A lengthy review by Politico's Michael Kruse of court documents involving Donald Trump reveals that the former president has for decades used the legal system as a cudgel against adversaries, despite his current protestations that the system is horrifically biased against him.
"He spent most of his adult life molding [the legal system] into an arena in which he could stake claims and hunt leverage," writes Kruse. "It has not been for him a place of last resort so much as a place of constant quarrel. Conflict in courts is not for him the cost of doing business — it is how he does business. Throughout his vast record of (mostly civil) lawsuits, whether on offense, defense or frequently a mix of the two, Trump has become a sort of layman’s master in the law and lawfare."
Trump learned much about the art of legal warfare from his relationship with Roy Cohn, the infamous former attorney for red-baiting Sen. Joe McCarthy.
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According to Kruse, Trump has adopted the central tactics that Cohn long use to keep himself out of legal hot water -- "deny, delay and attack, always play the victim, never stop undermining the system" --right up to the point where he was disbarred from practicing the law shortly before his death.
Or as Rep. Eric Swalwell put it to Kruse, "Trump is a legal terrorist."
