“I believe in America.”

So says Amerigo Bonasera, a humble funeral director, in the opening scene of the 1972 film The Godfather. As Barbara McQuade recounts at the start of her new book, Bonasera has come to the shadowy office of Vito Corleone to ask him to avenge a brutal attack on his daughter. Ultimately, Corleone agrees, whispering: “Someday, and that day may never come, I’ll call upon you to do a service for me.”

The lesson that McQuade, a former federal prosecutor, draws from this is that Corleone is demanding fealty. “What he’s saying is I’m going to do this thing for you but now you’re beholden to me.” And for Don Corleone, she says, read Donald Trump. “Every time he does somebody a favour, whether it’s an appointment or something else, he expects there to be a quid pro quo.”

It is a principle that informs The Fix: Saving America from the Corruption of a Mob-Style Government, a piercing exposé of how the president is eroding democracy by turning the US into a mafia state – with some proposals for how ordinary citizens can fight back. There is even a cover blurb from the Godfather Part II star Robert De Niro.

McQuade, 61, is a professor at the University of Michigan Law School and legal analyst for the MS Now network. 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.

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,” she says, sitting outside Comet Ping Pong, a Washington pizza joint targeted in 2016 by an armed man motivated by the baseless conspiracy theory that it was harbouring 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.”

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McQuade draws on an example from her home state of Michigan. “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. The fix is in: rigging the system to amass power and exert control.”

It is an approach that McQuade argues Trump learned decades ago from his notorious lawyer, Roy Cohn, who represented Trump and his father in the 1970s when the justice department sued them for racial discrimination.

Cohn, a former assistant US attorney and counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy’s red scare hearings and various mob figures, taught Trump the dark arts of surviving legal peril. “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 and we see him do that to great success,” McQuade says.

While Trump’s first term was somewhat constrained by traditional government officials who pushed back against his worst instincts, his second term is different. “He has learned this time around 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.”

McQuade notes that democratic institutions were turned against the people in 1930s Germany while oligarchs and loyalists replaced public servants in post-Soviet Russia. Hungary and Turkey offer contemporary examples of democracies hollowed from within. In America the dynamic manifests in what McQuade – borrowing a phrase from the House Democratic leader, Hakeem Jeffries – calls the three Cs of the Trump era: corruption, cruelty and chaos.

The corruption is ostentatious. McQuade points to Trump’s pardons for January 6 rioters and political donors, his acceptance of a $400m plane from Qatar and his cosying up to tech billionaires seeking favourable merger regulations in violation of the constitutional emoluments clause.

The cruelty is performative and is the point. It is there in Trump’s rhetoric and official White House social media accounts, including dehumanising memes about locking up and deporting immigrants with Hollywood-style music. Last month the White House launched a sci-fi-style web page, aliens.gov, that seems to be about the search for extraterrestrial life and declares “They walk among us,” but then reveals: “These ‘Aliens’ are the millions of ILLEGALS … Deport them all.”

McQuade reflects: “The effect is to chip away at our humanity.The cruelty is the enjoyment of inflicting harm on other humans, which is just not the way the United States has conducted itself in the world, at least in the post-World War II order.”

The chaos is a product of what historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat terms “engineered incompetence”. Cabinet appointments are no longer based on merit but subservience. McQuade points to the surreal reality of a vaccine denier, Robert Kennedy Jr, leading the Department of Health and Human Services and Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News host with no senior leadership experience, running the Pentagon at a time of war.

“If you put people in these very high-level positions, who don’t deserve to be there and wouldn’t be there under any other administration, they feel beholden to the leader who put them there and, even though nobody ever has to say so out loud, they understand you got this job for one reason and one reason only. I talk about the story that [former FBI director] Jim Comey tells in the first administration when he said Trump invited him to dinner and said, I expect loyalty. That’s not how this works.”

Trump uses both carrots and sticks to extort compliance. When he pardoned the Texas congressman Henry Cuellar, indicted on corruption and money laundering charges, Trump was subsequently outraged to learn that Cuellar still intended to run for re-election as a Democrat. McQuade interprets: “If I do something for you, you are now beholden to me. I control you. I own you.”

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The sticks are equally insidious. McQuade details how Trump issued executive orders to punish elite law firms that had previously employed attorneys who investigated him, such as Robert Mueller or Andrew Weissmann. These firms lost security clearances and access to federal courthouses. Most of these powerful firms succumbed to the president’s demands, prioritising their business over the rule of law.

“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 and I can get back to business as usual. But that’s not the case because the bully always comes back for more – it’s the bully and your lunch money. It’s the extortionist and their prey. They know you’re an easy mark and so they’ll come back for more.

“The way we’ve seen that play out with the law firms is they’ve been sidelined from challenging any of President Trump’s programmes or executive orders. In some ways, Trump has bought silence from his most stringent challengers and critics.”

That applies to sections of the media, too. McQuade, who in 2024 published Attack from Within: How Disinformation is Sabotaging America, highlights CBS settling a baseless “consumer fraud” lawsuit filed by Trump over standard editing of a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris.

“A big part of it is they are more focused on money than on journalistic ethics. These big media companies now are interested in mergers. They have to get approved by the federal government and so they are performing favours for President Trump in hopes that they will get favourable treatment.”

McQuade praises the Associated Press for refusing to change the name Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America, the Wall Street Journal for defying threats to publish Trump’s birthday note to Jeffrey Epstein and news organisations that refused to sign a Pentagon pledge to only report approved news. “The heroes of this administration when the history is written will be those who did resist and fight back,” she says.

If some institutions of civil society are faltering, what about the courts? McQuade offers a mixed assessment. Lower court judges – regardless of the party of the president who appointed them – have largely held the line against the administration’s most egregious overreaches.

The supreme court, however, is a different story. McQuade does not believe the conservative justices are simply “in Trump’s pocket”, but warns that their ideological commitment to the “unitary executive theory” (which holds that the president possesses sole authority over the executive branch) is disastrously timed. “As Justice [Ketanji Brown] Jackson has said, now is not the time to allow the executive to kind of run wild. Now is the time to stand up for what we do here in courts.”

In a scene reminiscent of The Godfather Part II, Trump showed up at a supreme court hearing on birthright citizenship, staring at the justices and sending a message by his mere presence. McQuade recalls: “I’ve seen that in court cases where there are gang members and others in an organisation who will just sit in the courtroom and look at them as they testify and remind you who’s boss and it can be very intimidating.”

But her title, The Fix, has a second, more hopeful meaning. McQuade, who lives with her husband in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and has four children, outlines a roadmap for civic action. She cites research by the Harvard political scientist Erica Chenoweth, who found that when just 3.5% of a population engages in peaceful, sustained protest, they can bring down an authoritarian government.

McQuade points to No Kings rallies as evidence of this energising force. Visiting a protest in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, she found “Americana” in action: priests, teachers, students and ordinary citizens holding signs. The author also urges Americans to run for local office, work on campaigns and join grassroots organisations such as the League of Women Voters to combat election disinformation.

Crucially, she believes the political opposition must rethink its strategy. Drawing on the recent success of the Hungarian lawyer Péter Magyar in challenging the country’s illiberal leader Viktor Orbán, McQuade argues that US politicians must stop retreating to their partisan bases and instead forge alliances between progressives and rural populists.

“We need to get back to governing for the majority of the people. Let’s focus on the things where we have things in common, what we can do, what we can achieve. Let’s address affordability. Let’s address the housing crisis. Let’s talk about jobs. Let’s talk about how we’re going to get our arms around AI and climate change.”

She insists that the authoritarian “house of cards” will eventually collapse, as voters realise that Donald Corleone cannot deliver on its promises amid rising gas prices and foreign entanglements in Iran. “We have the power to fix what’s wrong with us,” she adds. “We the people have the power to take back our democracy. We have the power to run for office, to work on campaigns, to control our own destiny and what I hope is people will read this book and be inspired to do just that.”