50 Lawless years of Donald Trump
 POLITICO illustration by Emily Scherer/Photos by Getty Images, iStock |
In November, Donald Trump took the witness stand in Room 300 of the New York County Courthouse in lower Manhattan and savaged the judge (“very hostile”), the prosecutor (he should be “ashamed”), the attorney general (“a political hack”), the trial (“crazy”) and the very legal system itself. The judge almost pleaded with Trump’s attorneys to control him. “If you can’t,” the judge said, “I will.” It would have been shocking, but it was Donald Trump — a man who has used and abused the courts for decades. ”Trump and his allies say he is the victim of the weaponization of the justice system, but the reality is exactly the opposite,” writes Michael Kruse in this week’s Friday Read. “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.” Trump’s avoidance of legal accountability for actions even his own party’s leaders have condemned has confounded a country riven with political divisions and distrust in institutions. The only way to make sense of it, Kruse writes, is to view Trump in a new way: “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.” “Just as he had upended the norms inside the New York courtroom, Trump has altered how 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.” |
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