Teflon Don: how Trump the mafia boss fought the law … and won

“You gotta do this. You gotta call Rod...”

It was 17 June 2017. Donald Trump was on the phone, urging Don McGahn, the White House counsel, to turn the screw on the deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein.

“Call Rod, tell Rod that [Robert] Mueller has conflicts and can’t be the special counsel,” Trump said, in a second call that day. “Mueller has to go … Call me back when you do it.”

If the tone of these secret conversations, revealed in Mueller’s long-awaited report this week, remind you of Tony Soprano – the amoral, brooding, charismatic, philandering, thuggish crime boss in the eponymous TV drama – ordering a hit on one his enemies, you are not alone.

Over 448 pages, Mueller does not present Trump as a traitor but does portray him as a serial liar willing to abuse power, shred norms and bend the rule of law in a White House rotten to the core. Amid this culture of malfeasance and mendacity, trusted lieutenants are expected to demonstrate absolute loyalty, up to and including obstructing justice to save the president’s skin.

“He conducts himself like a New Jersey mob boss who is unconcerned about asking the people around him to conduct unethical or legally challenging behaviour,” said Kurt Bardella, former spokesperson and senior adviser for the House oversight and government reform committee. “Truth and accuracy just don’t factor into his thought process at all.

“The demands for loyalty and fealty are like an organised crime network. Instead of the John Gotti family, it’s the Trump family and his solders are the Republican members of Congress who protect him.”

After two years that transfixed Washington, Mueller’s redacted report outlined 11 episodes in which Trump or his campaign organisation tried to have the special counsel fired, limit the scope of his investigation or interfere in other ways. But it did not recommend charges, nor find a criminal conspiracy with Russia to help Trump win the 2016 election, though it listed plenty of contacts.

The president was quick to claim vindication and rail against the media, while his House counselor, Kellyanne Conway, declared it was “really the best day since he got elected”. But Mueller state pointedly that “while this report does not conclude that the president committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him”, potentially offering Congress a roadmap to impeachment.

The devil was in details surely enough to end the career of almost any other politician. Many had been previously reported – a testament to dogged journalism – which probably reduced their shock value and worked to Trump’s benefit. But they also gave the clearest picture yet of the character of the man in the Oval Office.

Almost a year ago, the comedian Bill Maher told his HBO viewers: “People call this presidency a reality show. It’s more like a Scorsese movie. Everything Trump does is modeled on the mob. When he was accused of sexual harassment, he brought in Bill Clinton’s accusers to sit in the gallery at the debate, just like Michael Corleone brought Frank Pentangeli’s brother into court [in The Godfather Part II] …

“He’s so much like a Don that his name is literally Don.”

Mueller’s report depicted a man dangling pardons to acolytes, turning vicious against those who refused to kiss his ring and frantically scrambling to conceal evidence as law enforcement closed in. He appeared paranoid about who was on his side and who might betray him.

For example, James Comey, then director of the FBI, has claimed that in January 2017 Trump invited him to dinner and asked him for a pledge of loyalty. The president has disputed the account. However, Mueller found that “substantial evidence corroborates Comey’s account of the dinner invitation and the request for loyalty”.

In July that year, Trump asked his staff secretary Rob Porter for his opinion of associate attorney general Rachel Brand, asking if Brand was “on the team”.

Trump used the language of the mob to describe his foes. Mueller’s team said it found evidence to suggest the president intended to discourage his longtime confidante Michael Cohen from cooperating with federal authorities, noting that after Cohen did so, Trump branded him a “rat” and publicly suggested his family members had committed crimes.

Then there was Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chair now in jail for bank fraud and tax evasion. Mueller noted: “The evidence supports the inference that the president intended Manafort to believe that he could receive a pardon, which would make cooperation with the government as a means of obtaining a lesser sentence unnecessary.”

Trump’s attempts to fire Mueller, and then to cover up those attempts, pose one of the biggest question marks over his conduct.

His calls to McGahn that day in June 2017 were in vain. The White House counsel refused, deciding he would rather quit than trigger a crisis “akin to the Saturday Night Massacre”, Richard Nixon’s effort to hobble the Watergate investigation. McGahn told the then White House chief of staff, Reince Priebus, the president had asked him to “do crazy shit”.

Seven months later, when the New York Times revealed that Trump had asked McGahn to fire Mueller, the president told McGahn: “I never said to fire Mueller. I never said ‘fire’. This story doesn’t look good. You need to correct this. You’re the White House counsel.” McGahn refused, saying the story was accurate.

A livid Trump told Porter he would dismiss McGahn if the latter refused to craft a memo stating Trump never directed him to fire Mueller. The president is quoted as saying: “If he doesn’t write a letter, then maybe I’ll have to get rid of him.” He even disparaged McGahn as a “lying bastard”, according to Porter’s account.

In another telling encounter, Trump wondered aloud why McGahn took notes during meetings. “What about these notes? Why do you take notes? Lawyers don’t take notes. I never had a lawyer who took notes.” McGahn replied that he did so because he was a “real lawyer” and note-taking created a record. Trump said: “I’ve had a lot of great lawyers, like Roy Cohn. He did not take notes.”

Cohn, a mafia lawyer and political fixer best known for his involvement in Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist campaign of the 1950s, was a mentor and personal lawyer to Trump early in his business career.

Gwenda Blair, author of The Trumps and of Donald Trump: The Candidate, said: “I’m ever reminded of how consistent this man has been in this relentless focus on what he can get away with. I take my hat off, grudgingly, to his nose, his instinct for where is the bright part of the line and staying on a hair’s breadth on the right side of it.

“His stuff about no notes, no memos, no paper trails. That’s what he was telling his staff in the mid-70s. That was before The Godfather.”

Blair added: “There’s a moment in the report where Jared Kushner was trying to tell him something and Trump pushed him away and said, ‘I don’t want to know that.’ The instinct for deniability. Very Nixonian. The shrewdness about what you can get away with, just staying on the right side of the line. He can spot it in other people who will abide by that, like [the attorney general] William Barr.”

The report gives that impression that Trump was saved from himself by staff who disobeyed him, even at the risk of earning his wrath. Mueller writes that Trump’s attempts to seize control of the investigation “were mostly unsuccessful, but that is largely because the persons who surrounded the president declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests”.

Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said: “I thought it was a shocking report. I don’t think we’ve had a president in the modern era who’s been revealed to be as coarse and brutish and willing to break the law as Donald Trump.

“The criminal intent is quite comparable to what Richard Nixon engaged in. Trump was able to get away with it because his staff said no. Nixon’s staff did the Watergate break-in and participated in the cover-up.”

The investigation spelled out just how far Trump has gone in pushing the limits of the presidency and making others complicit. Jacobs added: “What concerns me about this moment is the message it sends to future presidents: Trump was able to act in a lawless way and solicit help from a foreign rival. One shudders to think how future presidents will act. What’s the deterrent?”

As faithfully chronicled in The Sopranos, the most skilled crime bosses manage to remain untouchable even as their captains and footsoldiers are picked off. Trump managed to resist sitting down for an in-person interview with the special counsel.

The report’s appendix includes 12 pages of Trump’s written responses to queries from Mueller’s team. There were more than 30 instances when Trump offered variations of “I don’t recall”, answers Mueller deemed “inadequate”. He considered issuing a subpoena to force the president to appear but decided to avoid a long legal battle.

But there was another striking moment in the report that seemed out of character. Mueller notes that Trump was so agitated at the special counsel’s appointment on 17 May 2017 that he slumped back in his chair and declared: “Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my presidency. I’m fucked.”

A rare show of self-doubt from an otherwise shameless Don. Corleone and Soprano would not have approved.