Last Tuesday’s State of the Union featured yet another eye-opening experience for the American people in the Time of Trump: watching the president of the United States stand in the House of Representatives and threaten Congress that there would be consequences if it persisted in investigating evidence that he and his team had engaged in corrupt acts.

“If there is going to be peace and legislation, there cannot be war and investigation,” the president warned. “It just doesn’t work that way.”

We have never had a president who so acted like a crime boss, and even after two years of Mr. Trump’s Don Corleone routine, it still takes some getting used to. He has variously threatened to retaliate against journalists who have had the nerve to not buy the hogwash he has been selling, and done his best to intimidate his longtime fixer, Michael Cohen, into rethinking testifying to Congress on what he knew about Trump by threatening Cohen’s family.

There is nothing subtle here; the president has admitted to firing the FBI director for refusing to agree to stop an FBI investigation into Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election that encompassed Trump and his closest advisers.

Threats and intimidation not only worked well for Donald Trump in the New York real estate world, but were his stock-in-trade. They have worked less well for him in the Oval Office. Federal and state prosecutors are swarming all over evidence of wrongdoing and outright law-breaking that has come streaming from the president, his White House, his inaugural committee, his putatively charitable foundation and his businesses like candy from a punctured pinata.

If the president’s State of the Union threat was intended as a fastball at the heads of Congressional committees investigating the administration, it did not succeed in brushing the new chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), back from home plate. Within hours of the president’s speech, Schiff issued a statement that had the words “Nice try” written all over it. The committee, he said, not only intended to reopen the investigation into Russian interference into the 2016 elections and the Trump-Russia connection that the Republicans, acting more like a protection racket than anything else, had squashed, but it was going to go “beyond Russia.” Schiff announced that the committee would examine “money laundering and financial compromise related to the business interests of President Trump, his family and his associates.” His announcement refrained from closing with the words “Have a nice day.”

Given the cult of threats and intimidation in residence in the White House, it was no surprise that the week also ended with a story about threats and intimidation — this time by a key Trump ally against someone Trump and his allies regard as a key Trump enemy. The emails sent by executives at American Media to Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos contained this express threat: The National Enquirer, which it owned, would publish materials embarrassing to Bezos that it had somehow obtained unless Bezos stopped investigating how American Media had obtained them, and unless he stated (falsely) that there was no reason to believe politics was behind American Media’s conduct. It was hard to say whether the emails to Bezos were more thuggish or arrogant, since American Media barely escaped prosecution for its role in Donald Trump’s scheme to pay off women and then cover it up, and nevertheless placed itself in criminal jeopardy so soon after dodging the bullet.

“A fish,” it is said, “rots from the head down.” The normalizing of gangsterism in places and at levels where it has not normally been on display is one of the more prominent features of the Trump era. America will be in need of one very long, very hot national shower to cleanse itself after that era has mercifully come to a close.

Jeff Robbins is a Boston lawyer and former U.S. delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Committee.