There is a script. It is older than anyone currently living. It goes like this:
I am not a criminal. I am a threat. And they hate me because of what I represent to you.
Al Capone knew it by heart.
By the late 1920s, Alphonse Gabriel Capone was the most powerful organized crime figure in America. He ran bootlegging, gambling, and prostitution across Chicago with an iron fist wrapped in a silk suit. He ordered murders. He bribed police captains, judges, and aldermen wholesale. The Saint Valentine's Day Massacre -- seven men machine-gunned in a garage on his orders -- was so brazen it shook the country.
And yet Al Capone's public posture, maintained with remarkable consistency, was that of a persecuted man.
"Every time a boy falls off a tricycle, every time a black cat has gray kittens, every time someone stubs a toe, every time there's a murder or a fire or the marines land in Nicaragua," Capone said, "the police and the newspapers holler 'get Capone.'"
He wasn't just complaining. He was building a brand. Capone cultivated a Robin Hood image, donated to soup kitchens during the Depression, made himself accessible to reporters, and cast himself as a simple businessman being singled out by hypocrites. "When I sell liquor, it's called bootlegging," he pointed out. "When my patrons serve it on Lake Shore Drive, it's called hospitality." He told crowds he had "spent the best years of my life giving people the lighter pleasures, helping them have a good time," and received in return only "abuse, the existence of a hunted man."
This country wanted booze, he said. He organized it. Why should he be called a public enemy?
The argument was not without a certain populist electricity. Prohibition was absurd. The rich did drink openly while working-class men went to jail. The cops Capone bribed were on every other corner. He was telling people things they already half-believed, and wrapping himself in their grievances as insulation against his own accountability.
His defense attorney argued at trial that the tax prosecution was simply a pretext -- that the government wasn't really after tax fraud, it was just trying to "stow Al Capone away." The jury should not, he told them, be a party to persecution in a time of public excitement.
The jury convicted him anyway. He died at 48, his mind destroyed by syphilis, the empire he built already in ruins.
But the script survived him.
Donald Trump did not invent the populist criminal's persecution narrative. He inherited it, refined it, and ran it at a scale Capone could never have imagined -- not across one city, but across an entire country, through television, social media, and the machinery of a major political party.
The playbook is identical. Only the costumes changed.
Where Capone said "every time something goes wrong, they blame me," Trump told his supporters at a Waco rally: "They're not coming after me. They're coming after you. I'm just standing in the way." The logic is the same move, executed a century apart. The criminal reframes his own legal accountability as an attack on the people who love him.
Where Capone cast himself as a simple man meeting a public demand -- beer, whiskey, a good time -- Trump cast himself as a simple man giving people what they wanted: jobs, a wall, a middle finger pointed at the people who looked down on them. "From the time I came down the golden escalator," Trump said after his first indictment, the radical left had been engaged in a witch hunt "to destroy the Make America Great Again movement." Not him. The movement. You.
Where Capone pointed at the hypocrisy of Prohibition -- the law applied selectively, to the poor and the ethnic, while the wealthy drank freely -- Trump pointed at real and perceived hypocrisy in the justice system: Hillary Clinton's emails, Hunter Biden's laptop, the two-tiered application of law. Some of those complaints had genuine substance. That's the point. The hustle works best when it's built on a foundation of things that are actually true.
Trump claimed the prosecution "would immediately stop" if he decided not to run for president -- framing his legal exposure as purely political, a weapon aimed not at a man who broke the law, but at a movement that threatened power. He compared his situation to Alexei Navalny dying in an Arctic prison. He called it "the existence of a hunted man."
Capone would have recognized that phrase. He used it himself.
Here is where the comparison becomes not just rhetorical but precise.
Capone ran an organization built on intimidation and bribery, surrounded himself with men willing to commit violence on his behalf, and corrupted every institution he could reach -- police, courts, city hall. He positioned this as American enterprise. "My rackets are run on strictly American lines," he said. He was not knocking the system. He was just using it.
Trump surrounded himself with what a presidential historian called "a team of felons" -- eleven top allies convicted or having pled guilty, their combined sentences totaling roughly thirty years. He pressured the Justice Department to prosecute his political enemies. He urged his attorney general to go after Hillary Clinton. He leaned on election officials in Georgia to "find" votes. He was impeached twice. He was convicted on 34 felony counts. He pardoned rioters who broke into the Capitol at his encouragement, including the first man to breach the building.
And throughout all of it, his line never wavered: this is persecution. They are doing this because of who I am, and what I mean to you.
The crucial difference between Capone and Trump is that Capone never got his hands on the actual machinery of the state. He had to bribe it from the outside. Trump won the presidency twice. He used the Justice Department as a tool of personal vengeance. He pardoned his own criminal associates. He sat in the Oval Office and directed federal power at his enemies while simultaneously claiming to be a victim of federal power.
Capone claimed he was being hunted. Trump made himself the hunter, from inside the building, while still claiming to be the prey.
The populist criminal's greatest trick is not the lie. It's the grain of truth.
Capone was right that Prohibition was selectively enforced. Trump is right that the justice system does not treat everyone equally. Both men took that truth, swallowed it whole, and used it to insulate themselves from consequences for things that had nothing to do with inequality and everything to do with their own appetites for power and money.
Capone's defense attorney told the jury: don't be a party to persecution in a time of public excitement.
Trump's supporters say the same thing today, at a volume that shakes windows.
But here is what the script always leaves out: the question of whether the government is treating you fairly is entirely separate from the question of whether you did the things they say you did.
Al Capone did the things they said he did.
Donald Trump did the things they said he did.
The jury that convicted Capone did not acquit him because he made them feel good at rallies. The question of what we do with that fact -- what we do with a man who turned the oldest hustle in American crime into the platform of a presidency -- is not a question about him.
It is a question about us.
Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!
JZ Murdock is a retired Senior Technical Writer/IT administrator, and an active award-winning author/ filmmaker, documentarian, and writer based in Bremerton, Washington.
He publishes commentary on the state of things at murdockinations.com and on his creative works over at Substack. He also posts on Slasher.com on the horror genre.
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