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When he isn’t fetishizing the fictive cannibal Hannibal Lecter — “a wonderful man” — Donald Trump rhapsodizes over the gangster Al Capone. “He was seriously tough, right?” Trump said of the murderous bootlegging pimp and drug dealer. “If you looked at him in the wrong way, he blew your brains out.

” The reverie, twisted as it may be, is an apt one. Though Capone cut a sanguinary trail broader and wider than the Windy City, the Chicago mobster landed behind bars only after being nailed for tax evasion — certainly the least of his crimes. So it is with Trump’s New York conviction for falsifying business records — “mere pieces of paper,” in the words of his thwarted defense counsel.



It’s possible, amid the yuckiness and the yucks — too much information about Trump’s bedding of Stormy Daniels , snickering accounts of the defendant’s courtroom siestas — to lose sight of the wrongdoing at the heart of the case. Trump paid $130,000 in hush money to cover up his extramarital liaison with Daniels, knowing the facts would very likely cost him the 2016 presidential election if voters found out. (His wife, Melania, was home with their newborn when Trump stepped out on her.

) It’s hardly the most egregious of Trump’s myriad offenses: pilfering highly classified documents from the White House; trying to strong-arm Georgia’s secretary of state into stealing enough votes to overturn Trump’s defeat; siccing a deadly mob on the Capitol to reverse the.

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