What is Donald Trump's management style? More like a wannabe dictator or king or more like a mob boss? Either way, corruption is part of it. He has made billiions using his power as president. https://www.newyorker.com/news/a-reporter-at-large/trumps-profiteering-hits-four-billion-dollars
My take: Trump's management style is based on corruption, more like a mob boss than a King, and both can be true at the same time... only corruption and pocket padding have marked much of Trump's second term.
This got me thinking: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/02/corruption-trump-administration/681794/?utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share.In this February 24, 2025, opinion piece in the Atlantic, the writer Jonathan Rauch argued that there was a fancy word for what Trump really personifies. It is patrimonialism, another word for a mob boss. Trump uses his power to make himself, his family, and his loyal followers rich. What Rauch describes is padding the pockets of his family and loyalists. Trump favors loyalists, I note, who have substance and power of their own to benefit him. Pocetk padding is one aspect, and it appears to be his motivation for some of his actions, including paving the way through regulatory agencies to give legality to his crypto ventures and business dealings like those of his son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
Another characteristic of a mob boss is punishing those who are "disloyal" or defy him. He does it by abusing his powers to "take revenge and retribution ", and carries it out, instructing and/or approving, or empowering his lieutenants in his cabinet and powerful regulatory government positions to take action using methods that courts later consider illegal or unconstitutional. Those actions inflict pain, financial and public pillorying, until some judicial branch stops it months later, and those judicial chickens are just coming home to roost. Even "his" Supreme Court is putting on the brakes, though most of the action is still at the lower federal court level. Trump, like a good mob boss, expects those he appoints to be loyal to him and not to the Constitution. April 1, 2026, he sat glaring in the Supreme Court chambers listening to the arguments near and dear to his heart, denial of birthright citizenship, as if to remind the justices to be loyal to him. After all, he appointed so many of them. It appeared to be an act of intimidation, if not just to give support to far-right, racist, white nationalist dreams. No president in US history had sat to hear the Supreme Court's argumentation on an issue until this.
Recent examples of this include unjustified legal action by the DOJ or threatening the political future of those in GOP-favoring gerrymandered districts. It does not mean doing what is in the reason for his election, such as reducing the cost of living and ending wars abroad.
I cannot help but think that a role model for a mob boss was best described in "The Godfather". Another description of how Trump operates was written by one of his former "fixer", Michael Cohen, Disloyal: A Memoir: The True Story of the Former Personal Attorney to President Donald J. Trump (2020). Cohen may be embittered, but the book is instructive. One of Cohen's contributions to understanding Trump is that Trump never gives a direct order, but drops enough hints about what he wants done,
https://mufticforumblog.blogspot.com/2026/03/semantics-for-masses-grifter-for.html
