The point Gwenda Blair is trying to make in
this Politico piece is that Donald Trump has always relied on thuggish lawyers to strong-arm those who get in his way, which is obviously true. She thinks this M.O. isn't working for Trump in Washington:
... whenever Trump has seen anything that he thinks poses the slightest risk to his business or his reputation, he has sicced a lawyer on the offending party. Often such threats arrive in the form of a letter on heavy, cream-colored stationery, adorned with an embossed gold T and declaring that unless the addressee ceases and desists from all objectionable behavior, the Trump Organization intends to pursue said person to the full extent of the law, i.e., sue his or her pants off. I know. I got one of those missives when I published my book.
Sometimes, as in my case, the threat is all that happens. Other times, an actual lawsuit ensues.... According to an ongoing USA Today tally, as of April 2018, the Trump Organization has been involved in more than 4,000 lawsuits, far more than any other real estate developer—or any president, for that matter.
Apparently, after entering the White House, Trump felt entitled to the same robust legal protection that he enjoyed in his 26th floor office at Trump Tower. But things haven’t worked out that way.
But I think Trump has relied on lawyers for more than muscle. Alongside his older daughter and his adult sons, lawyers have functioned as Trump's brain. Blair writes:
Most business executives tend to be lawyer-dependent, but for the better part of 50 years, lawyers have done everything for Trump except have his children. They have finagled unprecedented tax abatements, kept him going through multiple corporate bankruptcies (and out of personal bankruptcy), protected his finances from public scrutiny. They are so entwined with every aspect of his public and private life, it is unimaginable that Trump could have gotten anywhere close to where he is today without them....
Sometimes things have gone badly for Trump—his football venture failed, and in an ensuing lawsuit, he received only a humiliating $3 in damages. But even when his ventures have tanked (Trump Air, Trump Vodka, Trump Mortgage, his casinos, the Plaza Hotel, Trump Soho Hotel, and a string of never-opened Trump-branded ventures in Argentina, Brazil and Canada, among other places), to all appearances, lawyers have kept him solvent.
What your Trump-loving relatives don't understand about Trump is that he has only the vaguest notion of how to do the things he wants done. His lawyers understand the details. He doesn't. Trump knows the victories he wants, and he expects his lawyers to wrest them from the other affected parties. They find a way (or fail to), and he looks like a killer (at least when he wins). But he has no idea how it happens. And now his job every day is to do things he understands even less than he understood the nuts and bolts of the real estate business. Aren't we lucky?
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