Senate “advice and consent” on major appointments through the succession of “acting” agency heads and Cabinet secretaries, who could be instantly installed and removed, with all power concentrated in Trump himself. In his second term he has come up with a further refinement of one-boss rule, this time piling jobs—or rather titles—on Marco Rubio, ostensibly his top diplomat but in reality an all-hat, no-cattle mouthpiece for Trump, like all the other president’s men and women. It feels improvised and probably is. But it has also been some years in the making.

When Trump lost to Joe Biden, he recalibrated. Exiled to Mar-a-Lago, he tightened his hold on both houses of Congress, consolidated the sometimes lockstep allegiance of the Supreme Court, and clawed his way back, despite having been impeached twice by the House, convicted on 34 felony counts, and found liable in an array of lawsuits. As if to make up for lost time, second-term Trump, operating with Mob boss impunity, has become the consummate party boss in the tradition of New York’s Tammany Hall, an era when pols bragged about how many judges they had in their pocket.

Self-assured and self-obsessed, fearless and fearsome, the interloper of 2015 has become the folk hero of January 6, 2021, and now is widely acknowledged to be the dominant American political figure of the 21st century, as mythically big as Franklin Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan were in the 20th. Trump’s success derives from his innate understanding of how to wield bare-knuckle power by creating his own kind of syndicate in the time-tested style of both the political clubhouses and the Mob-adjacent New York real estate business of his youth. He is, without doubt, the capital’s most effective and intimidating executive since LBJ. And to get at the nub of how it all came to be, I turned to some of the people who know that world best.

Half a century ago, in the 1970s, when Trump was learning to navigate New York politics, the city itself almost went bankrupt—it couldn’t afford to repay nearly $3 billion in federal loans. A whole universe of operators was bilking the system: a complex but largely hidden raft of bankers, investors, money lenders, and lawyers who were mismanaging the nation’s greatest city, the citadel of world finance, and getting money or power, or both, while they did it. In all, New York governance consisted of a thick web of 1,500 to 2,000 people, in the estimate of the journalists Jack Newfield and Paul DeBrul in their 1981 book The Permanent Government, a dissection of the city’s largely hidden political class. Trump appears in it as its youngest player, a rising star who, they write, at “not yet 35 is the city’s most aggressive and politically connected developer.” The key words are “politically connected.” The idea, espoused by Beltway sophisticates, that Trump was a political novice was badly misplaced. In fact, he grew up in politics, not so different from Washington’s own but more direct, or at least more candid, in its emphasis on money and access. In the 1970s, Trump and his father “donated or loaned money to almost every important elected official in the city and state,” the authors wrote. And the money went to the top.

An early good bet they made was on the Brooklyn politician Hugh Carey. When he was elected governor of New York in 1974, the Trumps, among his “biggest and earliest backers…put up $1,200 to get the first phone lines into Carey’s headquarters, cosigned a $23,000 start-up loan, and contributed outright another $35,000,” according to Wayne Barrett’s Trump: The Deals and the Downfall, his full-scale investigation of the exploits of the Trumps. Published in 1992, it remains the single indispensable book on the subject.

These great journalists studied Trump so closely because they knew from the moment he arrived on the scene he was destined to transform it—an audacious, almost unstoppable force pushing ahead, hour upon hour, with “maniacal drive.” It bears little resemblance to the TV huckster and cartoonish bully of World Wrestling Entertainment and The Apprentice, two virtual personas he developed after his first career dissolved in serial bankruptcy.

In 1973, when he was just getting started, Trump shrewdly hired Carey’s chief fundraiser, Louise Sunshine, the granddaughter of Barney Pressman, the founder of Barneys New York. Sunshine, who went on to operate her own real estate company, was the first version of Trump’s current chief of staff, Susie Wiles, the sensible den mother to a distracted Trump. “Donald was all of maybe 24 years old,” Sunshine later told PBS’s Frontline (actually, he was 26.) “He was spreading his dollars around political circles in order to be known and garner credibility in the world of business. And he chose politics as a route to gain fame.” This, while operating out of a tiny office. The staff, at first, consisted of two: Trump and Sunshine, his own “lobbyist.”

Already, he had figured out how the system worked—and how easily politicians could be bought. Barrett describes Trump showing up late for lunch at the Four Seasons with one of the many elders shepherding him through real estate deals. He’d been held up, Trump explained, because he was at a Carey campaign event. “ ‘Carey’s a wonderful guy,’ Donald announced in a booming voice that could be heard six tables away. ‘He can be trusted. He’ll do anything for a developer who gives him a campaign contribution.’ ”

Over the years Trump has zigzagged more times than anyone, himself included, can possibly count. But when the subject turns to favors and “trust,” he has been rock-solid. Forty-one years after that lunch, during the first GOP debate in August 2015—the one that set him on his course to victory—Trump, this time in a voice boomed out to the estimated 24 million viewers watching Fox News that night, a record for a primary-season debate, said this about his GOP opponents: “Most of the people on this stage I’ve given to, just so you understand, a lot of money…. I will tell you that our system is broken…. I give to everybody. When they call, I give. And do you know what? When I need something from them two years later, three years later, I call them, they are there for me.”