Dear James Traficant,
Your most inglorious title has been usurped.
Jimbo, you have officially relinquished your questionable position as The Last Congressman To Be Expelled From the US House Of Representatives. You are no longer bringing up the rear, as they say. Nope. That distinction goes to the positively darling George Santos, who frankly, doesn’t have one iota of style compared to you no matter how stocked his closet is with Hermès and Ferragamo.
Baby, while I recognized this as an appropriate moment to revisit your myriad accomplishments, and while you’re clearly an authentic product of the Rust Belt just like me, I had a devil of a time figuring out why I wanted to write you this week. But I did want to write. I really did. Santos was sweeping the headlines, but yours was a better story by far.
Eventually, I went back to review your movie (I’m calling it “your movie” even though you’d been dead two years before TRAFICANT: The Congressman of Crimetown premiered).
While it’s not here in the trailer (you’ll have to shell out a dollar over at Vimeo to rent the whole thing—it’s worth every penny and then some), that interaction with Connie Chung at about the 48 minute mark? THAT, Jimbo, is the moment that stopped me.
Chung was getting ready to pose her last question. “One final question?” you said to her in the flirtiest of tones. “It’d better be good, you little TV vixen—I’m obsessed.” Chung blinked for a scant second before collapsing with laughter.
The footage then cuts to you walking through a scrum of reporters. “As a gladiator, I’ll stab people in the crotch,” you remarked.
Gladiators? TV vixens? You were just getting started. At about the 1:17 mark, the coverage of your July 2002 House Ethics Hearing began. During this blessed event you:
Approached a cameraman and tickled his tummy.
Threatened to kick your detractors “in the crotch.” (The crotch, Jimbo, seems to be a recurrent theme in your repertoire.)
Asked a woman being interviewed for the proceedings why you and she weren’t “sex partners.”
Stood, turned around, flipped up your jacket tails and presented your gorgeous fannie to the gallery.
Um … Santos who?
Theatrics aside, you’d been convicted on 10 felony counts including bribery, racketeering, and tax evasion. Your colleagues eventually voted 420-1 to expel you from Congress. Thusly disgraced, you trotted off to prison.
Notably, Jimbo, you had beat a similar wrap nearly 20 years before, didn’tcha?
In 1983, despite a signed confession and audio tapes—AUDIO TAPES—of you accepting mob bribes, you were found not guilty of racketeering charges.
Before all of that, however, you went to jail for another reason. I’m talking back in your days as sheriff of Mahoning County, a position you garnered in no small part because of your local football hero status.
In February 1983, amid devastating job losses in the Youngstown area (and while you knew good and goddamn well you were facing racketeering charges), you refused to sign off on a baker's dozen of foreclosure deeds that would have displaced unemployed steel workers and their families.
“Until I find out what happened to those people in those homes,” you said, “I'm not going to sign.” Mahoning County Common Pleas Court Judge Charles Bannon found you in contempt and tacked on a 100-day jail sentence.
After three days in the slammer, you processed the deeds and were released, but the image of you going to jail in a jumpsuit in order to protect down-on-their-luck constituents (however calculated it may have been) was indelible, and it forged ironclad support for you in the gritty Mahoning Valley. Boy did you play it up.
“It was really worth while,” you said shortly after your release. “I’m very proud I went to jail in Youngstown.”
From there, your political path became evermore tumultuous, but amid the scandals, indictments and incarceration; support for you would not die. You even garnered 15 percent of the vote from prison when you ran for your old seat (and lost) in 2002.
And now I arrive at the most difficult part of this communication.
As your denouement unfurled, Jimbo, your signature jocularity lost its luster. You eventually dove into the John Demjanjuk controversy and ran for office again (unsuccessfully) in 2010. You even wrote a book, and the one and only Ted Nugent blurbed it.
“Jim Traficant is one of the last American warriors,” professed Nugent on its cover.
You’d been a Dem for most of your political career, but right wing extremists found a darling in you, particularly after your 2014 death—which they attempted to tie to a wingnut conspiracy theory.
Would you have become a MAGA adherent? When your old aide and mentee Tim Ryan ran for a US Senate seat in 2022 against J. D. Vance, would you have cheered or condemned Ryan’s loss? I have no idea, Jimbo. Well … maybe I do, but to hell with my speculation.
I loved your hair and bell bottoms. I love that you were on Phil Donahue. I love that you were on 60 minutes. And Jimbo? I’ll bet you got a lot of trim back in the day, a LOT of trim.
You were famous for your one-minute speeches, in which you repeated your tag lines: “Beam me up,” and “You’re lookin’ at a junkyard dog in the face of a hurricane,” whatever the hell that means.
Lastly, plenty of peeps have made this obvious connection. And while I’d say you were better than that guy by a long shot, you can only beat the rap for so long, so no kicking crotches in the Oval Office for you.
Yeah, yeah …
Whatever you were, Jimbo, you were ours.
Love, Erin
ps: Full disclosure, in the short exchange with Connie Chung, I cannot tell if you say “I’m obsessed” or “I’m upset,” but frankly, Jimbo, I doubt it matters.
pps: I’ll bet you got at least some of that trim in Warren.
ppps: Plenty of strange stories come out of your neck of the woods, but this one about the Boy Scouts, a museum, and Norman Rockwell has to be one of the most astonishing tales I ever had the privilege to tell.
Enjoyed the hell out of this one, Erin. I had to learn about JT from my Boardman-raised husband, who used Traficant to explain to me what Youngstown is/was all about. He (my husband) said he used to sell suits to JT at Strouss department store. So I guess that's two degrees of separation.
You wrote a better "trailer" than anybody else I've seen. Traficant, for all his small performative oddities, was a figure worthy of someone's great political book; the way Earl Long was for AJ Liebling. I know a couple of folks have tried, but I don't think they captured him and his times the way they could have.
These times now make it more complicated, somehow; it's hard to be amused by Traficant's antics when so many malignant weirdos stalk the halls of power today.