A former federal prosecutor who has taken down mob figures, corrupt mayors, and a literal underwear bomber has looked at the Trump administration and concluded: yes, this is how the mafia works. Barbara McQuade's new book, 'The Fix: Saving America from the Corruption of a Mob-Style Government,' argues that Donald Trump doesn't just behave like a crime boss as a matter of style. She says it's a system, it's intentional, and it is very much working.
The Godfather Opening She Didn't Have to Stretch to Use
McQuade opens the book with the first scene of The Godfather. Amerigo Bonasera, a grieving father, sits in Don Corleone's office and asks for justice. Corleone agrees, and then adds his famous whisper: "Someday, and that day may never come, I'll call upon you to do a service for me." It's a scene about fealty dressed up as generosity.
McQuade, who teaches at the University of Michigan Law School and spent seven years as the U.S. attorney for the eastern district of Michigan, says the parallel to Trump is not a metaphor she had to strain for. "Every time he does somebody a favour, whether it's an appointment or something else, he expects there to be a quid pro quo," she told The Guardian. Read Corleone, she says, and you are reading Donald Trump. The book even comes with a cover blurb from Robert De Niro, who starred in Godfather Part II, which either perfectly completes the bit or proves McQuade has a genuine sense of humor about all of this.
Roy Cohn Taught Him Everything and It Shows
McQuade traces the origins of Trump's operating philosophy back to Roy Cohn, his lawyer and mentor from the 1970s. Cohn was a former assistant U.S. attorney who had worked as counsel to Joseph McCarthy's red scare hearings and represented actual organized crime figures. He came into Trump's orbit when the Justice Department sued Trump and his father for racial discrimination in their housing developments.
What Cohn passed down, according to McQuade, was a specific playbook for surviving legal and political attack. "He showed Trump the way to deal with being charged or attacked is to always fight back, to never admit to anything, to always turn the tables and accuse your accusers," she told The Guardian. Watch Trump for five consecutive minutes and you will see this in real time. He has been running the Cohn playbook for fifty years. At this point he's probably improved on it.
The difference between Trump's first term and his second, McQuade argues, is that he has learned to stop surrounding himself with people who might push back. Expertise is out. Loyalty is in. The people around him now, she says, understand they got their jobs for one reason and one reason only.
The Three Cs: Corruption, Cruelty, and Chaos
McQuade borrows a framework from House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries to organize what the Trump era actually looks like on the ground: corruption, cruelty, and chaos. All three are features, not bugs.
The corruption is not even subtle anymore. McQuade points to Trump's pardons for January 6 rioters and political donors, his acceptance of a $400 million plane from Qatar, and his cozying up to tech billionaires looking for favorable merger regulations, all of which she argues violates the constitutional emoluments clause. She also highlights a example from her home state: Trump threatened to hold up the opening of the Gordie Howe International Bridge between Detroit and Canada while, around the same time, the owner of a nearby private span made a million-dollar donation to a MAGA super PAC. As McQuade puts it plainly: "The fix is in."
The cruelty she describes as performative and deliberate. The White House last month launched aliens.gov, a webpage that appears to be about extraterrestrial life and declares "They walk among us" before revealing it is actually about undocumented immigrants and demanding their mass deportation, all scored to cinematic music. "The cruelty is the enjoyment of inflicting harm on other humans," McQuade told The Guardian, "which is just not the way the United States has conducted itself in the world, at least in the post-World War II order." Which is a very measured way of saying: this is grotesque.
Engineered Incompetence Is the Whole Point
The chaos piece of the framework is where McQuade's prosecutorial instincts really sharpen. She draws on historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat's concept of "engineered incompetence," the idea that putting unqualified loyalists into powerful positions is not an accident or a failure of vetting. It is the strategy.
She points to Robert Kennedy Jr., a vaccine skeptic, running the Department of Health and Human Services. And Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News host with zero senior leadership experience, running the Pentagon during active armed conflicts. According to McQuade, the mechanism is simple: people who would never have gotten those jobs anywhere else know exactly why they have them, and they act accordingly. They are beholden. Nobody has to say it out loud.
The historical comparisons McQuade draws are not comfortable ones. She references democratic institutions being turned against citizens in 1930s Germany. She points to oligarchs and loyalists replacing public servants in post-Soviet Russia. She cites Hungary and Turkey as contemporary examples of democracies hollowed out from within by leaders who used the institutions themselves to dismantle institutional power. The book is clearly arguing that the United States is further along this road than most Americans want to admit.
She's Not Just Diagnosing. She's Prosecuting.
McQuade is not an academic who discovered politics after 2016. She prosecuted Kwame Kilpatrick, the former Detroit mayor who ran the city like a personal ATM. She prosecuted the Volkswagen emissions scandal. She put Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the underwear bomber, away. She knows what corruption looks like from the inside of a courtroom, and she is telling you she recognizes the pattern.
The Guardian conducted the interview outside Comet Ping Pong, the Washington pizza restaurant that was targeted in 2016 by an armed man acting on the baseless QAnon-adjacent conspiracy theory that it was a front for a Democratic child trafficking ring. McQuade chose that location deliberately. It is a reminder that the disinformation machinery and the cruelty are connected. The chaos has a body count.
The book includes proposals for how ordinary citizens can push back. McQuade has not given up. But the weight of the evidence she has assembled makes it clear she is not writing a reassuring book. She is filing a brief.
The Dingo Take
Here is what is genuinely clarifying about McQuade's framing: it removes the need to argue about whether Trump is "really" authoritarian or whether this is "really" as bad as it looks. She is not a cable news pundit doing Hitler comparisons for engagement. She is a former federal prosecutor who spent years building cases against actual organized crime, and she is saying, with professional precision, that this is how a protection racket operates. The favor, the debt, the loyalty enforced through fear of punishment. It is not complicated. It is just usually easier to see when it's happening in Sicily.
The three Cs framework is useful because it names something people have been struggling to articulate for years. The chaos is not a side effect of bad management. The cruelty is not rhetoric that got out of hand. The corruption is not isolated incidents of bad judgment. They are a system. They work together. The chaos keeps you overwhelmed, the cruelty keeps critics afraid, and the corruption is how the whole machine gets paid. McQuade is describing a government that is functioning exactly as designed. That is the scariest sentence in the book.
Robert De Niro writing a blurb for the cover is funny, sure. But think about what it means that we have reached a point where a former U.S. attorney is publishing a serious legal analysis of the presidency and the most natural celebrity endorser is a man famous for playing a crime boss. Nobody in that chain of events made a wrong turn. That is just where we are.
