Trump
Goes to Court to Avoid Being a ‘Loser’
The president dusts off his well-worn litigation playbook to point
to someone else to blame for his own shortcomings.
By
November 6, 2020, 5:00
AM CST
As expected, Donald Trump has lobbed lawsuits at a few states,
challenging the bona fides of presidential voting. In a pair of cases in
Michigan and Pennsylvania, he’s pushed to stop ballots from being tallied,
while in Georgia he claimed negligence on the part of a single poll worker.
He’s also threatened to demand a recount in Wisconsin and to sue Nevada for
tallying “illegal votes.”
My Bloomberg Opinion colleague Noah Feldman accurately described the Michigan,
Georgia and Pennsylvania lawsuits as toothless. Judges in Michigan and Georgia dismissed the suits there on Thursday. And in
Nevada, an NBC reporter, Jacob Soboroff, gamely tried to pin down a former Trump intelligence official,
Ric Grenell, for evidence of voter fraud supporting the lawsuit there. Grenell
stayed mum.
Trump’s lawsuits are plainly frivolous and manage to equate counting votes with
fraud rather than democracy. But the point of the lawsuits isn’t to cure an
actual problem. Trump has spent months claiming that elections and mail-in
voting in the U.S. are riddled with malfeasance. They’re not, of course. His lawsuits are an extension of that push,
and the true goal is to find someone or something that he can blame for his own
failures and shortcomings — in this current case, possibly losing a
presidential election.
Days, weeks, months and years hence, Trump will point at these lawsuits as
tangible proof that something was rotten in the 2020 presidential election. In
fact, he will say, had the election not been rigged, he would have won. That’s
a two-fer for Trump: It allows him to avoid taking responsibility and helps him
dodge the “loser” label he enjoys slapping on everyone else but so fears
himself. In that context, the lawsuits are well worth it to him, even if they
help erode public trust in the electoral process.
This is all old hat for
Trump; he’s been involved in at least 3,500 lawsuits over the last three decades or so. He
learned long ago from the late Roy Cohn how to weaponize the legal system
against business competitors, the government and critics, gaining the valuable
insight that sometimes merely filing a suit got him just as far as actually
going to court. If it made a financial or legal problem go away, cowed an
opponent or provided him with a fall guy, that was enough.
The media has been a favorite Trump target, and he’s routinely rattled his saber
against reporters without following through. (Trump unsuccessfully sued me for libel in 2006, claiming that a biography I wrote, “TrumpNation,” unfairly questioned his business record and the
size of his fortune.) But there have been plenty of others:
- The
Department of Justice sued Trump, his father and their real
estate company in 1973 for violating the Fair
Housing Act by discriminating against prospective renters of color who
wanted apartments in Trump buildings. Trump, guided by Cohn, countersued
for $100 million, alleging that the feds were acting irresponsibly and
that their claims lacked merit. The judge tossed the Trump suit, and he
and his father eventually settled with the government out of court. Trump
spent years using his countersuit as a prop, claiming the government had
wanted him to lease to welfare recipients (when, in fact, he was accused
of plain old racism) and that he had successfully beaten down Uncle Sam (when,
in fact, the government required the Trumps to stop discriminating and
later took them to court again for failing to comply with the settlement).
- When
Trump proposed building a 150-story skyscraper on the West Side of
Manhattan in 1984, an award-winning architecture critic for the Chicago
Tribune, Paul Gapp, wrote that the building’s
design was "one of the silliest things anyone could inflict on New
York or any other city." It aspired to make history as “Guinness Book
of World Records architecture” rather than for superb aesthetics,
Gapp noted. Trump sued the Tribune and Gapp for libel, charging that Gapp
described the atrocious and ugly monstrosity he planned to build as “an
atrocious, ugly monstrosity” — even though Gapp had never used such
language. Trump’s suit was dismissed. The Tribune spent about
$60,000 defending the case, which was a warning shot against other critics
of the future president. The development the skyscraper anchored was never
built, and Trump, mired in debt, was forced to sell it to Hong Kong
developers. He later blamed the project’s demise on New York, its mayor
and its residents — everyone but himself.
- Marvin
Roffman, a financial analyst, correctly told the press in 1990 that
a new Trump casino in Atlantic City, the Taj Mahal, was larded with far
too much debt to be profitable. Trump threatened to sue Roffman’s
employer, Janney Montgomery Scott, for the remarks — persuading the
firm to promptly fire the analyst. Roffman later successfully countersued
Trump, and the Taj, like many enterprises Trump managed, went bankrupt.
Trump would go on to claim that an inhospitable market in Atlantic City,
rather than his own ineptitude and infatuation with debt, was why the Taj
and other casinos he ran there belly-flopped.
- To
finance the construction of a mixed-use hotel and condominium project in
Chicago, Trump borrowed $500 million from Deutsche Bank AG, the German
financial giant, in 2005. Trump personally guaranteed at least $40 million
of that loan. Units in the Trump International Hotel and Tower didn’t sell
particularly well when it opened in 2008, and when the financial crisis
accelerated that year, Trump’s debt became unmanageable. What did he
do? He sued Deutsche Bank for $3 billion,
claiming that his lender — not him — was at fault because of its
involvement in the financial crisis, which Trump also compared to a
natural disaster. Deutsche Bank countersued, and both sides settled
eventually — and miraculously kept doing business together. Trump had
found yet another fall guy.
All of
this pre-presidential litigation had less dangerous and damaging echoes than it
does now, but the playbook has always been the same. With public faith in our
core institutions once again under assault from Trump — and perhaps one of the
last times while he’s president — it would be valuable for everyone
involved to remember that POTUS is often a paper tiger, especially in court.
