Is Trump's management style: more like a King or more like a mob boss?

 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 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

The rule of law trumps the rule of a ruler: USA 101

A version of this appeared in the e and print editions of the Sky Hi News November 7, 2018 and on line November 8.

 https://www.skyhinews.com/news/opinion/opinion-usa-101-the-rule-of-law-trumps-the-rule-of-the-ruler/

The morning after November 6:  Still sitting in the Oval Office is a president who views laws as a barrier to his power, a challenge  to get around them or  claim he can bend the rule of law to his benefit. He brought with him to the White House this scofflaw attitude,  rooted  in his business experience. His midterm election promise to reverse the 14th Amendment is only one case in point. (added later November 7 A crisis is being engineered by Donald Trump to impede the Mueller investigation by appointing a yes man flunky on record to criticizing Mueller acting in place  of fired Jeff Sessions This is a direct result of Trump holding onto the Senate...By doing so, Trump has insulated himself against impeachment and can operate with all of the arrogance, retribution, and abuse of power he thinks he has...rule of law be damned. This is a third finger raised against Mueller and democracy. It is also one more element in building an obstruction of justice case  against Trump Mueller could use if Trump's appointee takes action to rein in Mueller.  A constitutional crisis is just beginning.  Expect Trump to take advantage of the lame duck session to get away with whatever he can before the newly blue majority  House is sworn in.  )

Throughout his life as an heir to a fortune which he nurtured into a greater fortune with a family run real estate  enterprise, Donald Trump  only needed  his  simple command to rule his business. Any challengers were to be hit back harder than they hurt him. For him, as expressed in interviews , fear is his power.  His reputation was not good  in the real estate field, already filled with con artists and puffing sales people and he shrugged off  a long list of suits and bankruptcies as  just another cost of doing business.  He survived claims of fraud and misdeeds   by  settling  disputes with money, as he did in the Trump University case or his problem with infidelities and abusive  behavior with women.
When he became  president, he tried  to run the White House with the same attitudes and ethics  as he had run his business. His TV reality show and real estate hawker mentality, his frequently uttered lies and exaggerations  continued. He arose to political power by leading causes like birtherism, claiming Obama was an illegitimate president because he was born in Kenya, contrary to overwhelming evidence.  This  appealed to many  who resented that  their preservation of ethnic and racial power was constrained by the rule of  law, political correctness (AKA civility),  and the Constitution. Later he was claiming he was above the law because of his position as president. He asserted  he could not be subpoenaed to testify  in a criminal case and he could pardon himself.
 He  has made promises that would challenge the very supremacy of the Constitution.  In a last minute midterm election promise, Donald Trump said he would sign an executive order to overturn the 14th Amendment. It guaranteed a  person’s  children born  or naturalized in the US  would be  US citizens.  With a stroke of a pen signing an executive order, he proposed to change the constitution. He would destroy this odious  birthright citizenship. It was obviously a promise made to appeal to his white nationalist base. If he had the power to change the Constitution by executive order,  then he could also  take action against his critics, the enemies of the people, the free press,  and  keep on going, until the rule of law, the Constitution, was not worth the parchment on which it was written. To keep some wannabe despot,   king , or dictator from altering that fundamental  document from which all laws flowed, the Constitution made itself very difficult to be amended, fortunately for democracy.    “Amendments must be proposed either by the Congress with a two-thirds majority vote in both the House of Representatives and the Senate or by a constitutional convention called for by two-thirds of the State legislatures.”
Subject to interpretation, the application of some Constitutional provisions are  altered. However, the 14th is one of the most unambiguous amendments ever written.    “Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside” He was trying to pull off another  con, counting on  the ignorance of his devout followers.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-says-maybe-u-s-will-have-a-president-for-life-someday