What if a president had the loyalty of organised crime and the powers of a state?

The convergence of state power and organised criminal loyalty is not without historical precedent, and the precedents are not reassuring. The relationships between certain political machines and criminal organisations in American urban history, between the Sicilian mafia and Christian Democratic politics in post-war Italy, or between state security services and criminal networks in the post-Soviet transition all illustrate the basic dynamic: organised crime provides capacity the state cannot officially deploy, and the state provides impunity that criminal organisations cannot otherwise obtain.

What makes the presidential scenario distinct is scale and visibility. Criminal-state symbiosis at lower levels of government is parasitic on a larger, mostly-functioning state. At the executive level, the state itself becomes the enforcement mechanism, and the distinction between legitimate and criminal violence collapses into a single apparatus controlled by one person.

The historical pattern in such arrangements is that the relationship tends to become mutually coercive over time. The criminal organisation knows things. The leader needs them not to speak. This creates a dynamic where neither party can easily exit the arrangement, and where the loyalty is less about genuine support than mutual dependence - which is quite a different thing and much more brittle.

The state capacity this corrupts most thoroughly is the justice system. Courts, prosecutors, and police cannot function as checks on executive power if they are simultaneously instruments of executive protection from accountability. Once that corruption is established, restoring normal function requires removing the source - and the source has both state power and criminal enforcement at their disposal.

The historical exits from such arrangements are rarely clean or peaceful.

The legal scenario here is genuinely novel in constitutional terms, even though the component parts - executive power and criminal organisation - are individually well understood. What combining them at the presidential level creates is a specific accountability gap that most constitutional systems are not designed to handle.

Criminal organisations operate by exploiting the gap between what the law formally prohibits and what enforcement can actually reach. They have developed expertise over generations in intimidating witnesses, corrupting officials, and maintaining parallel information structures that make prosecution difficult. When those capabilities are combined with executive control over the prosecution system itself, the normal mechanisms of legal accountability are severely compromised.

The constitutional provisions most relevant to this scenario are those that do not depend on executive cooperation for their enforcement: legislative contempt powers, state-level prosecution in federal systems, international legal jurisdiction, and judicial orders that can be enforced by officers who are not directly controlled by the executive. These are the pressure points.

The question is whether they are collectively robust enough. Each individual mechanism can be challenged, delayed, or intimidated. The aggregate question is whether enough of them survive to create meaningful accountability. Historical experience with similar configurations suggests that the answer depends heavily on factors that cannot be read from constitutional text: the willingness of individual actors to accept personal risk, the availability of external pressure, and the ultimate question of whether the military will enforce court orders.

The law's tools in this scenario are real but limited. They depend on people willing to use them.

Economists who study institutions have a useful framework for this: the difference between public goods provided by states and protection rackets provided by criminal organisations is, at the most basic level, a question of whether you can opt out and whether the service is general or selective. States provide security universally (in principle) and you cannot exit the jurisdiction to avoid paying. Criminal organisations provide protection selectively, and the price includes your compliance.

What happens when a president has mob loyalty is that the executive's capacity to deliver selective benefits and impose selective costs increases dramatically. The ability to reward loyalty and punish opposition at low formal cost - bypassing the slow machinery of legal process, regulatory action, or budgetary politics - is enormously useful for maintaining political power.

The economic consequences are predictable. Investment retreats from sectors that cannot be protected by political connection. Contract enforcement becomes uncertain outside the favoured network. Capital flows toward those with the right relationships and away from those without them. This is the basic economic profile of captured states, and it is not good for growth - but it can persist for a long time because those who benefit from the arrangement are concentrated and motivated, while those who bear the costs are diffuse.

The international economic dimension matters too. Trade partners and investors have increasingly refined tools for detecting this kind of institutional degradation. Sanctions regimes, capital flight, and reduced foreign direct investment tend to follow, which narrows the economic base available to maintain the patronage networks. These pressures are real but slow.

The scenario is economically unsustainable. The question is always the timescale.

The thing about loyalty in organised crime — as far as I understand it, and I've spent time working with people who knew it firsthand — is that it is personal loyalty in a pure form. You are loyal to the boss. The boss owes you protection and a share of what the operation produces. If the boss fails you, the loyalty does not transfer to whoever replaces them. It dissolves. The organisation is not the point. The relationship is.

I spent my career in a system designed to run on exactly the opposite principle. The British Army does not want you loyal to your commanding officer. It wants you loyal to the regiment, to the institution, to the mission. The commanding officer is a placeholder — someone who carries authority by virtue of their position, not their personality. The system is designed to function when the commanding officer is wrong, when they are absent, when they are relieved of command. The loyalty to the structure survives the individual.

What the article describes — a president with the loyalty of organised crime — is a president in whose hands the institutional loyalty has been converted into personal loyalty. The people around them are loyal not to the office, to the constitution, to the state, but to the person. And that creates a specific, identifiable problem: the mechanisms designed to correct bad leadership are now staffed by people whose loyalty depends on not correcting it.

I have seen bad units led by officers who inspired personal loyalty. The loyalty held, right up until it didn't. Because personal loyalty has a tipping point that institutional loyalty doesn't: when following the leader becomes obviously self-destructive, the personal loyalty breaks and there's nothing underneath it. In a state, that tipping point is much later in arriving, and the damage done before it arrives is much larger. The mafia model of power is not more stable than institutional power. It is less stable, but more damaging on the way down.