The country lusts over its lawless past — particularly organized crime — and for Rachel Maddow, that kind of merciless underworld is ever so familiar with the brutal state of domestic politics.
"Violence is something that we are very good at in this country," she said Monday night on her MSNBC show. "And we all know all the tropes right? You know, making business people pay protection to the mob, and if they don't pay their protection money then the mob guys beat them up and trash their business and maybe even kill them.
"The mob guys running the card games and the other gambling rackets, where sure the odds are against you while you're playing, but the odds are you're going to get yourself killed if you actually get in debt to them. And extortion and stealing and prostitution and drug dealing and armed robbery — we've all seen it in a million shows and you can create all sorts of romance and drama around it.
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"And we absolutely do as a country."
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And yet Maddow is troubled by the fictional portrayals becoming too real.
She pointed to the fact that the kind of feral violence portrayed on big and small screens (showing scenes from Martin Scorsese Italian mobster flicks and the HBO series "The Sopranos") all of it is so raw and brutish.
"The irreducibly thuggish, brute, boring violence of it never goes away and it messes people up in an unsexy lasting awful unromantic way," she said.
Maddow's monologue then turned to MAGA enforcer Steve Bannon.
The one-time consigliere to former President Donald Trump is clawing his way to avoid jail after being found guilty of contempt of Congress.
For now, Bannon must report to prison by July 1.
But in a montage of his speeches, Maddow showcased the mob-like methods aired out of the populist podcast publisher's mouth.
"You're the vanguard of this revolution," Bannon tells his acolytes in one speech. "We're going to do what the Romans did to Carthage. We're going to salt the earth around it so there'll never be another building there again."
She compared La Cosa Nostra to MAGA's "Revolutionary" idealism.
"We're living through an era in our country's political life right now which is not politics," she said. "And if you want to call it the most romantic possible thing, I think you could call it revolutionary; just like gangsterism is a familiar trope for us in our favorite American drama, we also romanticize revolution and revolutionaries as much as any country on earth."
Watch the clip below or at this link.