Trump Hates His Lawyer Now, So That's Right On Schedule
The Roy Cohn Trump is looking for still stubbornly burning in hell.
Don’t faint, but Donald Trump hates his lawyers again.
Well, not Alina Habba. She’s great, obviously, a veritable genius.
But he hates his lead lawyer Todd Blanche, the one who’s supposed to get him out of this porn peener payoff stick-’em-up witch hunt once and for all, the one who stands in the background while a haggard-looking Trump shows reporters the stacks of Fox News articles the blonde lady prints out to make him feel better.
What’s wrong? Is his trial not going well or something? (It is not going well. See HERE and HERE.)
This story from Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan has every element of the “Trump Hates Lawyer” story. Tell us if you’ve heard these things before.
He loved Todd Blanche. But then his trial started and he doesn’t love Todd Blanche so much. Now he complains about Todd Blanche. Todd Blanche is doing it wrong.
He has griped that Mr. Blanche, a former federal prosecutor and veteran litigator, has not been following his instructions closely, and has been insufficiently aggressive. Mr. Trump wants him to attack witnesses, attack what the former president sees as a hostile jury pool, and attack the judge, Juan M. Merchan.
“Not following his instructions closely.”
Wants him to attack the witnesses.
Wants him to attack the jury.
Wants him to attack the judge.
It’s incredible after all these years that Trump is just now a criminal defendant, but we do believe that when Trump ultimately meets his earthly judgment, when the key to the prison he’s buried under is thrown away, it will be largely because:
Mr. Trump views himself as own best legal strategist.
Because of that. Because, as Fran Lebowitz once said, "You don't know anyone as stupid as Donald Trump. You just don't."
FLASHBACK RIGHT HERE!
Trump is really playing all the greatest hits about Blanche behind closed doors, including the one about how maybe he shouldn’t pay him so much money:
Mr. Trump, who often complains about legal fees and sometimes refuses to pay them, has also wondered aloud why his lawyers cost so much, according to the people, who all spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive topic.
Haberman reminds us that Trump is still searching for his Roy Cohn, who remains in hell after being humiliatingly disbarred just before he died. And decent lawyers don’t want to represent him — for all the reasons mentioned so far in this post — so he has to work with these Yellow Pages bus stop bench clownweasels.
How do we know that, at heart, Blanche is a moron and not a talented hired gun? Because he’s a true believer, says Haberman.
Mr. Blanche reworked his career to take on Mr. Trump as a client, and also represents the former president in two of the three other criminal indictments. Friends say he truly believes that Mr. Trump should not have been charged in Manhattan.
Sad.
And now he gets to be simply Trump’s latest in a string of abused lawyers, many of whom end up indicted, disbarred or both as a result of their working for him. He’s damned if he do, damned if he don’t, as are all Trump lawyers at some point in their representation:
The judge last week warned Mr. Blanche that he was “losing all credibility” by claiming that Mr. Trump was entitled, as a political candidate, to attack people involved in the trial despite a gag order meant to bar him from denouncing witnesses and others.
Mr. Blanche’s friends and defenders say that he has an unsolvable client management problem. If he were to do exactly what Mr. Trump wanted, they say, he would almost certainly be disciplined by the judge and would perhaps undermine his client’s defense.
Bless his heart. We’d pity him if he deserved it, but he doesn’t.
And again no, MAGA faithful. Trump’s New York trial is not going well for him.
Evan Hurst on Twitter right here.
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The thing about this guy is he is so incredibly fucking tedious. It seems like insult to injury to have to keep track of his criming ass. If you’re going to menace the world with a return to totalitarianism, can you at least vary your foam flecked tirades? Banality of evil, oh, hell yeah. Sure, nothing ‘boring’ about refugees in tents in the desert and leaving blue cities to die in a pandemic and stochastic terrorism murdering his opposition... But this guy in person is still like some washed up wedding band fascist. All the hits you were sick of ten years ago.
I figure this might be part of why his supporters seem increasingly not to give a shit. He’s overplayed his hits. Occupational hazard maybe. You can only turn the volume up so high on the hate before it saturates even the worst of them...
(... and no wonder he’s falling asleep. Probably even bores himself.)