American Mafia

The American Mafia appears in the book less as a separately documented criminal organization than as a political metaphor for concentrated power. It names an order in which wealthy actors use influence, intimidation, loyalty, and force to shape public life while remaining insulated from accountability. Through this comparison, the book interprets the Ownership Class as a form of organized domination rather than merely an economic elite.

Mafia as a Model of Elite Power

The book's account begins with the master–slave dialectic: one self-conscious being risks everything, including life, to seize power, while the other submits in order to preserve life. This hierarchy becomes a general explanation for the relation between the 1% and the 99%. The elite is described as willing to take greater risks and use greater force, while the majority is portrayed as accepting domination and seeking masters who will direct its existence.

That analysis gives the American Mafia its wider significance. The Mafia becomes an image of power organized around command, submission, and personal allegiance rather than democratic accountability. The book characterizes much of the 1% as relishing struggle and defeating others, with domination treated as their primary objective. It therefore presents elite rule as resembling an enlarged criminal hierarchy: the powerful command, the subordinate comply, and the system persists because many of the governed are said to desire leadership by stronger figures.

Roy Cohn and Donald Trump

The most concrete connection between the American Mafia and the book's political argument is Roy Cohn. When Donald Trump moved to Manhattan from the outer boroughs in the late 1970s, Cohn became his mentor. Cohn is identified as Senator Joseph McCarthy's chief counsel during the McCarthy witch hunts and as an attorney who served the Mafia. The book treats Trump's choice of such a mentor as revealing: a leading member of the Ownership Class turned to a lawyer associated with political attack, tabloid manipulation, and Mafia clients.

The relationship is presented as formative rather than incidental. Trump described Cohn as brutal but loyal, emphasizing that Cohn brutalized people on his behalf. Roger Stone attributed several of Trump's characteristic expressions and habits to Cohn, including saying “100 percent,” “Forget about it,” “A lot of people say,” and “Believe me.” Stone also argued that Cohn taught Trump how to understand the tabloid press and the media cycle, and that their speech patterns were similar.

Alan Dershowitz's account extends the comparison from language to method. He described Cohn's governing principle as loyalty rather than political or ethical consistency, and said that Cohn taught Trump never to apologize, never to back down, never to admit error, and to use every available means to achieve an end. In this portrayal, the American Mafia signifies a style of power in which personal loyalty replaces principle and relentless aggression is treated as effectiveness.

From Criminal Hierarchy to Predatory Capitalism

The book broadens the Mafia analogy beyond Cohn's biography. It describes the Ownership Class as the ultimate mafia because super-rich people use wealth, power, and influence to shape the world according to narrow self-interest. Its proposed remedy is a 100% inheritance tax, intended to destroy the inherited power of the super-rich rather than merely redistribute some income.

The same argument identifies Donald Trump as a billionaire plutocrat who belongs unmistakably to the Ownership Class. His self-estimated wealth exceeds ten billion dollars, and he possesses a vast property portfolio. The book therefore treats the claim that Trump stands outside the elite as a form of political self-deception: supporters who see him as an enemy of the rich are, in the book's view, supporting a senior member of the very class that rules them.

This framework also casts predatory capitalism as a system that allows banks and corporations to run the world and dictate to elected politicians without being elected or accountable. The book calls this the globalist agenda when it means super-rich right-wing Americans, including Trump, extending predatory free-market capitalism across the world. The American Mafia thus functions as a compressed name for unaccountable economic power operating through political influence.

The Mafia Image in Historical and Cultural Allegory

The book's historical allegories intensify the connection between organized domination and capitalist rule. It calls the Trump insurgency “The Confederacy: The Sequel,” associating it with racism, white supremacy, and ultra-plutocracy, and compares it to the world of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. Elsewhere, the Confederacy is interpreted as a political order in which slavery was accepted as a mechanism for maximizing profit.

This argument culminates in the claim that modern employment reproduces the master-slave relation: “Employee” is described as capitalism's euphemism for “slave,” while employers are identified with masters, owners, and slavers. Abraham Lincoln's use of the positive-liberty state to destroy the Confederacy is presented as a precedent for ending what the book calls the Confederacy's surviving mental form: the ideology of unrestrained predatory capitalism.

The cultural counterpart is John Carpenter's They Live. The film depicts a hidden elite that has engineered economic collapse, brought about the ruin of the working class, and nearly enslaved it to the rich. A subliminal signal conceals the elite's true nature and implants its messages in the population, while an underground Resistance seeks to expose the deception. The book rejects right-wing attempts to equate the film's aliens with Jews or the Illuminati, emphasizing Carpenter's statement that the aliens represented yuppie followers of Ronald Reagan and that the film was about yuppies and unrestrained capitalism. The American Mafia metaphor and the film's alien elite perform the same interpretive work: they make invisible domination appear as a deliberate system of control.

Loyalty, Submission, and Political Perception

The book argues that the public's relation to elite power is sustained not only by coercion but also by attachment to hierarchy. Trump supporters are described as resentful of cultural elites while voting for a billionaire plutocrat, directing their resentment downward toward minorities rather than upward toward the Ownership Class. The book says that such supporters can accept rule by a rich elite so long as that elite preserves their relative position above non-white groups.

This is why the Mafia image is politically useful within the book's argument. It exposes the contradiction between professed freedom and willing submission to a wealthy leader. The 99% are said to revere the elite, depend on it to define their existence, and long to be led and bossed by it. The same structure appears in the book's discussion of media: criticism of Trump is labeled “Fake News,” while praise is labeled “True News,” showing how political loyalty can replace an objective standard of truth.

The American Mafia therefore stands at the intersection of biography, economics, history, and media criticism. It links Cohn's methods to Trump's public persona, Trump's wealth to the Ownership Class, capitalist employment to enslavement, and ideological propaganda to concealed domination. Its decisive role is not to supply a complete institutional history of the Mafia, but to provide the book with a governing metaphor for power that survives by demanding loyalty, rewarding submission, and presenting organized elite rule as freedom.