The Fix

Former federal prosecutor Barbara McQuade argues that Donald Trump's second presidential administration operates through corruption, cruelty, and chaos in ways that parallel organized crime. Drawing on her experience at the Department of Justice (DOJ), McQuade frames many chapters with illustrative cases and stories, and proposes structural reforms to protect American democracy.

McQuade opens with the 2013 federal trial of former Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, whom she prosecuted for racketeering, to introduce her central argument: Trump has sought to concentrate all governmental power in himself, governing through leverage, threats, and personal enrichment in the style of a mob boss. She traces this approach to Trump's mentor Roy Cohn, a lawyer who represented Senator Joseph McCarthy and New York crime families. McQuade catalogs Trump's 34 felony convictions for falsifying business records and multiple indictments dismissed on procedural grounds rather than on their merits, framing his second term as defined by corruption serving private interests at public expense, cruelty toward vulnerable populations, and institutional chaos.

McQuade argues that Trump uses rewards and punishments to enforce loyalty, comparing his demand for obedience to the Corleone crime family in The Godfather. Second-term appointees such as Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense and Kash Patel as FBI director were chosen for fealty rather than qualifications, a pattern historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat calls "engineered incompetence": Unqualified appointees become dependent on the leader and easier to control. McQuade contrasts Hegseth, whose record included allegations of financial mismanagement, with his predecessor Mark Esper, who refused Trump's request to deploy troops against George Floyd protesters in 2020 and was fired. She documents Trump's purge of independent officials, including inspectors general, federal reserve governors, and prosecutors who worked on the January 6, 2021, Capitol attack cases.

McQuade argues that Trump deploys spectacle to project invincibility, tracing his showmanship from The Apprentice television show through his redecoration of the White House with gold fixtures, a planned $400 million ballroom funded by companies bidding for government contracts, and a military parade costing up to $45 million. She documents the deployment of National Guard troops to American cities over local officials' objections, naval strikes on alleged drug boats, and a military operation to abduct Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro. She also details efforts to control culture by removing references to climate change, slavery, and transgender Americans from national parks and museums.

On disinformation, McQuade argues Trump uses false claims to distract, punish, and rewrite history. She describes his first-day executive order alleging that the Biden administration had "weaponized" government, which Attorney General Pam Bondi used to establish a task force targeting officials involved in Trump's prosecutions. McQuade details sweeping clemency for January 6 defendants, including commuting sentences for Proud Boys and Oath Keepers members convicted of seditious conspiracy, and the White House website's revision describing the attack as a "peaceful" protest. She notes the rise of political violence in 2025, including the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk and the murders of Minnesota legislator Melissa Hortman and her husband.

McQuade contends that Trump treats the Constitution as an obstacle. She describes his seizure of executive power through orders asserting control over independent regulatory agencies and restoring Schedule F, which allows the firing of federal employees in policymaking roles. She catalogs ethical violations: the Trump Organization entering real estate deals in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states during his presidency; accepting a $400 million jet from Qatar, raising concerns under the Constitution's prohibition on gifts from foreign governments; launching World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency company that earned tens of millions for the Trump family while the administration relaxed crypto regulation; and selling branded merchandise and meme coins, a type of speculative cryptocurrency, from the presidency.

McQuade argues Trump uses extortion tactics against law firms, the media, and universities. Executive orders targeted major firms with baseless accusations, forcing eight to promise nearly $1 billion in pro bono services to Trump's causes, while four that fought back won easily in court. She describes media capitulation, including Jeff Bezos blocking the Washington Post's endorsement of Kamala Harris and FCC Chairman Brendan Carr suggesting ABC could lose its broadcast license over comedian Jimmy Kimmel's comments. Columbia University agreed to government oversight of its curriculum after Trump stripped $400 million in federal grants, while Harvard University refused and won favorable rulings even as Trump froze $2.2 billion in funds.

McQuade examines the DOJ's transformation into a personal enforcement tool. She opens with the case of New York City mayor Eric Adams, whose bribery charges the Trump DOJ offered to dismiss in exchange for cooperation on immigration enforcement, prompting interim US attorney Danielle Sassoon, a member of the Federalist Society, a conservative legal organization, to resign in protest. McQuade describes legally flimsy indictments of former FBI director James Comey and New York attorney general Letitia James, both dismissed when a judge found the prosecutor's appointment invalid, and documents the purge of DOJ personnel, the abandonment of police consent decrees, court-supervised reform agreements with local police departments, and the dismissal of voting-rights lawsuits across multiple states.

McQuade draws parallels between Trump's relationship with tech billionaires and the oligarchic systems of Russia and the Gilded Age of the 1870s through 1910s. She documents how figures like Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk reversed from critics to supporters as their companies faced regulatory pressure, and details Trump's interventions in private business, including retaining a "Golden Share," a special government stake granting veto power, in US Steel's sale.

On immigration, McQuade documents aggressive enforcement: declaring a national emergency, imposing arrest quotas, attempting to redefine birthright citizenship contrary to the Fourteenth Amendment, and sending approximately 250 men to El Salvador's terrorism prison in apparent violation of a judge's order, including the erroneous deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland resident. She describes the arrests of international students for pro-Palestinian speech, including Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate, and Rümeysa Öztürk, a Tufts doctoral student seized by masked agents for coauthoring a critical op-ed. She also details attacks on transgender Americans through executive orders and military bans.

McQuade argues the constitutional separation of powers has devolved into a separation of parties. She documents Republican members of Congress who admitted fear of retaliation, the administration's repeated defiance of court orders, and the Supreme Court's enabling role through the 2024 presidential immunity decision, the growing use of the shadow docket, the court's expedited emergency docket, to lift lower-court injunctions, and a ruling that district courts cannot issue universal injunctions (orders blocking a policy nationwide rather than only for the plaintiffs in a given case). On foreign policy, McQuade contrasts Trump's hostility toward Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky with his admiration for authoritarian leaders, and describes how tariff chaos and the abandonment of soft power, meaning influence through diplomacy, aid, and cultural exchange, pushed traditional allies to negotiate agreements without the United States.

McQuade draws on historical precedents for reform, including the Progressive Era's trust-busting, the formation of the United Nations and NATO, the Nuremberg Trials, the civil rights movement, and post-Watergate legislation. She cites Harvard political scientist Erica Chenoweth's finding that nonviolent mobilization of just 3.5 percent of a population has reliably ousted authoritarian regimes. McQuade proposes structural reforms: mandating professional qualifications for appointees; codifying DOJ independence; extending ethics laws to prohibit the president from profiting from office; empowering courts by moving the US Marshals Service to the judicial branch; and reforming elections through the DISCLOSE Act, requiring super PACs to reveal their donors; a constitutional amendment to overturn the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling on campaign spending; independent redistricting commissions; ranked-choice voting; and the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, an agreement among states to award their electoral votes to the national popular vote winner. She outlines policies addressing income inequality, immigration, crime reduction, and climate change.

McQuade concludes by calling on citizens to take action through litigation, organizing, education, satire, and voting. Courts blocked the president's actions in at least 144 of more than 500 legal challenges in the first 10 months of 2025, and an estimated four to seven million people participated in October 2025 "No Kings" protests. McQuade argues that authoritarian regimes eventually fail because leaders surround themselves with loyalists who lack the competence to govern, and urges citizens to act before democratic institutions are too damaged to recover.