# Jamie Raskin — "It's a gangster state" > [!quote] "It's a gangster state." > — Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, on MSNBC's *Deadline: White House*, June 16, 2025 ## Context Raskin said it on the Monday after the June 14, 2025 [[No Kings Coalition]] protests, in a segment about Trump-family self-enrichment. Per the clip and transcript summaries, he characterized the second-term government as "a corrupt, monarchical" system in which a small circle uses public office and private ventures for personal gain, pointing to foreign payments, the family's cryptocurrency businesses, and business deals — and said the participants had stopped bothering to maintain the pretense of ethical governance. Only the four-word line is reproduced here as verbatim; the full transcript sits behind a Grabien paywall and the MS Now clip is video-only. Raskin returned to the phrase within days — an MS Now *Last Word* segment on pardons and masked immigration raids is titled around his description of a "gangster state of authoritarianism." ## Why this matters "Gangster state" is the congressional-Democratic shorthand for what the political-science literature calls [[Kleptocracy]]: not lawlessness, but the state's coercive and regulatory machinery repurposed to serve a ruling family's extraction. Raskin's list — foreign payments, crypto, deals — maps onto the vault's own structure: [[Emoluments Clauses]], the [[Trump Family Corruption Ecosystem]]'s crypto pipeline, and the licensing deals ([[Qatar Simaisma Golf Deal]], [[Vietnam Hung Yen Golf Deal]]) announced the month before he spoke. The line also dates the frame: by mid-June 2025 the opposition's description had shifted from "conflicts of interest" to organized-crime vocabulary, which is where it has stayed. ## See Also - [[Jamie Raskin]] - [[Kleptocracy]] - [[Trump Family Corruption Ecosystem]] - [[No Kings Coalition]] - [[Quotes Hub]]