The president is treating Venezuela like a truckload of Italian designer suits his gang can hijack from a rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike.

What is happening now in Latin America is not foreign policy. It is not military strategy. It is not statecraft of any sort. And it is certainly not a law enforcement operation. On the contrary, it is a mob heist. Nothing more. Nothing less. It is an effort by a bunch of lawless thugs to use muscle to take what isn’t theirs.

The only way it differs from the day-to-day behavior of the mafia itself is that the soldiers carrying out the boss’s orders are not high school dropouts from Brooklyn or Newark; they’re members of the U.S. military’s elite Delta Force doing so under the cover of the stars and stripes.

Every aspect of the operation is reminiscent of scenes from The Godfather, The Sopranos or perhaps your favorite Scorsese movie.

To start with, Trump looks and acts like a mob boss. In fact, it has often been noted that this president—who used to work in casinos and the building trades—has long emulated the style and affect of now-deceased Gambino family boss John Gotti. (More recently, he has started to resemble Genovese crime boss, Vincent “the Chin” Gigante, who was famous for wandering the streets of Greenwich Village in his pajamas mumbling incoherently to himself. Gigante’s mental decline was a ploy to avoid prosecution, of course, whereas Trump’s appears real—and he has avoided prosecution a different way, with the help of the

© The Daily Beast