Ex-prosecutor says Trump’s 'mob boss' world is about to spiral

U.S. President Donald Trump looks on during a press briefing at the White House, on the one-year mark into his second term in office, in Washington, D.C., U.S., January 20, 2026. REUTERS Nathan Howard

Former prosecutor Barbara McQuade knows mob tactics, and she says she sees the mob in countless aspects of President Donald Trump’s practices.

“From 2010 to 2017 she served as the US attorney for the eastern district of Michigan. She has prosecuted high-profile corruption cases, including that of the former Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, as well as the ‘underwear bomber’ Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and the Volkswagen emissions scandal,” reports the Guardian. “Now she turns her prosecutorial gaze on the occupant of the White House and makes the case that Trump governs like a mob boss.”

“He uses his power to try to control others, especially would-be critics,” said McQuade, speaking to the Guardian while sitting outside Comet Ping Pong, a Washington pizza restaurant targeted in 2016 on the baseless conspiracy theory that it was harboring children as part of a Democratic-led child sex-trafficking ring. “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.”

She cites the president’s recent machinations in Michigan politics as example: “He has threatened to hold up the opening of the Gordie Howe bridge between Detroit and Canada and there’s an owner of a private span next to it who made a million-dollar donation to the MAGA SuperPac at around the same time."

McQuade, the author of The Fix: Saving America from the Corruption of a Mob-Style Government, also points to Trump’s pardons for January 6 rioters and political donors, his acceptance of a $400 million plane from Qatar and his lockstep with tech billionaires seeking favorable merger regulations in violation of the constitutional emoluments clause.

Trump uses both carrots and sticks to extort compliance, she said, and he get furious when the carrots don’t deliver.

When he pardoned the Texas congressman Henry Cuellar, who was indicted on corruption and money laundering charges, Trump was outraged to learn that Cuellar still intended to run for re-election as a Democrat.

“If I do something for you, you are now beholden to me. I control you. I own you,” McQuade told the Guardian.

But his sticks “are equally insidious,” she said, referring to how Trump issued executive orders to punish elite law firms that had previously employed attorneys who investigated him, including Robert Mueller or Andrew Weissmann. His EOs barred these firms’ security clearances and access to federal courthouses. And many of them surrendered to Trump’s demands.

But mobsters don’t have to deliver low inflation and affordable gas — and on these issues Trump is floundering. So his authoritarian “house of cards” will eventually collapse, as voters realize that he can’t hold up to his promises.

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