The Whole Nation Wants To Know-- Why Is Trump Such A Grotesque Scum Bag?

Also, Why Are His Supporters Too Stupid To See That?

Was I the only person wondering if New York doesn’t have contempt of court when Trump staged his 6 minute courtroom fit on Thursday? Shayna Jacobs and Mark Berman reported that when Trump got up to speak, “Engoron asked if Trump would agree to stick to subjects related to the case, echoing his emailed request. Instead of answering directly, Trump launched into a speech from his seat in the courtroom. ‘What’s happened here, sir, is a fraud on me,’ Trump said. ‘If I’m not allowed to talk about [the political motivation]— it really is a disservice. I would say that’s a big part of the case. I would say it’s 100 percent.’ Engoron asked Kise to ‘please control your client,’ but Kise did not appear to make any effort to do so. Engoron audibly sighed and gave Trump one minute to wrap up his remarks. ‘I know this is boring to you,’ Trump said. ‘You have your own agenda. You can’t listen for more than one minute.’ Engoron also challenged Trump on a claim that he had never been in trouble with banks before. ‘By the way, you said you’ve never had a problem— haven’t you been sued before?’ Engoron said. ‘I should have won it every time,’ Trump replied. After Trump spoke, Engoron said the defense had used its allotted time and that the court would break for lunch.”

And not a word about contempt of court. I hope Engoron has a bigger settlement in mind than the D.A. is asking for. This morning, Michael Kruse noted that “What happened in Room 300 of the New York County Courthouse in lower Manhattan in November had never happened. Not in the preceding almost two and a half centuries of the history of the United States. Donald Trump was on the witness stand. It was not unprecedented in the annals of American jurisprudence just because it was a former president, although that was totally true. It was unprecedented because the power dynamic of the courtroom had been upended— the defendant was not on defense, the most vulnerable person in the room was the most dominant person in the room, and the people nominally in charge could do little about it. It was unprecedented, too, because over the course of four or so hours Trump savaged the judge, the prosecutor, the attorney general, the case and the trial— savaged the system itself. He called the attorney general ‘a political hack.’ He called the judge ‘very hostile.’ He called the trial ‘crazy’ and the court ‘a fraud’ and the case ‘a disgrace.’ He told the prosecutor he should be ‘ashamed’ of himself. The judge all but pleaded repeatedly with Trump’s attorneys to ‘control’ him. ‘If you can’t,’ the judge said, ‘I will.’ But he didn’t, because he couldn’t, and audible from the city’s streets were the steady sounds of sirens and that felt absolutely apt.”

This is what Trump has been getting away with for his entire life— and successfully manipulating the justice system as he became more and more brazen in his career of crime. Kruse warned this morning that “Trump’s testimony if anything was but a taste. (In fact, he said many of the same things in the same courtroom on Thursday.) This country has never seen and therefore is utterly unprepared for what it’s about to endure in the wrenching weeks and months ahead— active challenges based on post-Civil War constitutional amendments to bar insurrectionists from the ballot; existentially important questions about presidential immunity almost certainly to be decided by a U.S. Supreme Court the citizenry has seldom trusted less; and a candidate running for the White House while facing four separate criminal indictments alleging 91 felonies, among them, of course, charges that he tried to overturn an election he lost and overthrow the democracy he swore to defend. And while many found Trump’s conduct in court in New York shocking, it is in fact for Trump not shocking at all. For Trump, it is less an aberration than an extension, an escalation— a culmination. Trump has never been in precisely this position, and the level of the threat that he faces is inarguably new, but it’s just as true, too, that nobody has been preparing for this as long as he has himself.”

Trump’s idol, role model and mentor was Roy Cohn, who Kruse described as “the top attorney and aide to red-baiting Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s who then in the ’60s and ’70s turned his ill repute into a career as “a legal executioner” for celebrities, executives and mob bosses. He didn’t pay his bills. He didn’t pay his taxes. He was shameless and remorseless and ‘famous among lawyers for winning cases by delays, evasions and lies.’ He was indicted four times, for bribery and conspiracy, for extortion and blackmail, for stock-swindling and obstruction of justice and filing false reports— and never once convicted. He was, to the people who knew him and watched him with some combination of wonder and disgust, ‘a bully,’ ‘a scoundrel’ and ‘as politically incorrect as they come.’ Trump was transfixed. Eventually, karma caught up with Cohn. He was disbarred and in 1986 died broke and alone of AIDS, abandoned even by Trump, who he taught delay, delay, delay… for years and years. “Trump had siphoned from Cohn lasting lessons. He learned that the evidence can be irrelevant. He learned that the law doesn’t matter, the government’s mission doesn’t matter.’ He learned that you could use the law to sort of bend circumstances to your will. ‘Attack, attack, attack— no matter what the merits are— fuck the merits— attack, attack, attack.’ That was Roy Cohn’s methodology that was adopted by Donald Trump.” Now… will karma catch up with Trump, the most odious and most villainous and hated president in American history?

Strap in. This is going to be wild. Kruse noted that “Trump and his allies say he is the victim of the weaponization of the justice system, but the reality is exactly the opposite. For literally more than 50 years, according to thousands of pages of court records and hundreds of interviews with lawyers and legal experts, people who have worked for Trump, against Trump or both, and many of the myriad litigants who’ve been caught in the crossfire, Trump has taught himself how to use and abuse the legal system for his own advantage and aims. Many might view the legal system as a place to try to avoid, or as perhaps a necessary evil, or maybe even as a noble arbiter of equality and fairness. Not Trump. He spent most of his adult life molding it into an arena in which he could stake claims and hunt leverage. It has not been for him a place of last resort so much as a place of constant quarrel. Conflict in courts is not for him the cost of doing business— it is how he does business. Throughout his vast record of (mostly civil) lawsuits, whether on offense, defense or frequently a mix of the two, Trump has become a sort of layman’s master in the law and lawfare.”

Many have been confounded by the legal system’s inability to constrain Trump, by his ability to escape at least thus far any legal accounting for behavior that even some leaders of his own party excoriated— and why that reckoning might never come. To understand this requires seeing Trump in a new mode— not as a businessman-turned-celebrity-turned-politician, or as a nationalist populist demagogue, or as the epochal leader of a right-wing movement, but rather as a legal combatant. “This is not a political rally— this is a courtroom,” the judge admonished him at one point in November in New York. It was only in the most technical sense correct. Just as he had upended the norms inside the New York courtroom, Trump has altered the very way we view the justice system as a whole. This is not something he began to do once he won elected office. It has been a lifelong project.

Starting in 1973, when the federal government sued him and his father for racist rental practices in the apartments they owned, Trump learned from the notorious Roy Cohn, then searched for another Roy Cohn— then finally became his own Roy Cohn. He’s exploited as loopholes the legal system’s bedrock tenets, eyeing its very integrity as simultaneously its intrinsic vulnerability— the near sacrosanct honoring of the rights of the defendant, the deliberation that due process demands, the constant constitutional balancing act that relies on shared good faith as much as fixed, written rules. He has routinely turned what’s obviously peril into what’s effectively fuel, taking long rosters of losses and willing them into something like wins— if not in a court of law, then in that of public opinion. It has worked, and it continues to work. Trump, after all, was at one of his weakest points politically until the first of his four arraignments last spring. Ever since, his legal jeopardy and his political viability have done little but go up, together. Deny, delay and attack, always play the victim, never stop undermining the system: Trump has taken the Cohn playbook to reaches not even Cohn could have foreseen— fusing his legal efforts with his business interests, lawyers as important to him as loan officers, and now he’s done the same with politics. He’s not fighting the system, it seems sometimes, so much as he’s using it. He’s fundraising off of it. He’s consolidating support because of it. He’s far and away the most likely Republican nominee, polls consistently show. He’s the odds-on favorite to be the president again.

“He has attacked the judicial system, our system of justice and the rule of law his entire life,” said J. Michael Luttig, a conservative former federal appellate judge and one of the founders of the recently formed Society for the Rule of Law. “And this to him,” Luttig told me, “is the grand finale.”

…“Our democracy rests on a foundation of trust— trust in elections, trust in institutions,” Bassin said. “And you know what scares me the most about Trump? It’s not the sledgehammer he’s taken to the structure of our national house,” he told me. “It’s the termites he’s unleashed into the foundation.”

…That Trump would win the White House on a populist platform while preying on poor people— it’s a paradox that confounds his critics. “He has these people that are drawn to him because of his charisma and this image that he projects, and then the people that loved him the most, he actually hurt the most,” Tristan Snell, the lead prosecutor in the attorney general’s case, told me. “That’s the thing that people don’t get about this— still to this day— and it’s been replicated with the people who support him politically now.”

Snell has a book due out later this month. It’s called Taking Down Trump.

“There is still understandably a great deal of mixed feeling, of cautious optimism and bitter pessimism, on the question of whether justice will one day come for Donald Trump— or whether justice in America still exists all. It is perhaps the most important question,” Snell writes. “The answer to that question may well determine much of our collective fate.

“If the greatest malefactors are, in effect, untouchable, beyond the reach of the law, subject to a different set of rules— or no rules at all,” he continues, “then we will likely slip into a spiral from which we may never recover.”

…[P]eople don’t trust the system. They trust Trump. And that’s because Trump’s told them to— for 50 years. He started doing this in the ’70s, teaming with Cohn and accusing the government of “Gestapo-like” tactics and “smears.” He kept doing it in the ’80s, always playing the victim of Central Park South, claiming people were out to get him and using the courts to do it. “Trump,” Trump told The Times, “is not going to be harassed.” He did it in Palm Beach, and he did it when he sued O’Brien, and he did it with Trump U., and he only escalated the efforts once he came down the escalator in Trump Tower in 2015 and especially after he lost to Biden in 2020. He sends to supporters email after email every day asking for money for his campaign by attacking “Crooked Joe” and “the Radical Democrats” and “villainous forces” and “crooks” and “thugs” and “fools” and “their phony charges” and “this vicious witch hunt” and their “SHAM TRIALS.” Nothing is on the level, and the institutions can’t be trusted, and the system can’t be trusted, he has insidiously hammered home, and so he is free, he suggests, to go after the people he says have gone after him. It is, as George Conway said at the opening gathering of the Society for the Rule of Law in early November in Washington, “an infectious disease that is affecting the entire body politic.”

“He has made himself the arbiter of fairness,” Hank Sheinkopf, the longtime New York Democratic strategist who has watched Trump work for decades, told me, “for those who feel that they have been unfairly put upon.”

“He is wearing our institutions down to their nubs,” lawyer and legal analyst Danielle McLauglin told me, “and the judicial system, the system of justice, I think, is particularly vulnerable to him.”

“He’s pushing the system to the breaking point,” Ian Bassin told me.

“He’s poisoned the well,” Brian Klaas told me.

“It’s of surpassing importance what happens,” Judge Luttig told me, “but that still doesn’t change the fact that he’s already laid waste to our democracy and to our elections and to the rule of law.”

“That’s really the greatest danger he poses to our democracy,” Zirin told me. “Not that there would be a Muslim ban, not that he would give tremendous tax breaks to the rich who support him, not any of the Republican plans that he associated with, and not even that he would disengage us from foreign alliances,” he said. “The greatest danger is his undermining of the rule of law.”

“Trump,” as Swalwell put it to me, “is a legal terrorist.”

“We’re about to go through a great trial in this country. … We’re going to be testing the proposition that the rule of law applies to everyone and no one’s above the law,” California congressman and Senate candidate Adam Schiff told me. “It will be particularly wrenching because Trump will continue to make the false claim that he’s being politically persecuted,” said Schiff, a former federal prosecutor and an impeachment manager in Trump’s first impeachment, “and it will also give Trump the continuing opportunity to tear down the system.”