THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

Now that Cheeto Mussolini finds his nuts in a salad shooter he is more and more using the language of his old New York friends who also found their nuts in a salad shooter when the Law came knocking.

For much of the 1980s and 1990s, “the Dapper Don” and “the Donald” vied for supremacy on the front pages of New York’s tabloids. The don, John J. Gotti, died in a federal prison in 2002, while Donald J. Trump went on to be president of the United States.

Now, as Mr. Trump faces his own mushrooming legal troubles, he has taken to using a vocabulary that sounds uncannily like that of Mr. Gotti and his fellow mobsters in the waning days of organized crime, when ambitious prosecutors like Rudolph W. Giuliani tried to turn witnesses against their bosses to win racketeering convictions.

“I know all about flipping,” Mr. Trump told Fox News this week. “For 30, 40 years I’ve been watching flippers. Everything’s wonderful and then they get 10 years in jail and they flip on whoever the next highest one is, or as high as you can go.”

Mr. Trump was referring to the decision by his former lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, to take a plea deal on fraud charges and admit to prosecutors that he paid off two women to clam up about the sexual affairs that they claimed to have had with Mr. Trump.

But the president was also evoking a bygone world — the outer boroughs of New York City, where he grew up — a place of leafy neighborhoods and working-class families, as well as its share of shady businessmen and mob-linked politicians. From an early age, Mr. Trump encountered these raffish types with their unscrupulous methods, unsavory connections and uncertain loyalties.

Mr. Trump is comfortable with the wiseguys-argot of that time and place, and he defaults to it whether he is describing his faithless lawyer or his fruitless efforts to discourage the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, from investigating one of his senior advisers, Michael T. Flynn, over his connections to Russia.

“When I first heard that Trump said to Comey, ‘Let this go,’ it just rang such a bell with me,” said Nicholas Pileggi, an author who has chronicled the Mafia in books and films like “Goodfellas” and “Casino.” “Trump was surrounded by these people. Being raised in that environment, it was normalized to him.”

Mr. Pileggi traced the president’s language to the Madison Club, a Democratic Party machine in Brooklyn that helped his father, Fred Trump, win his first real estate deals in the 1930s. In those smoke-filled circles, favors were traded like cases of whiskey and loyalty mattered above all.

Mr. Trump honed his vocabulary over decades through his association with the lawyer Roy Cohn, who besides working for Senator Joseph McCarthy also represented Mafia bosses like Mr. Gotti, Tony Salerno and Carmine Galante. He also gravitated to colorful characters like Roger J. Stone Jr., the pinkie-ring-wearing political consultant, and Mr. Stone’s onetime partner, Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman who was convicted on Tuesday of eight counts of tax and bank fraud.

“It’s the kind of subculture that most people avoid,” said Michael D’Antonio, one of Mr. Trump’s biographers. “You cross the street to get away from people like that. Donald brings them close. He’s most comfortable with them.”

He's comfortable with them but he will be one of them even when he goes to prison. He isn't tough enough the be a 'Gaspipe'. He isn't well dressed enough to be a 'Dapper Don'. He might be a 'Fat Tony' being just a front man for the real boss.