Trumpworld outside the law

Donald Trump’s friend, lawyer and mentor Roy Cohn had an adage: “F--- the law,” he liked to say, according to a new book by attorney James D. Zirin. “Who’s the judge?” He meant that, although idealists might imagine that the courts were august and impartial, the judiciary was in fact made up of people who could be bullied or bamboozled or bought off. To Cohn, politics was a brutal and unfair game, and the law was just an extension of politics, with extra paperwork. If you understood that, he believed, you could get a huge head start on the idealists.

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In his book “Plaintiff in Chief: A Portrait of Donald Trump in 3,500 Lawsuits,” Zirin argues that Trump learned to see the law as Cohn did: “not as a system of rules to be obeyed . . . but as a potent weapon to be used against his adversaries.” Trump sued often but rarely won big. Winning in court wasn’t always the point: The lawsuit itself was the thing, a tool of intimidation cloaked in legalese, an outgoing missile that left your enemies buried in costs and hassle.

  WaPo

A way of life that Devin Nunes has adopted.

[Trump] lost friends, wives, lawyers and business partners — but always found new ones, who thought their fate would be different.

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So far this year, Trump has sued those investigating him, including House committees and the Manhattan district attorney, to stop them from obtaining his financial documents. He has also attacked those pursuers out of court, trying to tar his enemies as partisans seeking “a coup” to overturn the 2016 election. Instead of submitting to precedent, he has ignored it — and posited a theory that, in the eyes of the law, a president is like a temporary emperor.

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All of it came from the playbook that Zirin lays out: confuse, deny, delay. If you can’t beat the case, beat the system, by exploiting its human flaws.

As a former federal prosecutor and longtime private attorney, Zirin has depended on the idea that the law is legitimate and no man is above it. So he sees Trump’s life — and now his presidency — as an attack on that legitimacy. “Trump’s position,” he writes, is “that he is either above the law or released from the obligation of observing it.”

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Trump discovered early on that, if you’re wealthy, most of life — including much of the law — operates on an honor system. People obey the rules without being forced to do so, out of shame or respect or fear. If you just don’t obey, Trump realized, these systems take a long time to catch up, if they ever do.

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Trump seems to believe he can count on the Supreme Court, to which he appointed two justices, to deflect prosecutors’ inquiries. But he also faces impeachment proceedings in the House and the Senate, where his fate will be decided by politicians, not judges.

He sees no danger in either of those places, and he's probably right.

Trump, of course, has boasted that he will never make like Richard Nixon and resign. Zirin seems to have doubts. In cases like the one involving Trump University, Trump had vowed never to give in — and then gave in, settling the case, walking away, declaring victory in retreat. Even Cohn, in the end, couldn’t beat the system forever: He was disbarred in 1986, five weeks before he died. Zirin closes the book with a quote from Cohn about how hard it is to be where Trump is now, fighting the system on every side at once: “No public man can remain indefinitely at the center of controversy.”

But he can try.