“Outlaw-in-Chief.”
“Con Artist-in-Chief.”
“Houdini of White-Collar and Organized Crime.”
“Teflon Don.”
“Boss Trump.”
These are nicknames for Donald Trump offered up by author and criminologist Gregg Barak, who portrays the 45th president’s history of legal troubles as those of a mobster who has long evaded justice for his crimes.
But now, as Trump contends with 91 felony charges across four criminal cases and bears civil liability for the sexual abuse and defamation of a writer, as well as fraudulently inflating the value of his business empire, Trump must face the legal consequences of his actions.
Still, that doesn’t mean that Trump hasn’t already employed his own “politically organized Republican crime family” to thwart the justice process, Barak argues in his new book “Indicting the 45th President: Boss Trump, the GOP, and What We Can Do About the Threat to American Democracy.”
Raw Story got an exclusive first look at the book, which is scheduled for public release on April 1.
Book cover (Rutledge/Gregg Barak)
Trump’s alleged white collar crimes date as far back as 1973, and the former president has been involved in more than 4,000 legal cases in that time, Barak writes. Yet, Trump has evaded major consequences for his alleged malfeasance because “crimes of the powerful and the crimes of the powerless” and “suite and street crime” are treated differently in the United States, Barak told Raw Story in an exclusive interview about his new book.
As Barak writes, there are “two contradictory standards of justice” in the United States, and Trump benefited from “social realities of justice in America” that are “already stacked in favor of the powerful perpetrators of crime.”
“So long as Trump believes that he can prevail to fight another day to retain and/or regain his former power, then the amoral and corrupt racketeer and wannabe dictator will unapologetically continue to transcend democratic norms and to resist the authority of the state even if it means destroying American society in the process,” Barak writes. “Something that he has been working on since he was sworn into office in 2017.”
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Barak paints a comprehensive picture of how he says Trump exerts his “legal and political power” and uses his “mob-boss tendencies” to intimidate politicians, citizens and law enforcement agencies who challenge him.
“While most non-revolutionary outlaws would have cut a deal to stay out of prison, Trump behind the scenes and on social media platforms had been trying to stoke his base and threatening harm and violence to prosecutors and judges and other law enforcement personnel,” Barak writes. “Like a mafioso boss and Mussolini’s blackshirts or storm troopers, Trump had been fomenting hate, scapegoats and violence toward the ‘enemies-others’ since his campaign rallies began in late 2015.”
The irony of this, Barak said, is that the Republican Party historically identifies as the “party of law and order.” Yet, the party — particularly its far-right wing — defends Trump’s lawlessness and spreads falsehoods about election fraud and other conspiracy theories on his behalf, he argues.
That, coupled with Trump’s ability to project his troubles onto his opponents, keeps his base loyal to him despite his legal peril, Barak said.
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“Everything that he is accusing everyone else of doing is precisely what we've all witnessed him do for as long as we've been observing him,” Barak told Raw Story in a phone interview. “That is just an amazing ability to invert the narrative, and even though the majority of people think it's all poppycock and BS, there's 40 percent of the country who's all in.”
Why are those 40 percent in?
For “psychological reasons, Barak told Raw Story. In a society that is increasingly disconnected, “the cult of personality satisfies that need,” he said.
Among Barak’s greatest concerns: Trump’s threat to democratic institutions, particularly the press, as well as his political weaponization of government agencies. But Barak said he also doesn’t “believe for a minute that Donald Trump will win in 2024.”
Barak predicted Trump will “meet his Waterloo, sooner or later after all these years,” particularly as a judge denied on Thursday his attempts to delay the March 25 start of his New York criminal trial.
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“This will be the first but not last time that Trump finally gets his well overdue comeuppance, some time in early May 2024,” Barak said.
Barak’s book outlines the constitutional and democratic reforms needed to avoid an “authoritarian or autocratic regime” now and in the future, ranging from making the House of Representatives’ size more reflective of the population to reforming the outsize influence of wealthy corporations and the electoral process.
In short, a “tyranny of the majority,” not a “tyranny of the minority” is needed, Barak writes.
Barak said he ultimately wants readers to understand Trump and his associates’ threat to democracy — and how to save it.
“It's not to be snookered, to understand what the GOP and Trump are all about,” Barak told Raw Story. “It's that they want to contract rather than expand the rights of people.”
