Trump’s Retribution Against the Washington Post Owner Is His Gravest Abuse of Power

By Jonathan Chait

The saga of President Trump’s reprisals against Amazon has lurked on the margin of the news, largely overshadowed by the Ukraine scandal. Late Thursday night, Amazon revealed it had filed a protest in federal court of a Pentagon decision to deny it a $10 billion cloud-computing contract, the most recent piecemeal iteration of a saga that attracted precious little media attention even before the Ukraine scandal obscured it.

Yet the story here is almost certainly a massive scandal, probably more significant than the Ukraine scandal that spurred impeachment proceedings. Trump improperly used government policy to punish the owner of an independent newspaper as retribution for critical coverage. It resembles the Ukraine scandal because it is a flagrant abuse of power, and has been hiding in plain sight for months (as the Ukraine scandal did, until a whistle-blower report leaked in September). The scale of the abuse, though, is far more serious, because it is a concrete manifestation of Trump’s authoritarian ambitions.

Coverage of this story has implicitly extended Trump the benefit of the doubt by treating his hatred of Amazon’s owner and the Defense Department’s decision to spurn Amazon as presumably disconnected. There is not yet any smoking gun proof that Trump interfered improperly. It is possible, however unlikely, that the Pentagon acted completely at arm’s length from any political consideration, and the result just happened to comport with Trump’s desire to punish Jeff Bezos.

But even the appearance of impropriety ought to amount to a far larger scandal than it has been treated so far. The external evidence alone is incredibly damning, sufficient on its own to constitute an impeachable offense. ...

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https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/11/trump-amazon-bezos-defense-cloud-washington-post-pentagon-scandal.html

Slate: A Mafia expert explains why Trump feels so much like a mobster

Rep. Adam Schiff tweeted that the “transcript” of President Donald Trump’s phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “reads like a classic mob shakedown.” Many in the anti-Trump parts of Twitter have been echoing this line of attack this week, but it’s far from the first time we’ve noticed that Trump sounds like someone from The Sopranos. (Remember “Because a long time ago, he did me a favor” and “I know all about flipping”?)

But how far does this analogy go? And does the American public, conditioned by years of moviegoing and media coverage to love a brooding Mafioso, see “a mob shakedown” as a bad thing? Selwyn Raab, a former investigative reporter for the New York Times who covered organized crime, is the author of Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America’s Most Powerful Mafia Empires. I caught up with Raab on Friday to ask what he thought about the latest Trump-Mafia comparisons. Our conversation, which Raab began, has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Selwyn Raab: It’s important to remember that Trump learned his ABCs for success from Roy Cohn, who was mixed up in the Mafia, defended them, and mentored Trump exactly how to succeed in life. “Always be aggressive, take no prisoners …” ...

The subtlety is like … “Do me a favor.” Gotti would never say, “Hit that guy.” He’d just say, “Do me a favor, get rid of that stone in my shoe.” He would just say, “He’s a problem.” You never caught Gotti saying, “Let’s do a hit job on him,” but the understanding is clear to their acolytes. They know what the code words mean.
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https://slate.com/human-interest/2019/09/trump-mafia-behavior-analogy-ukraine-transcript.html