Why Trump loves corrupt Democrats Game recognises game

There is a colourful catchphrase popular in hip-hop culture that describes a kind of mutual respect between hustlers or players — “game recognises game”. It feels apropos of Donald Trump’s rehabilitation of ex-Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich and the rescue of New York Mayor Eric Adams, both of which came by separate strokes of a pen this week.

Regardless of their chosen parties and aesthetic differences, all three figures are vintage throwbacks from a dying era of US politics: the urban machine boss.

For all the recent talk of Trump as a Bonapartist or an “American Caesar”, he’s more like a supersized version of William “Boss” Tweed, the Democratic honcho who dominated New York politics via an elaborate system of patronage centred around Manhattan’s Tammany Hall. Tweed was only the most notorious example of a bigger phenomenon.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, “bossism” reigned in metropolises like New York and Chicago, cities where social and economic policy was made through political horse-trading and personal networks rife with varying levels of corruption. These networks were led by strong mayors and executives, the Buck-Stops-Here types once wryly depicted in old newspaper editorial cartoons as tough-talking, cigar-chomping kingpins.

One boss that Trump has sometimes looked to with a sense of nostalgia is Meade Esposito, the swaggering king of the Brooklyn Democratic Party from 1969 to 1984. Esposito was described by one one historian as “an ‘old school’ king-maker: a political fixer whose machine was fuelled by loyalty, patronage, and a quid-pro-quo system that resulted in a bevy of municipal corruption scandals and inquiries”. To Trump, though, Esposito was a hero, whom the 45th and 47th president has praised for ruling “with an iron fist”. As Trump told The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman: “I figured that the Mitch McConnells would be like him in terms of strength.”

The boss’s admiration for bossism has now yielded a pardon for Rod Blagojevich. Lord knows that Blagojevich tried to govern like a boss. The problem was that the former Illinois chief executive made the mistake of doing so while Chicago’s machine was being scrapped for parts. The old brand of politics was supplanted by the new Democratic Party as embodied by Clintonite disciples Rahm Emanuel and Barack Obama — both Chicagoans who harnessed mass media, celebrity, NGOs, and fundraising prowess, replacing the backscratching loyalists of old with bloodless progressive technocrats.

It has now been 16 years since Blagojevich was impeached and ousted as governor, one of a long line of Illinois politicians imprisoned for political corruption. Among his crimes: lying to federal agents and holding up money to a children’s hospital in exchange for campaign contributions. Most notably, Blagojevich tried to sell access to Obama’s Senate seat in 2008 after Obama left to run for president (the FBI secretly wiretapped Blagojevich saying of Obama’s vacated job: “I’ve got this thing, and it’s fucking golden, I’m just not giving it up for fucking nothing.”)

It was a shockingly blatant and clumsy example of quid pro quo, but it may have been seen as business as usual in a different era of Illinois politics. Consider the example of Jacob Arvey, a Chicago Democratic boss of the Forties infamous for providing virtually anything for residents of his ward, including legal counsel, apartments, and even wooden legs and glass eyes in exchange for votes. His advice in politics was purely transactional: “It’s very simple. Put people under obligation to you.”

But when the well-coiffed Blagojevich tried to put people under obligation in the aughts, he was convicted of a host of corruption-related crimes. In 2010, he appeared on four episodes of Trump’s reality TV show, Celebrity Apprentice, during his national innocence tour before heading to prison to serve 14 years; he only served eight years behind bars before Trump commuted the sentence in 2020 (ending Blagojevich’s prison stint without formally clearing his name or wiping his record).

At the time, Trump made it clear that he saw parallels between Blagojevich’s case and the FBI’s inquiry into his own alleged — and later disproved — “collusion” with Russia. It was notable that Robert Mueller served as FBI director when the bureau investigated Blagojevich and later led the special-counsel probe that would clear Trump of collusion.

Blago has kept a low profile since his exodus from jail. He has been recording Cameo videos and occasionally performing ironic covers of Elvis’ Jailhouse Rock at Chicago street festivals. There was little reason now to pardon Blagojevich, as he has no political favours to return — unless, that is, it’s Trump magnanimously “recognising game”.

Then there is the Eric Adams case. Unlike Blago’s run-ins with the law, his case is more recent, and a lot more complicated to navigate. Adams, a Democrat, was considered an outsider in New York’s 2021 mayor’s race. The former NYPD captain was the polar opposite of Michael Bloomberg’s elite technocrat. He was an aspiring Machine Man, the kind of dealmaking Gotham politician who helped Trump land millions in tax abatements for his properties in the wake of the Big Apple’s fiscal crisis in the Seventies.

But like Blago, Adams got caught playing bad machine politics. In September, he was hit with a five-count federal indictment for bribery, fraud, and campaign-finance violations. Prosecutors alleged that the mayor quietly received more than $100,000 worth of illegal campaign contributions, plus free luxury travel, in exchange for doing favours for the Turkish government. Adams pleaded not guilty, suggesting that he was being targeted with lawfare by the Biden administration because he criticised the Democrats’ loose immigration policy. (In reality, Adams was all for welcoming tens of thousands of newcomers from points south before he turned against it.)

As with Blagojevich, Trump publicly sided with Adams this week, expressing sympathy for his claim that he was unfairly targeted for political reasons. “We need great Judges and Politicians to help fix New York and to stop the kind of Lawfare that was launched against me,” he posted on Truth Social.

In response, Trump’s Department of Justice directed federal prosecutors to drop the corruption charges against the mayor. Remarkably, Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove wrote that the decision wasn’t about the merits of the case. Instead, Bove claimed that the case was interfering with Adams’s ability to “devote full attention and resources to the illegal immigration and violent crime that escalated under the policies of the prior administration”. There’s a not-so-small catch. The DOJ left open the possibility that charges could be refiled on Adams following a review.

Perhaps, then, Trump is treating the Gotham’s mayor like an old-fashioned machine boss who is gaming the system for an underling while expecting something in return. Meade Esposito and Boss Tweed would be proud. Game recognises game, indeed.

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Ryan Zickgraf writes from Pennsylvania.

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