Former federal prosecutor Barbara McQuade, who served as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan from 2010 to 2017, has published “The Fix: Saving America from the Corruption of a Mob-Style Government,” a book that argues President Donald Trump operates the presidency using the tactics of organized crime. McQuade, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School and a legal analyst for MS Now, draws on her experience prosecuting high-profile corruption cases — including former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and the Volkswagen emissions scandal — to make the case that Trump’s leadership systematically undermines democratic institutions.
McQuade likens Trump to the fictional mob boss Vito Corleone, describing how Trump demands loyalty in exchange for favors. “Every time he does somebody a favour, whether it’s an appointment or something else, he expects there to be a quid pro quo,” McQuade said. She said Trump uses leverage to extract compliance. “He uses any leverage he can get, inflicting pain to try to coerce them to come to the table to negotiate their own punishment. He’s done it with law firms and the media and universities and even foreign allies with tariffs.”
McQuade organizes her critique around what she calls the “three Cs”: corruption, cruelty, and chaos. She points to Trump’s pardons for Jan. 6 rioters and political donors, his acceptance of a $400 million plane from Qatar, and his courtship of tech billionaires seeking favorable merger regulations as evidence of ostentatious corruption. Cruelty is performative and central to Trump’s approach, she said, citing dehumanizing White House social media posts about immigrants and a recently launched website, aliens.gov, that initially appears to be about extraterrestrial life but redirects to messaging declaring “These ‘Aliens’ are the millions of ILLEGALS … Deport them all.” She called the cruelty “the enjoyment of inflicting harm on other humans.”
The chaos, McQuade argues, stems from what historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat calls “engineered incompetence” — Cabinet appointments based on subservience rather than merit. She cited Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine skeptic, leading the Department of Health and Human Services, and Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News host with no senior leadership experience, running the Pentagon.
McQuade traces Trump’s tactics to his longtime lawyer Roy Cohn. “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 said. She said Trump learned in his second term that “what he should prize instead of expertise and competence is loyalty — people who will do his bidding and sing his praises as he wishes.”
The book details how Trump has used executive orders to target elite law firms that had employed attorneys who investigated him, including Robert Mueller and Andrew Weissmann. The orders stripped security clearances and access to federal courthouses; most firms complied. “When an extortionist makes a demand, so often what I’ve seen in my career is people will make a payout and think there, now I’m done, it’s over,” McQuade said. “But that’s not the case because the bully always comes back for more.”
McQuade offered a mixed assessment of the judiciary. She said lower-court judges have largely held the line, but warned that the Supreme Court’s conservative majority, driven by an ideological commitment to the unitary executive theory, is dangerously timed. She noted that Trump appeared in person at a Supreme Court hearing on birthright citizenship, a move she described as intimidating, reminiscent of gang members sitting in a courtroom to remind witnesses “who’s boss.”
The final portion of McQuade’s book outlines a roadmap for civic resistance. She cites research by Harvard political scientist Erica Chenoweth that found that sustained, peaceful protest by just 3.5% of a population can bring down an authoritarian government. McQuade points to the No Kings rallies as evidence of energizing grassroots activism. She urges Americans to run for local office, work on campaigns, and join groups such as the League of Women Voters to combat election disinformation.
Drawing on the recent success of Hungarian lawyer Péter Magyar in challenging Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, McQuade argues that U.S. politicians must move beyond partisan bases and forge alliances between progressives and rural populists. “We need to get back to governing for the majority of the people,” she said. “Let’s focus on the things where we have things in common.” She predicted the authoritarian “house of cards” will eventually collapse. “We have the power to fix what’s wrong with us,” she said. “We the people have the power to take back our democracy.”