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As Donald Trump flew to Florida on Saturday for a pair of political events, he could look back on what had been the best and worst of weeks. On Wednesday, he returned from a summit in London to mark the seventieth anniversary of NATO, where a hot mike captured some of his fellow world leaders mocking him. Less than twenty-four hours later, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi confirmed that the House Judiciary Committee will proceed with drafting articles of impeachment against Trump, which all but assured that he will become only the fourth President in historyalong with Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clintonto have an impeachment proceeding against him be approved by committee and referred to the full House for a vote. But, after all this, Trump received a big political boost on Friday when the Labor Department reported that the U.S. economy had created two hundred and sixty-six thousand jobs in November, far more than expected. The unemployment rate last month was just 3.5 per cent, which matched the lowest it had been in fifty years.

Trump was jubilant. GREAT JOBS REPORT!, he tweeted on Friday morning. Even allowing for the facts that the monthly job figures bounce around and come with a sizable margin of error attached, it was hard to argue with his assessment. On Wall Street, the consensus forecast had been for job growth of a hundred and eighty-seven thousand, which in itself would have been a pretty strong number. It reflected strong hiring across the huge services sector, which these days employs about eighty per cent of all working Americans. The biggest job gains came in health care, leisure and hospitality, and professional services. But even the manufacturing sector, which has been hit hard by Trumps trade wars, added fifty-four thousand jobs, only some of which were accounted for by the end of a strike at General Motors.

Of course, Trumps claim to have created the strong labor market is baseless. The current economic expansion began in 2009, under Barack Obama, and employment growth has been remarkably steady since then. But all Presidents tend to receive credit when the economy does well and criticism when it does badly, even if their policies have little to do with it. At the end of 2018, the rate of G.D.P. growth dipped, the stock market fell, and it seemed possible that Trump would be going into next years election campaign saddled with an economy that was weakening sharplya fear heightened by the continuation of his trade wars. These concerns have now receded. Todays job report, more than any other report in recent months, squashed any lingering concerns about an imminent recession in the U.S. economy, Gad Levanon, an economist at the Conference Board, told CNBC on Friday. Employment growth also shows no signs of slowing further despite the historically low unemployment rate.

The Labor Department also reported that wages are still rising. Over the past year, average hourly earnings have risen by 3.1 per cent, while the rate of consumer-price inflation is just 1.8 per cent. And lately, wage gains have picked up further. According to Ian Shepherdson, the chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, hourly wages for non-supervisory/production workers increased at an annual rate of 4.1 per cent in the past three months. Thats the highest rate since September, 2008, which was the month Lehman Brothers collapsed. So workers purchasing power is going up, and so are over-all household incomes. Indeed, Bloomberg News pointed out that, by one measure of wages, the rate of wage growth is now higher than the average interest rate on thirty-year mortgagesthe first time this has been true since Nixon was President. To be sure, many Americans still havent benefitted much, if at all, from the long recovery. And there are enormous public concerns about issues like the costs of health care and housing, as well as rising inequality and corporate greed, which the Democrats will rightly emphasize in the general election. But, at this stage, the headline economic figures are positive.

What is the likely political impact of all this? Chris Cillizza, of CNN, showed no doubt on Friday. The latest economic numbers... make one thing very clear: President Donald Trump has a path to win a second term next year, he wrote. After reciting some of the good economic news, which includes the stock market hitting new highs, Cillizza delivered a little history lesson. Setting aside Gerald Ford, who is a special case because he took over after Nixon resignedand then later pardoned him, to disastrous political effectsonly two Presidents since the Second World War have lost relection contest. They were Jimmy Carter, in 1980, and George H. W. Bush, in 1992: both of them were handicapped by a weak economy. The data then is clear, Cillizza concluded. Its very, very hard to beat an incumbent president unless the economy is seen by a majority of the public to be weakening badly.

But that isnt the end of the storya fact that Cillizza acknowledged in the second half of his piece. For one thing, in our polarized political environment, the economy seems to play less of a role than it used to do in determining voters attitudes toward the President and politics in general. This trend was evident during the last Administration, when Obamas approval ratings remained middling despite a slow but steady recovery from the Great Recession. Since Trump entered the White House, the trend has been even more evident. His approval numbers are 15 points lower than where youd have expected them to be, John Sides, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University who has studied this issue closely, told Greg Ip, of the Wall Street Journal. In a sharp column, Ip noted that the strong economy didnt prevent the Democrats from making big gains in the 2018 midterm elections and in local elections last month, in Virginia and other states. Moreover, many of these gains came in affluent suburbs, where the value of peoples houses and retirement portfolios have been rising strongly.

In another of his tweets on Friday, Trump paraphrased the famous quote from the political consultant James Carville, writing, Its the economy, stupid. These days, it isnt only the economy, though. Inevitably, the 2020 election will also be a referendum on Trumps conduct as President. Some voters may be willing to set aside Trumps scandals, aberrant behavior, and controversial policies and focus exclusively on the state of the economy, but many, many others wont. This implies that the ongoing political battles, particularly those over impeachment, may well have more impact on the election than some commentators have argued. For example, the Democrats, simply by going through with their threat to deploy the ultimate constitutional weapon that is available to Congress against Trump, will rally many of the local activists whose enthusiasm and involvement they will need next year. In that sense, as I noted in a column on Friday, impeachment is already a win for the Democrats.

But it also matters how things play out over the next few weeks, as the House Judiciary Committee files articles of impeachment, the full House votes on them, and the action moves to the Senate for a trial under the purview of the Chief Justice, John Roberts. On Friday, the White House indicated that it will continue to boycott the House proceedings. In a letter to Jerry Nadler, the Democratic head of the Judiciary Committee, Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel, said, You should end this inquiry now and not waste even more time with additional hearings. This brazen defiance was only the latest example of the White Houses refusal to coperate in any way with the impeachment inquiry, a stance that is itself grounds for impeachment, the Harvard Law professor Noah Feldman pointed out during his testimony to the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday. A President who will not coperate with an impeachment inquiry is putting himself above the law, Feldman said. Putting yourself above the law as President is the core of an impeachable offense because if a President could not be impeached for that, he would in fact not be responsible to anybody.

While Trump and his aides were scoffing at the impeachment inquiry from the White House, Rudy Giuliani, Trumps personal lawyer and a key figure in the Ukraine scandal, was taking his defiance even further, essentially raising his middle finger from Kyiv. Even though his business dealings are now under federal investigation, and one of his Ukrainian associatesLev Parnasis reportedly coperating with the Feds, Giuliani returned this week to the Ukrainian capital, where he is said to be helping a right-wing U.S. media outlet, One America News Network, put together a documentary about his discredited conspiracy theory that Ukraine, and not Russia, was responsible for hacking the e-mails of Democrats during the 2016 election. The fact that Giuliani is back in Ukraine is like a murder suspect returning to the crime scene to live-stream themselves moon dancing, Dan Eberhart, a Republican donor and Trump supporter, told the Washington Post. Its brazen on a galactic level. And so, the madness goes on.

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What Does a Strong Jobs Report Mean for Trumps Relection Chances in 2020? - The New Yorker

Investors are ill-prepared for the possibility of President Donald Trump walking away from talks aimed at cementing the "phase one" China trade deal that was announced in principle in October, CNBC's Jim Cramer said Monday.

"I think people continue to believe that there's going to be a deal because they think it's rational, 'Why not do a deal? It's good for both sides,'" Cramer said about what he sees as conventional wisdom on Wall Street.

However, Trump feels "prodded by the Chinese, humiliated," Cramer said on "Squawk on the Street," pointing to what he calls the latest "provocation" China's Communist Party reportedly ordering all state offices to remove foreign hardware and software within three years. The order, as described by the Financial Times, could hit major U.S. firms including Microsoft, Dell and HP.

The policy is seen as a direct move against U.S. technology firms during the 17-month-long U.S.-China trade war, which has spilled over into an economic dispute, including how Beijing subsidizes its tech industry.

"Why should there be a deal?" asked Cramer, a supporter of the president's hard-line approach to try to force China to open up its markets. "It's provocation."

For its part, the U.S. has effectively blacklisted Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei on national security concerns about whether China could use Huawei equipment to spy. Huawei has repeatedly said those concerns are unfounded.

Ahead of Sunday's deadline for new American tariffs on Chinese goods, "it's fish or cut bait time and I think that the cut bait is, 'Thanks for nothing China,'" Cramer said. The planned Dec. 15 tariffs on products, including smartphones and laptops, would be on top of the billions and billions of dollars of levies that Washington and Beijing have already imposed on each others' imports.

"[Trump] wants some sign, some sign that the Chinese want to do a deal, so that he can do it," according to the "Mad Money" host's read on the situation. "I think the president is increasingly saying, 'If they're going to continue in my face to not what to do a deal, I'm happy to walk away.' So I think that's the tenor of things right now."

On Friday, Cramer said on CNBC that the strong November jobs report gives Trump cover. "The president can walk away from the table with this number," highlighting the unemployment rate last month dipping to 3.5%, matching a 50-year low. Cramer has said the U.S. stock market hovering around record highs is also a feather in Trump's cap in trade negotiations.

Top Trump economic advisor Larry Kudlow, a former CNBC personality who used to host a show with Cramer, said the president is prepared to walk away from a China deal if he doesn't get the terms he wants. However, Kudlow, director of the National Economic Council and a self-described free trader, also said Friday that the U.S. and China are "close" to a deal.

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Cramer: Investors are not prepared for Trump walking away on China trade, but they should be - CNBC

Donald Trump called for the population of Seoul to be moved during an Oval Office meeting when tensions between the US and North Korea were at their height, according to a new book about the presidents relations with the US military.

In Trump and his Generals: The Cost of Chaos, the national security and counter-terrorism expert Peter Bergen also gives new details of Trumps demands that the families of US service members in South Korea be evacuated, which the North Korean regime would have interpreted as a clear move towards war. In both cases, Trumps impetuous diktats were ignored by his top officials.

Bergens book, the latest in a string of accounts of the presidents erratic leadership on national security issues, is being published on Tuesday at a time when friction between Washington and Pyongyang is once more on the rise, after more than 18 months of detente and summitry. The North Korean leadership is threatening a resumption of missile tests, and a war of words between Trump and Kim Jong-un is simmering once more.

Trump has resurrected his nickname for Kim, Rocket Man. North Korea conducted a missile engine test at a site that it had previously mothballed, and on Monday a senior regime official called the US president a heedless and erratic old man.

The level of mutual hostility is still some way off from the worst period in 2017 when a conflict looked a real possibility.

In his book, Bergen a vice-president of the New America thinktank describes an Oval Office meeting on North Korea in mid-April 2017, after a string of North Korean missile tests. Trumps top national security officials were present and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency had made a model of a secret North Korean facility the size of coffee table, to illustrate the regimes covert programmes.

According to Bergen, Trump was also shown a satellite image of the Korean peninsula at night, showing the lights of China and South Korea and the blackness of North Korea in between. Trump initially mistook the void for an ocean. When he was shown the bright lights of Seoul just 30 miles south of the demilitarized zone separating the two Koreas, the president asked: Why is Seoul so close to the North Korean border?

Trump had been repeatedly told that US freedom of action against North Korea was constrained by the fact that the regimes artillery could demolish the South Korean capital in retaliation for any attack, inflicting mass casualties on its population of 25 million.

They have to move, Trump said, according to Bergen, who adds that his officials were initially unsure if the president was joking. But Trump then repeated the line. They have to move!

No action was taken in response to Trumps bizarre remark, but the situation grew steadily worse, with a series of North Korean intercontinental ballistic missile tests and a hydrogen bomb test in September 2017.

After watching a retired four-star general, Jack Keane, interviewed on Fox News in late January 2018, saying that US troops deployed to South Korea should not take their families with them, Bergen reports that Trump told his national security team: I want an evacuation of American civilians from South Korea.

A senior official warned that such an evacuation would be interpreted as a signal that the US was ready to go to war, and would crash the South Korean stock market, but Trump is reported to have ignored the warning, telling his team: Go do it!

Alarmed Pentagon officials ignored the order, and according to Bergen Trump eventually dropped the idea. It was one of a number of occasions that the defense secretary at the time, James Mattis, ignored direction from the White House. He also refused to send defense department officials to a planned Korea war game at Camp David in the autumn of 2017, or to provide military options for intercepting North Korean ships suspected of sanctions busting.

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Trump called for Seoul evacuation at height of North Korea tensions, new book says - The Guardian

Disturbingly stoic, violent and seeking absolution hes not sure he needs, the mob killer Frank Sheeran allowed Robert De Niro to deliver a majestic, subtle performance in The Irishman that has the feel of a crowning achievement and for reasons that go beyond the screen. Based on Sheerans memoir, I Heard You Paint Houses, the film is haunted by the cinematic moments that De Niro, the director Martin Scorsese and the co-stars Al Pacino and Joe Pesci have made in so many movies about hard men with hollowed hearts. The fact that me, Joe and Al were doing this film is something in and of itself, said the halting, taciturn De Niro, who also played a key role in this falls controversial, Scorsese-indebted Joker. Marty directing it says something. It all sets a tone. The audiences perception of each character, us actors being together and what the story is the film is all those things. Its also a reminder, as if we needed one, of the brutal and beautifully unsentimental revelations that only a peak De Niro performance can provide.

In getting ready to play Frank Sheeran, you dug deep into the source material, and you also spoke with people who knew the guy. But Im curious how your thinking about preparation has changed over the years. Youve said in the past that you dont kill yourself with it the way you did when you were younger. What I meant was that maybe its not as necessary to be so obsessed. Its better at times to be relaxed. Do all the preparation before, and then just do the scene, and dont be anxious about it or amped up about what it is. Getting so concerned about an emotional scene you can kind of short-circuit whatevers going to come.

Was there a performance that led to that realization? No. I just felt that a real emotional situation in life comes due to the circumstances around you. If you prepare too much you know the joke about the actor who couldnt remember any lines?

No, I dont know it. This actor cant remember lines, so he cant get a job. A director he knows runs into him at the gas station where hes working. The director says: I have a play that in the third act, what you do is go and say, Hark, I hear the cannons roar. Can I count on you to do that? The actor says hell do it. He goes and rehearses, rehearses, rehearses. Hark, I hear the cannons roar. Hark, I hear the cannons roar. On the day of the play, the third act comes, and the actor runs out onstage. Boom! The cannon goes boom, and the actor goes, What the [expletive] was that?! The point is, you dont want to lose spontaneity.

Jack Davison for The New York Times

Earlier in your career, there was a lot of attention paid to how you changed your body for your work in, to pick just the most famous example, Raging Bull. In The Irishman, your body changed too, but the changes were made digitally, to allow you to look younger. How did it affect the performance not to be able to feel those changes physically? Well, its harder to act younger than it is the other way round. We had a guy named Gary Tacon who was a movement coach. He would tap you and say, Youre 39 in this scene. In one case, I was walking down the stairs a little more carefully than my character wouldve, and Gary showed me that you kind of fall down the stairs when youre younger. So I did that. I did it well. Marty cut it out because he didnt need it. But it was that kind of stuff. You have to be aware of having a certain spryness.

And you felt that you could credibly achieve that? I felt that, but even so, some people felt it was not they werent criticizing it. They were saying they could see my real age. O.K., fine, thats interesting. I shouldve taken steroids or something. Theyll youth-ify you or de-age you or whatever, but you still cant look like youre crotchety. Its a good thing. You know, Marty would see, and I saw it, too, that there would be an expression in my eyes during a scene, but after they youth-ified me, my eyes had a different emotional expression. Marty was concerned about that. I had the right emotional intention, the right attitude, but when that de-aging came, the expression in the eye changed. So they had to figure out a way to make sure that after I was youth-ified it would not alter the intention of the scene as we acted it. It was an interesting problem.

You could think about a character like Frank or a lot of people youve played as fundamentally inhumane as written on the page. But you have a way of infusing all these vicious characters with something approaching soul. Are there keys to doing that? The rule in acting is you never make a judgment about your character. The characters have their reasons, and you understand them. Youre trying to look at their point of view. I mean, in The Irishman, Frank has a problem with his daughter. He has problems that anybody can relate to. I never thought of him as being amoral or immoral. He lives in a world where the penalties are harsh if you dont do what youre supposed to do. He says hes going to do something, he does it. I dont like to go to Trump, but he is a person who, to me, has no morals, no ethics, no sense of right and wrong, is a dirty player.

Could you find your way into the character of President Trump? I wouldnt want to play him. Hes such an awful person. Theres nothing redeemable about him, and I never say that about any character.

You found redemptive qualities in Travis Bickle, and youre saying you couldnt do the same if you were playing President Trump? I cant compare. Theres not one moment that Trump said: Im sorry. I realize Ive done something that I shouldnt have done. He has not one speck of redeemability in him. Hes not owed one speck of redeemability.

People have argued that some of Trumps rhetoric has emboldened others to make threats or enact violence. Those arguments are not a world away from ones that people made about Travis Bickle or Joker. Do you think those arguments hold water? They might, but Trump has people who follow him who are crazy and want to do crazy things. What were doing in film, its like a dream. We know its not real. There are people who will take anything to be real and that we have no control over. The president is supposed to set an example of trying to do the right thing. Not be a nasty little bitch. Because thats what he is. Hes a petulant little punk. Theres not one thing that I see in him or his family, not any redeeming qualities. Theyre out on the take. Its like a gangster family.

To shift subjects a bit, what about if somebody were looking to play you? Would you be willing to talk with them and help out with their preparation? Thats a good question. I dont know. Ive always experienced that people are open because they want you to get it right. They want to give you information. With Raging Bull, Jake LaMotta was great with me and Marty. He was happy that we were making a movie about him. Certain things, maybe it was our interpretation. Thats the same with Frank Sheeran and The Irishman. In acting they say: Make it your own. Personalize it. Its the same thing with these stories. There has to be some I dont like to say poetic license, because that has a negative connotation when it shouldnt but its a way of expressing how you see it. It doesnt mean its right. But its how you see yourself.

What did you see in yourself that you put into Frank Sheeran? Aha! That is the question.

Jack Davison for The New York Times

Whats the answer? That is the question, but the answer is personal. I mean, when I talked to Marty about certain things about the film sometimes hes like a priest. We talk, and I have to be honest with him in order to get stuff in the film that we need to say. But its personal stuff that I would express through the character. Its not stuff Id tell other people.

I know youve thought about one day sitting down and watching all your own movies. What would you hope to see? I would probably be apprehensive, because Im critical about what I did. But the other thing is what I could learn if I looked at all my stuff and got an idea of what Ive done, what the pattern is. Because Id like to do something thats really different from what Ive done or been known to do.

If you watched all your performances, do you think youd feel any pride? I have reasons that I look at my stuff and Im not happy. Other people look at my stuff and say they dont even know what Im talking about. I dont know. Its not for me to say.

David Marchese is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine and the Talk columnist. Recently he interviewed Pete Townshend on rocks legacy, Patti LuPone about being bullied on Broadway and Whoopi Goldberg about creative fulfillment. Jack Davison is a British photographer. His work has been featured in British Vogue, Modern Weekly China and recently in the magazine with a cover photograph of Glenda Jackson. His first book, Photographs, was published by Loose Joints earlier this year.

Stylist: Brian Molloy. Grooming: Lynda Eichner. Clothing: Charvet.

This interview has been edited and condensed from two conversations.

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Robert De Niro Thinks Donald Trump Is Worse Than Any Gangster He's Played - The New York Times

Martin Scorseses new film, The Irishman, conjures up a lost world. It depicts an era when the Mafia was so powerful that it set off alarms in the Kennedy White House, and Scorsese even hints that organized crime was behind JFKs assassination.

But by the end of the three-hour-plus movie, the nostalgia fades and so does the pinkie-ring finery. Every made man Scorsese introduces to the viewer is snuffed out until all thats left is Frank Sheeran (played by Robert DeNiro), a disheveled, wheelchair-bound ex-hit man whos haunted by his memories. At the films end, a pair of FBI agents plead with Sheeran to talk about his victims, telling him theres no reason to keep silent anymore because theres no one left to protect. Everybodys dead, Mr. Sheeran, one agent says. Theyre all gone.

Well, many still remember. One person who knew the real-life mob families that show up in The Irishman is President Donald Trump.

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, Trumps buildings and his casinos attracted underworld figures like Fat Tony Salerno, the Fedora-wearing, cigar-chomping boss of the Genovese crime family. Salerno, whos portrayed in the film by Domenick Lombardozzi, supplied the fast-drying concrete that built Trump Tower and other Trump properties. Salerno also controlled the local concrete workers union, and when a strike shut down construction in Manhattan in 1982, the one of the few buildings that wasnt affected was Trump Tower.

The Irishman is based on the 2003 book I Heard You Paint Houses: Frank The Irishman Sheeran & Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa, by Charles Brandt. (The title is a reference to the special kind of painting Sheeran did that left his victims brains on the wall.) The book is full of characters who didnt make it into the movie, but they did surface in Trumps world. One is Philadelphia mob boss Philip Testa, the chicken man whose 1981 murder by nail bomb Bruce Springsteen sings about in the song Atlantic City. Testas son sold Trump premium land that became a casino parking lot. Another figure in the book is Testas successor, Nicodemus Little Nicky Scarfo, whose associates tried to lease Trump land for his casino in Atlantic City until New Jersey casino regulators quashed the deal.

Trump wasnt the only one who knew the people in the world of The Irishman. In addition to being a hit man, Sheeran was president of a local Teamsters union in Delaware. In 1972, shortly before Election Day, a prominent lawyer who was very big in the Democratic Party came to see him. There were some political ads that would run in the local newspaper every day in the last week before election, and the lawyer didnt want them to run. So Sheeran set up a picket line outside the newspaper, and he knew the Teamsters union drivers who delivered the paper wouldnt cross it. So the ads were never delivered, and on Election Day, Delaware had a new senator: a young man named Joe Biden. After that, Sheeran said Bidens door was always open. You could reach out for him, and he would listen, he wrote.

The Biden story isnt in the movie. There wasnt room enough for everyone to make it into Scorseses epic Mafia biopic, but Salerno does and with good reason. Salerno ran the most powerful of New Yorks five Mafia families. Im the fucking boss, thats who I am, Salerno once boasted in a secretly recorded conversation. Connecticut is mine; New Jersey is mine. Nothing got built in New York without Salerno dipping his meaty hand into the till.

In 1983, the year Trump Tower opened its doors, the future president reportedly met the Genovese family boss. The common thread linking Salerno and Trump was Roy Cohn, the infamous lawyer who represented both men. Cohn, the heavy-lidded henchman to Senator Joseph McCarthy, introduced the two men in his Manhattan townhouse, according to the late journalist Wayne Barrett. Under oath, Trump swore that wasnt true, but he also swore that he didnt know that Cohn represented Salerno, a fact that had been widely reported in Cohns obituary a few years earlier.

And its not just Trump who has links to the world depicted in The Irishman. It also overlapped with some of the figures in Trumps world, past and present. Roger Stone, Trumps longtime political adviser, also met Salerno when he visited Cohns Manhattan brownstone. This was in 1979, and Stone had been tapped to run Ronald Reagans political operation in New York. Cohn, dressed in a silk bathrobe, introduced Stone to the mobster and then offered to help him with the Reagan campaign. Cohns advice would change the course of Stones life: What you need is Donald Trump. Cohn sent the young political operative off to meet the up-and-coming real estate developer. It was a path that would lead 40 years later to Stones conviction last month on charges of lying to Congress about his contacts with WikiLeaks.

Rudy Giuliani, the presidents personal lawyer, also crossed paths with Salerno as New Yorks top federal prosecutor in the 1980s. Giuliani was obsessed with Salerno. Tony was the Tip ONeill of the underworld and would reside forever in Rudy Giulianis mind, wrote the legendary New York columnist Jimmy Breslin. Giuliani went after Salerno with such zeal that the mobsters defense attorney complained that the prosecutor has made it his personal mission to bury my client.

In March 1986, Giuliani announced that a grand jury had indicted Salerno and others on charges that included rigging construction bids. Trump Plaza, a co-op apartment building on Manhattans East Side, was specifically mentioned in the 29-count indictment. Salerno arranged things so his concrete company got a $7.8 million contract at Trump Plaza. It just so happens that while these bids were being rigged, the building was under construction, right around the time that Trump met Salerno in Cohns townhouse. Even so, the indictment makes it clear that the bid-rigging occurred without the knowledge of developers.

The FBI had uncovered the concrete bid-rigging scheme at Trump Plaza by secretly bugging Mafia homes and hangouts, including the Palma Boys Social Club, where DeNiro and his rabbi Russell Bufalino, played by Joe Pesci, sit down with Salerno in Scorseses film. Giuliani, by his own account, listened to countless hours of secretly recorded conversations of mobsters, and he reportedly was able to pull off a convincing impression of the mobsters scratchy voice. When you listen to those guys for thousands of hours, you cant help but sound like them, Giuliani once said.

More than three decades later, its Giuliani who is under federal investigation for his dealings in Ukraine, Trump is the president on the brink of impeachment, and bosses like Salerno are dead and gone, except for in the movies. As Giuliani finds himself in the crosshairs of prosecutors with the U.S. attorneys office he once ran, its worth pondering what was on those tapes. Salerno died in prison in 1992, but his words captured on tape live on. When Giuliani says he has insurance on his famous client, is it to Trumps connection to the lost word of The Irishman that hes referring?

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The Real-Life Mob Families of The Irishman? Donald Trump Knew Them - Rolling Stone