Abstract
Given Gregg Barak’s 30-year history of documenting corporate crime, crimes of the capitalist state, crime and the media it is fitting that the culminating focus of Barak’s criminology is the master media manipulator and con artist of the 21st century President Donald Trump. Barak’s criminological analysis shows how Trump’s obsession with power, domination and control merged with “malignant,” “out-of-control capitalism” to unleash a social movement of intolerance to difference, and criticism and the liberation of exploitative exclusion. This was founded on a personality of “extreme narcissistic need for self-aggrandizement” built over five-decades. It intersected with cultural memes of white supremacy and the fear that democracy would swamp white America.
As media-maven, Barak is aware that the cultural war unleashed under Trump’s presidency is a battle between competing narratives: those claiming pursuits of justice are “witch hunts, hoaxes, fake news” fed by “global elites and the deep state,” against the counter-narrative about “saving democracy from authoritarianism,” and recovering law-and-order from damage, chaos, and trauma. But Barak says this ignores the fundamental structural conditions that generate these narratives. These conditions are the intensification of structural inequality under a bourgeois democratic liberal political economy exposing extremes of economic wealth and its concentration in the hands of the few. As Barak states “Crime is born out of the miseries of privileges of material conditions while crime control is about who is benefitting from harming whom.”
Criminology on Donald Trump is organized in three sections. The first three chapters examine Trump’s life and business practices before formally becoming a politician. This looks at his childhood and family life, his life of deviance, deception and dishonesty, and his use of the law as a weapon to bully and intimidate others. After reviewing the checkered background of Trump’s family members Barak describes him as impulsive, dyslexic, and having a “language processing disorder.” Trump’s bizarre and outlandish claims favors his self-interests and the fiction he wants to be the reality. According to Barak, Trump’s absence of empathy combined with an aggression to others emanates from the cold conditional love, and sexist and racist abuse of his father Fred, as well as the episodic absences of his mother.
Barak builds an interesting analysis of Trump’s personality type, challenging the popular characterization of him of as an egocentric narcissist. Barak argues that “Trump is a calculating and compulsive liar,” “a megalomanic with delusions of grandeur” and a frantic hyper-manic punctuated with moments of depression. Barak also believes that Trump knows facts from fiction, while preferring to manipulate using fiction, using deception and lies as means to his ends. Barak draws on Matza’s neutralization to show how Trump justifies and enable his actions, both legitimate and illegitimate. Barak says that rather than narcissistic or sociopathic Trump is a “disturbed, frustrated, angry neurotic white guy suffering from the legacies of cognitive and nurturing deficits.” This was subsequently sustained through the Trump Organization, a conglomerate of some 500 hospitality and housing businesses, itself the culmination of legal and illegal wealth accumulation, tax avoidance and “family businesses of organized crime.” Trump, says Barak, desperately seeks serious recognition as a winner but instead receives comedic mockery, ridiculing and teasing. Hence Trump’s anger toward the ‘fake’ news, the Hollywood elites and so on.
Barak’s next four chapters uncovers Trump’s use of the presidency to assault democracy and corrupt the executive branch of government for his own and nepotistic benefits and the appointment to leadership roles of those who needed his power and were prepared to do anything for it, including giving him money and spending money at his various hotels, golf-courses and casinos. Barak exposes the numerous ways Trump’s network of political affiliates facilitated his various contracts and licenses for casinos using Trump’s playbook “smoke, mirrors, threats and promises.”
In the last chapter Barak examines the post-presidency period and Trump’s stoking of white supremacy and conspiracy theories and his suppression of African American voters. Barak details the pattern of Trump’s media manipulation designed to minimize his own wrong-doing and deflect attention to others’ alleged corruption and criminality, particularly his 2016 Democratic opposition candidate Hilary Clinton. Barak shows how during his Presidential campaigns Trump tapped into the buried seam of white resentment at diversity, multiculturalism and civil rights feeding on the forces of “nativism, popularism, racism, sexism, evangelicalism, authoritarianism, white supremacy and conspiracy theory”. Barak makes a convincing case that the hostility between Trump and the media played into both of their interests as Trump’s outlandish and caustic comments were guaranteed media coverage for ratings.
In Barak’s analysis, Trump is part of a movement to deconstruct the constitutional state, to pass restrictive elections rules, and to overturn unfavorable election results, as part of a process to delegitimize the voting system. It is about deconstructing the liberal state to suppress diversity, multiculturalism, and gender deviance with Trump as the savior of white identity from all they fear and resent. In discussing Trump’s “sinkhole of organizational corruption” Barak draws on the concept of “influence market corruption,” a combination of the exercise of power by elite networks and the manufacture of complacency by blending deviant practices with “business as usual.” This expanded range of corrupt practices includes subtle forms of bribery and extortion, appropriation of public funds, and giving benefits to the rich in return for funding for political campaigns. His corruption involves offshore investments, failure to divest investments at home that are a conflict of interests.
At this point, you might be beginning to wonder where the criminology is in Criminology on Trump. There is a Freudian analysis of suppression of the unconscious, and sociopsychological explanations of frustration-aggression, failed parenting and neutralization theories early on, that could have benefitted from a discussion drawing on Healy and Bronner’s Frustration-Aggression theory, Bowlby’s analysis of failed parental attachment, and Skinnerian behavioral learning on reinforcement as well as discussing the relevance of social learning through role modeling as in Bandura. Particularly absent is explicit reference to Trump as the master social constructionist, even though there is no better illustration of socially constructing reality than that done by Trump. The book too is a lost opportunity to discuss Trump as the first postmodern president for his constant challenge to facts, evidence and truth claims and his affinity for multiple versions of truth and embrace of “truthiness.” While there are a few mentions of Merton’s structural strain theory and a brief one-page mention of Freudian-Marxism of Gerth and Mills, there is little conflict and no radical theory except in the broadest sense of the capitalist system. Nor is there any discussion of feminist critique in spite of the misogyny and objectification Barak levels at Trump. Similarly, there is no discussion of Critical Race Theory (except banning it) to address the issues of white supremacy raised in the documented accommodations to racism by Trump and his supporters. For these reasons the Criminology on Trump is a misleading title for the book that is more accurately titled The Crimes and Corruption of Donald Trump. However, the book is a thoroughly well researched case study that would be an excellent and exciting way for criminology students to find clusters of fascinating fraudulent government practices to test various theories in the field. For any student of the nexus of power and crime Barak’s book is an essential read.