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“How strange is it for you to sit here and compare the President to a mob boss?” The question doesn’t reference Vladimir Putin, the Russian dictator, or Rodrigo Duterte, the murderous ruler of the Philippines, though both are presidents of their countries. George Stephanopoulos of ABC News is asking former FBI director James Comey about Donald Trump.

America is about to learn the answer as the interview is aired tonight and Comey’s book, “A Higher Loyalty,” is published this week. Early excerpts and reviews have already revealed that Comey considers Trump “unethical and untethered to the truth.” The President’s leadership, writes Comey, is “ego-driven, transactional and about personal loyalty.” It all adds up to a toxic culture of the sort he encountered in his days investigating the mob.

Shocking as all this should be, the fact that we have reached the point where the nation’s former top cop is publicly discussing the mob-like behavior of a sitting President became inevitable on election night 2016. And though the right-wing media is working overtime to call the Trump-godfather comparison obscene and histrionic, my time studying the Donald has taught me it’s actually quite apt.

Seventy years old when he took office, Trump has long projected a menacing mobster/executive style. It was in the air all around him when we sat for XX hours of interviews in 20XX as I wrote my book, “Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success.”

It starts with the look — the suits, the hair, the bodyguards — and extends to his penchant for tough-guy talk. Opponents get nasty nicknames like Crooked Hillary or Lyin’ Ted or Crying Chuck and critics become assailants whom he promises to “hit back 10 times harder.”

Though Trump considers this stance righteous, it is the attitude of a thug who intends to intimidate. Especially when the man doing the threatening is the most powerful person in the world.

In his life before the White House, Trump operated with the impulsive unpredictability of a Tony Soprano and prized, above all else, secrecy and loyalty.

And like a mobster, Trump surrounded himself not with top talent, as he has often claimed, but with a circle of needy sycophants who owed their existence, and their futures, to him. Some of them are family, entrusted with the secrets of more than 500 private companies — remember how candidate Trump reneged on the promise to release his tax returns? — they will inherit his fortune when he dies.

Many more of them are bound to Trump not by blood but by money. Among these, over the years, no one has been more important than his lawyer Michael Cohen.

Everyone knows from the movies that big bosses depend on lawyers — Tom Hagen is the prototype — who keep them out of trouble, and that attorneys have special privileges under the law. What is said between lawyers and clients is generally out of a prosecutor’s reach, and this allows an attorney to become a confidante, confessor and, in the worst cases, conspirator.

Trump’s first lawyer, the notorious and now deceased Roy Cohn, was the classic example of attorneys who enable criminal clients. Cohn, a mentor to Trump in his formative years, even let mobsters use his office to confer so they could be sure they were talking in rooms that were free of police-planted bugs.

For Trump, he served as menacing figure so frightening that Trump kept a photo of him in a drawer and flashed it to ward off those he considered to be threats. “You knew when you were in Cohn’s presence you were in the presence of pure evil,” is how lawyer Victor Kovner put it once.

After Cohn’s death but prior to Trump’s gaining the presidency, Michael Cohen was his bargain basement Roy Cohn. In the run-up to the election, he functioned as the bagman who paid off porn star Stormy Daniels to make sure she wouldn’t talk about her affair with Trump.

He has always made it clear that he is what Trump wants. He has called himself Trump’s “fix-it guy” and compared himself to the fictional Ray Donovan who, on screen, commits various crimes to make problems go away.

Last week, Cohen’s office, home and hotel room were raided by the FBI and federal prosecutors on orders approved by a federal judge in Manhattan; it’s no small thing to get a probable-cause warrant to seize evidence from a lawyer, much less the sitting President’s lawyer. The raid was inspired by information discovered during special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe of Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. election. Mueller is supposed to follow any evidence of crime he discovers and can hand off matters to local prosecutors.

Did Mueller discover evidence of crimes committed by Cohen that have nothing to do with Trump, or crimes that Cohen, like Donovan, committed for his client? Surely this is the question prosecutors are now trying to resolve.

Cohen’s payment to Daniels, days before the election, could have violated campaign finance laws, and Cohen while working for Trump has had enough contact with Russians and their allies to make anyone suspicious.

But what may really alarm Trump is what Cohen’s files may contain relative to all the business deals he has done.