Newsweek: Donald Trump Is the ‘Lawfare’ King
Newsweek
Donald Trump Is the ‘Lawfare’ King | Opinion
Published Jun 13, 2024 at 11:39 AM EDT
Retired Judge and Author
With the conviction of President Biden’s son Hunter following former President Donald Trump’s conviction, it’s hard to say that a corrupt legal system is responsible for carrying out either prosecution.
Trump’s charges of “lawfare” against him by a vast conspiracy controlled by the current president can’t possibly ring true after the president’s son was convicted in Delaware with the same ease with which Trump was convicted in New York. When Trump says Hunter Biden’s conviction was a mere ruse to cover his father’s wrongdoing we know it isn’t true. All we have to do is observe the president’s abiding love for his son to know he would never use him so cynically.
Still, Trump is right to recognize the existence of what is now being called “lawfare.” But he is wrong to suggest it has been invented to persecute him. It is Trump himself who mastered the art far long before anyone started using that term.
With his “lawfare” claims, Trump is just projecting again. Commentators have long noted Trump’s tendency to distract from his own wrongdoing by loudly accusing others of doing the very thing he is trying to get away with. In the Trump lexicon, “Crooked Hillary” was followed by “Crooked Joe.” “Lyin’ Ted Cruz gave way to “Lyin’ Hillary” which gave way to “Lyin’ James Comey,” which gave way to applying the term to his adversaries in court along with his own former White House chief of staff and his hand-picked chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
“Lawfare” against Trump? Donald Trump may not have invented lawfare but if there is ever a monument to lawfare, Trump should be the Michaelangelo who carves it. Second in line to his claims about liars, Trump’s claim of lawfare against him is his masterpiece of projection.
It’s too bad that our legal system is slow and expensive. Most legal systems have been criticized for this and defended with the expression that “the wheels of justice turn slowly.”
Many remember the fictional probate lawsuit Jarndyce v. Jarndyce from Charles Dickens 1852 book Bleak House. The case lasted for decades. The money in dispute was ultimately lost to everyone but the lawyers. Claims of lawsuit abuse have continued ever since, from James Bond actor Roger Moore’s wife trying to destroy her ex and others with vexatious lawsuits to the man who filed 180 disability lawsuits against businesses, to Trump mentor Roy Cohn, who taught Trump the ropes of lawfare before the word became common. Lawfare is about exploiting the weakness of the system to bludgeon your adversaries.
But no one—no one—has excelled at the art more than Donald Trump. Calculations show he and his businesses have been embroiled in more than four thousand lawsuits over the past 30 years. He has serially stiffed contractors and even publicly threatened not to pay a teleprompter vendor at a recent rally in Las Vegas. Trump companies have filed six bankruptcies. He and others on his behalf filed no less than 60 failed lawsuits that tried to tangle up the electoral machinery that rightly found he had lost the 2020 election. Today, he continues to sue the media when he doesn’t like his coverage.
He is a master at playing defense, too. He has tangled most of the criminal prosecutions against him in knots. The election fraud prosecution against him in Washington is stalled before the Supreme Court. The election fraud case against him in Georgia has been stayed while an upper court examines comic claims about a prosecutor’s sex life, and the trial date in his Florida secret documents case has been vacated. Only the New York hush money case went to trial and has left him a convicted felon—in the least serious matter of all.
Trump complaining about lawfare is not merely the pot calling the kettle black. It is the original bubbling caldron of poisonous lawsuits speaking to us. He is Exhibit A if we were to put the courts in this country on trial for malpractice. He, and others like him, are the reason the judiciary must take a firmer hand with litigants to ensure that legal process is not just a means to punish our enemies as much when we are wrong as when we are right. Until that reform happens, lawfare can only grow.
Thomas G. Moukawsher is a former Connecticut complex litigation judge and a former co-chair of the American Bar Association Committee on Employee Benefits. He is the author of the new book, The Common Flaw: Needless Complexity in the Courts and 50 Ways to Reduce It.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.