Yeah, Trump sounded like a mob boss, but...

The way he talked on the phone to Raffensperger and his counsel last Saturday is the way many men, especially powerful men, talk to one another and most especially, underlings. Businessmen, high school and college football coaches, Hollywood agents and producers, Silicon Valley programmers...hell, I've heard editors yelling at and threatening reporters who weren't producing the kinds of headlines that sold newspapers and magazines.

Trump is a gibbering paranoid lunatic criminal, of course. He was, after all, trying to cajole the Georgia Secretary of State into committing several felonies on his behalf. But I came across my share of gibbering paranoid lunatic criminals in the 15 years I spent in the writerly trenches of Hollywood, and even a few in the corridors of Madison Avenue slick magazines back in the day. The stories I heard in New York in the 70's and 80's about Wall Street traders and the way they yelled at and threatened and stole from each other...well, don't get me started. In Hollywood, Prada suit wearing assholes like Mike Ovitz positively delighted in their reputations as cutthroat screamers and sharks. Power-lawyers like Bert Fields spent half their time working and the other half polishing their images as backstabbers and "killers." And of course there have always been thuggish politicians like Newt Gingrich and Tom Delay, who relished his schoolyard bully moniker, "The Hammer" as he strode the hallways of power barking orders at aides and threatening wayward members of the Republican caucus with the political death penalty if they didn't toe the line.

Remember when Republicans and not a few Democrats used to go around telling the world that what we needed to do was get rid of the "professional politicians" who never had a real job in their lives and get a "real businessman" elected to office?

Well, now we know what you get when you go with the experience and "bottom-line" savvy of a businessman: You get a guy who thinks and talks and acts like a mob boss, because that's the way he was raised by his father, and that's what he learned at the feet of "mentors" like Roy Cohn, and that's what he thought he had to do to make it in the ruthless world of bigtime Manhattan real estate.

Trump has put a psychotic edge to it in the way he callously mishandled and lied his way through the COVID crisis. Hundreds of thousands have paid with their lives for Trump's bullying and cruel disregard for facts and science, but way too many men are way too much like him. The utterly sexist male culture that has produced so many men who have been exposed by the Me Too movement should be all the evidence we need that the problem goes deeper than one ignorant, coarse, tasteless, grasping creep by the name of Donald Trump.

Shakespeare could have been writing not about Caesar but about men in general when he had Cassius tell Brutus:

Why, man, he [Caesar] doth bestride the narrow world

Like a colossus, and we petty men

Walk under his huge legs, and peep about

To find ourselves dishonorable graves.

Men at some time are masters of their fates;

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,

But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

The fault, dear fellow men, is not in Trump, but in ourselves.