Dem
51
GOP
49
What happened in Room 300 of the New York County Courthouse last Thursday has completely upended 2½ centuries of legal tradition in the United States. Normally, defendants do not get to bully judges and the legal system and get away with it. The most vulnerable person in the room, Donald Trump, was dominating the process and getting away with it—at least for the time being. Trump savaged the judge, the court, and NY Attorney General Letitia James. Judge Arthur Engoron pleaded with him to stop ranting, but Trump kept on going. Any other defendant who pulled that sh** would be given an invitation he couldn't refuse to spend the evening (and a few more) at lovely Rikers Island. But Engoron didn't want to risk giving Trump a basis to win an appeal, so he just bit his tongue and put up with it.
While this case is new, for 50 years Trump has used and abused the legal system to his advantage. Legal battles for him are not a cost of doing business, they are how he does business. He has used the courts for both offense and defense, thousands of times, over the decades. The courts have become his primary business tool and the entire legal system has no way to stop him. He has become a master at managing the law, rather than the law managing him.
Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA), a former prosecutor and Trump impeachment manager, said: "There's probably no single person in America who is more, I would say, knowledgeable and experienced in our legal system—as both a plaintiff and as a defendant—than Donald Trump." Trump's experience managing the legal system goes back to at least 1973, when the federal government sued Trump and his father, Fred Trump, for racial discrimination in renting the apartments they owned in Queens. He learned from the notorious Roy Cohn how to manipulate the system's near sacrosanct protections for the rights of defendants and rules for due process to his advantage. In reality, the system depends as much on good faith on the part of all parties rather than rigid rules. Trump realized early on that he didn't have to operate in good faith and how that could help him.
Conservative former appellate judge J. Michael Luttig recently said: "He has attacked the judicial system, our system of justice and the rule of law his entire life. And this to him is the grande finale." Paul Rosenzweig, an assistant secretary of DHS during George W. Bush's administration, said the election isn't a referendum on Joe Biden or Donald Trump. It is "a referendum on the rule of law." But maybe it is too late. Democracy can't function if half the country doesn't believe in it any more. What if Trump is convicted and wins anyway?
Trump learned well from his mentor, Cohn, the top attorney for the red-baiting Sen. Joe McCarthy. Cohn didn't pay his bills. He didn't pay taxes. He won cases by delays, evasions, and lies. Like Trump, he was indicted four times, but for bribery, extortion, obstruction of justice, and filing false reports. He delayed and delayed and delayed more and was never once convicted. He was a bully and a scoundrel. All he did was attack, attack, attack. Trump marveled as he got away with everything; he learned the ropes from Cohn.
In the 1980s, Trump bought a team in the United States Football League and sued the NFL. He sued the architecture critic of the Chicago Tribune. He sued New York businessmen Jules and Eddie Trump for daring to be called Trumps, even though they were richer than he was. That case went on for 5 years. Trump bought a building on Central Park South to turn it into a fancy condo building, but first he had to get rid of the tenants in rent-controlled apartments. He sued one tenant for not paying his rent even though he had. He turned off the hot water and heat. He allowed homeless people to live in vacant apartments and put up tin windows on empty apartments to make the building look shabby so the tenants would leave. The tenants sued him, so he countersued, calling the tenants racketeers. He sued their lawyers, so they had to hire lawyers. Trump saw the way to beat these people was not on the merits of the case because there were no merits. He waged his battle in The New York Post before he even went to court. He eventually prevailed because his opponents gave up due to the cost of all his lawsuits.
After Trump bought Mar-a-Lago, he sued Palm Beach County because planes from Palm Beach Airport (which was there before he bought the property) were disturbing his rest. The County sued him back. At the time, commission chairman Ken Foster said: "I think it's ridiculous Mr. Trump has taken on the taxpayers of Palm Beach County, thinking his pockets are deeper than ours." That is exactly what Trump was thinking. He thought the County would conclude changing the flight patterns in and out of the airport would be easier and cheaper than years of litigation. He knew he could just wear them down. And he was right. Not only did the County change the flight patterns, but it also gave him a cheap 30-year lease on the land that his golf course now occupies.
Trump has also sued authors of books critical of him. In 2013, when then-NY AG Eric Schneiderman sued Trump University for bilking its students, he countersued Schneiderman for $100 million. And much more. He's been doing this for 50 years. Read the article linked to above if you want more details. Many more details.
Jim Zirin, author of Plaintiff in Chief: A Portrait of Donald Trump in 3,500 Lawsuits, said: "He learned that the evidence can be irrelevant, the law doesn't matter, and the government's mission doesn't matter. You could use the law to bend circumstances to your will." Zirin also said the greatest danger is not a Muslim ban or tax breaks for the rich or disengaging from NATO. He said: "The greatest danger is his undermining the rule of law. Given 50 years of winning this way, is it surprising that Trump attacked a judge who could fine him $370 million or more, ban his company from operating in New York State, and force him to dump all his properties there at fire-sale prices? That is how he has operated his whole life and it has always worked. Why change now?" (V)