Some years ago, I was introduced to a mob associate who wanted to write a book. Actually, he wanted to publish a book to make some money, and he needed a ghostwriter to put the f’in words on the page. It’s fair to say that he was not a nice man. He stole, he lied, he committed extortion, and he used violence for financial gain. But as he talked about his story, he said something perceptive about narrative structure. “I may need a redeeming third act,” he told me. “Only I can’t think of what it could be.”

I couldn’t either. That was one of the reasons I turned down the job.

But I’ve been thinking about mob stories a lot the last of couple of weeks, as our government turns to a new cut-throat way of doing business.

Last week, while understrappers working for Elon Musk machine-gunned their way through much of the federal civil service, the U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent showed up in Ukraine and tried to strong-arm President Volodymyr Zelensky into immediately signing an agreement to turn over half the country’s rare minerals as payment for past American assistance in the war against Russia. Unsurprisingly, Zelensky demurred, asking for better security guarantees out of what is essentially the same kind of protection racket deal a Queens bar owner might be forced to make with a Lucchese crew member.

Instead of making him a better offer, Trump – who previously tried to shake down Zelensky to get dirt on Joe Biden - froze the Ukrainian leader out of negotiations with the uber-thug Putin, and then lied about Zelensky being a dictator responsible for starting the war.

By the logic of this cashbox diplomacy, more Jews of Eastern Europe might have survived if they’d sent enough money to the U.S.A., and no American Marine would have set foot on Normandy Beach without making sure a personal check cleared.

Meanwhile, Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove, representing the Justice Department, tried to muscle lawyers working for the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District into dropping charges against Mayor Eric Adams in a blatant one-hand-washes-the-other quid pro quo for the mayor implementing the Trump Administration’s anti-immigrant policies. Bove gave them an hour to come up with an answer. Seven prosecutors quit, rather than do the dirty work for him.

A few days later, four of Adams’s deputy mayors took the honorable way out and quit, rather than capitulating to the blatant political extortion.

And then there’s Trump vowing retribution against those who’ve crossed him and trying to install Kash Patel, author of Government Gangsters, as his FBI Director; menacing Canada with talk of making it his 51^st state, and threatening to withhold crucial aid to allies Egypt and Jordan if they don’t agree to accept two million Palestinians into their countries while the U.S. annexes Gaza as a resort area.

Long before any of this happened, I heard people compare Donald Trump to Don Corleone in THE GODFATHER. I didn’t think that comparison was apt. I still don’t. Don Corleone is subtle, far-sighted, and primarily concerned with taking care of his family. He’s also a fictional character. Trump is more like real-life mobsters I’ve met: vulgar, impatient, prone to epic self-pity, pointlessly malevolent, bluntly transactional, and severely uninterested in other people.

Now, you might say, “Great! That’s exactly what I voted for.” A lot of Trump’s supporters admire his forthrightness. They believe that anyone who says he doesn’t look out for his own interests first is either a fool or a liar who can’t be trusted. And let’s admit that some bureaucracies deserve to get the squeeze put on them, to eliminate fraud and waste (though not as much as some claim; Musk’s DOGE unit declared that it was cutting an $8 billion contract that was actually only worth $8 million).

But let’s get back to that third act question. Mob movies rarely have joyful conclusions. Tony Soprano famously said there were only two ways things finished up for guys like him: dead or in the can. But I don’t think anything bad will happen to Trump at all. He’ll almost certainly die many years from now as a smug and cruel old man telling lies under a fluffy pink quilt.

With Trump, it’s always the guy standing next to him who gets clipped. Rudy Giuliani. Michael Cohen. The former aides like Mike Pompeo and John Bolton who have been stripped of security protection after threats from Iran. Even if I was Vladimir Putin, I might be nervous about standing too close to this guy.

So it’s not Trump’s third act that has me stumped. He’s gotten his happy ending. It’s how do the rest of us get out of this racket without it turning into a bloodbath.