{"id":213701,"date":"2026-06-13T23:16:12","date_gmt":"2026-06-13T23:16:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/trump-as-don-corleone-every-time-he-does-somebody-a-favour-he-expects-a-quid-pro-quo-the-guardian\/"},"modified":"2026-06-13T23:16:12","modified_gmt":"2026-06-13T23:16:12","slug":"trump-as-don-corleone-every-time-he-does-somebody-a-favour-he-expects-a-quid-pro-quo-the-guardian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/trump-as-don-corleone-every-time-he-does-somebody-a-favour-he-expects-a-quid-pro-quo-the-guardian\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump as Don Corleone: \u2018Every time he does somebody a favour \u2026 he expects a quid pro quo\u2019 – The Guardian"},"content":{"rendered":"

Barbara McQuade\u2019s book is a piercing expos\u00e9 of how Trump is eroding democracy by turning the US into a mafia state
\u201cI believe in America.\u201d
So says Amerigo Bonasera, a humble funeral director, in the opening scene of the 1972 film The Godfather<\/a>. As Barbara McQuade recounts at the start of her new book<\/a>, 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: \u201cSomeday, and that day may never come, I\u2019ll call upon you to do a service for me.\u201d
The lesson that McQuade, a former federal prosecutor, draws from this is that Corleone is demanding fealty. \u201cWhat he\u2019s saying is I\u2019m going to do this thing for you but now you\u2019re beholden to me.\u201d And for Don Corleone, she says, read Donald Trump<\/a>. \u201cEvery time he does somebody a favour, whether it\u2019s an appointment or something else, he expects there to be a quid pro quo.\u201d
It is a principle that informs The Fix: Saving America from the Corruption of a Mob-Style Government, a piercing expos\u00e9 of how the president is eroding democracy by turning the US into a mafia state \u2013 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<\/a>.
McQuade, 61, is a professor at the University of Michigan Law School<\/a> 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 \u201cunderwear bomber\u201d 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. \u201cHe uses his power to try to control others, especially would-be critics,\u201d 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.
\u201cHe uses any leverage he can get, inflicting pain to try to coerce them to come to the table to negotiate their own punishment. He\u2019s done it with law firms and the media and universities and even foreign allies with tariffs.\u201d
McQuade draws on an example from her home state of Michigan. \u201cHe has threatened to hold up the opening of the Gordie Howe bridge between Detroit and Canada and there\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/em>
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\u2019s red scare hearings and various mob figures, taught Trump the dark arts of surviving legal peril. \u201c<\/em>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,\u201d McQuade says.
While Trump\u2019s first term was somewhat constrained by traditional government officials who pushed back against his worst instincts, his second term is different. \u201cHe has learned this time around that what he should prize instead of expertise and competence is loyalty \u2013 people who will do his bidding and sing his praises as he wishes.\u201d<\/em>
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 \u2013 borrowing a phrase from the House Democratic leader, Hakeem Jeffries<\/a> \u2013 calls the three Cs of the Trump era: corruption, cruelty and chaos.
The corruption is ostentatious<\/a>. McQuade points to Trump\u2019s 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\u2019s 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<\/a>, that seems to be about the search for extraterrestrial life and declares \u201cThey walk among us,\u201d but then reveals: \u201cThese \u2018Aliens\u2019 are the millions of ILLEGALS \u2026 Deport them all.\u201d
McQuade reflects: \u201cThe effect is to chip away at our humanity. <\/em>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.\u201d<\/em>
The chaos is a product of what historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat terms \u201cengineered incompetence\u201d. 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>, a former Fox News host with no senior leadership experience, running the Pentagon at a time of war.
\u201cIf you put people in these very high-level positions, who don\u2019t deserve to be there and wouldn\u2019t 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<\/a> tells in the first administration when he said Trump invited him to dinner and said, I expect loyalty. That\u2019s not how this works.\u201d<\/em>
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: \u201cIf I do something for you, you are now beholden to me. I control you. I own you.\u201d
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\u2019s demands, prioritising their business over the rule of law.
\u201cWhen an extortionist makes a demand, so often what I\u2019ve seen in my career is people will make a payout and think there, now I\u2019m done, it\u2019s over and I can get back to business as usual. But that\u2019s not the case because the bully always comes back for more \u2013 it\u2019s the bully and your lunch money. It\u2019s the extortionist and their prey. They know you\u2019re an easy mark and so they\u2019ll come back for more.
\u201cThe way we\u2019ve seen that play out with the law firms is they\u2019ve been sidelined from challenging any of President Trump\u2019s programmes or executive orders. <\/em>In some ways, Trump has bought silence from his most stringent challengers and critics.\u201d<\/em>
That applies to sections of the media, too. McQuade, who in 2024 published Attack from Within<\/a>: How Disinformation is Sabotaging America, highlights CBS settling a baseless \u201cconsumer fraud\u201d lawsuit filed by Trump over standard editing of a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris.
\u201cA 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.\u201d
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\u2019s birthday note to Jeffrey Epstein<\/a> and news organisations that refused to sign a Pentagon pledge to only report approved news. \u201cThe heroes of this administration when the history is written will be those who did resist and fight back,\u201d she says.
If some institutions of civil society are faltering, what about the courts? McQuade offers a mixed assessment. Lower court judges \u2013 regardless of the party of the president who appointed them \u2013 have largely held the line against the administration\u2019s most egregious overreaches.
The supreme court, however, is a different story. McQuade does not believe the conservative justices are simply \u201cin Trump\u2019s pocket\u201d, but warns that their ideological commitment to the \u201cunitary executive theory\u201d (which holds that the president possesses sole authority over the executive branch) is disastrously timed. \u201cAs 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.\u201d
In a scene reminiscent of The Godfather Part II, Trump showed up at a supreme court hearing on birthright citizenship<\/a>, staring at the justices and sending a message by his mere presence. McQuade recalls: \u201cI\u2019ve 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\u2019s boss and it can be very intimidating.\u201d
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<\/a>, 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<\/a> as evidence of this energising force. Visiting a protest in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, she found \u201cAmericana\u201d 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<\/a> to combat election disinformation.
Crucially, she believes the political opposition must rethink its strategy. Drawing on the recent success of the Hungarian lawyer P\u00e9ter Magyar<\/a> in challenging the country\u2019s illiberal leader Viktor Orb\u00e1n, McQuade argues that US politicians must stop retreating to their partisan bases and instead forge alliances between progressives and rural populists.
\u201cWe need to get back to governing for the majority of the people. Let\u2019s focus on the things where we have things in common, what we can do, what we can achieve. Let\u2019s address affordability. Let\u2019s address the housing crisis. Let\u2019s talk about jobs. Let\u2019s talk about how we\u2019re going to get our arms around AI and climate change.\u201d
She insists that the authoritarian \u201chouse of cards\u201d will eventually collapse, as voters realise that Donald Corleone cannot deliver on its promises amid rising gas prices and foreign entanglements in Iran. \u201cWe have the power to fix what\u2019s wrong with us,\u201d she adds. \u201cWe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Barbara McQuade\u2019s book is a piercing expos\u00e9 of how Trump is eroding democracy by turning the US into a mafia state\u201cI believe in America.\u201dSo 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":213702,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-213701","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-us","8":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213701","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=213701"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213701\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/213702"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=213701"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=213701"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=213701"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}