Gregg Barak, Salon

The Economist posted a list this month entitled "What to read to understand Donald Trump," a list of five "handy books" from the overflowing library of volumes about the man who, as the editors put it, "remains at the center of American politics." These include the first major book about the Trump White House, Michael Wolff's 2018 "Fire and Fury," and several other classics of this mini-genre: "Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America" by John Sides, Michel Tesler and Lynn Vavreck; John Bolton's White House memoir, "The Room Where It Happened" and two accounts of the end of Trump's presidency, "Frankly, We Did Win This Election," by Michael C. Bender, and most recently "Thank You for Your Servitude: Donald Trump's Washington and the Price of Submission" by Mark Leibovich.

This article first appeared on Salon.

Taken together, those five books about Trump World capture a great deal of the the political intrigue, scandalous gossip and incoherent policy-making of Trump's two presidential campaigns and his chaotic administration. But I would argue they explain far more about the boss' enablers and his MAGA supporters than they do about Trump himself, his 75 years of life or personal history.

If you want to understand Donald Trump's personality and his interrelated behavior in business, politics, and crime, I would recommend this alternative list: five other books that provide meaningful and serious examinations of Trump's social-psychological makeup and his family, emotional and social development:

• "The Making of Donald Trump" (2016) by David Cay Johnston
• "Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man" (2020) by Mary R. Trump
• "The Strange Case of Donald J. Trump: A Psychological Reckoning" (2020) by Dan P. McAdams
• "Disloyal, a Memoir: The True Story of the Former Attorney to the President of the United States" (2020) by Michael Cohen
• "Tower of Lies: What My 18 Years of Working with Donald Trump Reveals About Him" (2020) by Barbara A. Res

From the perspective of criminology, which is my field, what is particularly interesting about these 10 Trump books is that with the exception of those by Bolton, Johnston and Cohen, there are no substantive discussions of Trump's evident corruption, or more than cursory examinations of his criminal career in business, politics and government.

Without an appreciation or a less-than-superficial understanding of the nature of the crimes of the powerful, their habitual patterns of lawlessness and the normalization of these crimes — not to mention the systemic resistance to holding powerful perpetrators accountable — there is palpable jeopardy that people will not understand that, like other criminals, they are created in relation to their personal social status and their social identification experiences. And furthermore, that the types of crimes committed by the most powerful offenders also result from their personal biographies, and particularly their experiences with crime control and law enforcement (if any).

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Without this level of understanding of the etiological voyage of Donald Trump's criminality and impunity, especially in relation to how he became for four years the most powerful person on earth, most people view him through a lens of cognitive dissonance. They are likely to think of Trump as mentally ill or deeply irrational — an innately evil individual or some kind of "born criminal." In that view, whatever else Trump may be, he cannot possibly be a "rational" actor.

I would forcefully argue that's not true. More important, this discourse focused on Trump's perceived insanity, ignorance or immorality works to mitigate, both socially and legally, against more accurate perceptions of his rationality, intentionality and level of culpability.

Consider Lloyd Green's book review for the Guardian of Michael Wolff's third Trump book, "Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency." This is Wolff's best and "most alarming" book, Green writes, and "that is saying plenty," especially since "Fire and Fury" had both "infuriated a president" and "fueled a publishing boom."

Most people view Trump through a lens of cognitive dissonance: His behavior doesn't make sense, so he's mentally ill or deeply irrational or innately evil. None of that is true.

Wolff's new book describes Trump's "wrath-filled final days in power" exemplified by an interview that Wolff held in the lobby of Mar-a-Lago. Wolff simply allows Trump to rant through a classic "exercise in Trumpian score-settling," without even trying to push back against the cascade of lies. As Wolff admits, he was reluctant to interrupt or ask serious questions because he knew that the interview would have come to an abrupt end had he done so. So Trump simply babbles on nonsensically, to no obvious purpose for either man.

As I have written elsewhere about Wolff's conclusions, he "argues non-persuasively that the Donald was too crazy" to be genuinely guilty of plotting a coup or other criminal behavior. Wolff sees Trump as experiencing "swings of irrationality and mania," and as "someone who has completely departed reality. Trump was incapable of forming specific intent, he argues, based "on the calculated and 'coordinated' misuse of power."

Wolff is not alone. Indeed, the slew of books documenting Trump's final days in office tend to agree on this analysis, along with most cable TV talking heads, with the obvious exception of those on Fox News. The consensus, more or less, is that Trump's loss to "Sleepy" Joe Biden broke him, and that his fantasies, as captured in the title of "Frankly, We Did Win this Election," are evidence that he was seriously deluded, and not just acting deluded.

Here's a similar take from Daily Kos on Trump books and election delusions:

Losing the election untethered him from whatever scraps of reality his advisers had still managed to tie him to, and up he went like a lost balloon with anger management issues. By the end he was (is) wallowing in delusion, ordering staff to do impossible and/or illegal things, absolutely convinced that everything was a conspiracy and that anyone who didn't tell him what he wanted to hear was in on it.

Let me disagree firmly, and speak from the clinical evidence. Trump has never been tethered to reality — but that does not necessarily mean he believes his own delusions. Similarly, while some of his presidential advisers may have resisted to varying degrees or pushed back against his more unhinged desires, they never had him tied up or taken away in a straitjacket. Some of his own appointed Cabinet members saw his behavior as crazy or unstable from the beginning, and reportedly talked about invoking the 25th Amendment at various times — but never did so.

For many years, perhaps for his whole life, Trump has been bipolar, irrational, paranoid, narcissistic and sociopathic. Those qualities do not necessarily mean that he is delusional or legally insane, or that he lacks criminal intent. Trump knows as well as anybody does, and probably better than most, the differences between "fake news" and legitimate information.

But here's what's most important: Trump knows he is guilty of all the crimes he has been accused of. He also knows he has no genuine defenses for any of those likely or potential charges, which is why he so persistently seeks to lie, to obfuscate and to delay. He also understands that his best defense, at least in the court of public opinion, is a forceful offense: Always a master of projection, he charges his legal accusers with sinister and conspiratorial motivations.

Trump feels no empathy whatsoever for any of the Jan. 6 rioters and could not care less about their legal travails, adjudications or punishments. Whether we're talking about insurrectionists or FBI agents, Trump simply uses them instrumentally, as he uses everybody else, to satisfy his bottomless narcissism and egotistical needs. It's the modus operandi of a sociopath without the psychological ability to identify with either of those two groups, or literally any other, including the "base voters" of the Trump cult.

To state this differently, Trump is deceitful, but not deluded or delusional. Unlike Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Trump does not really believe that he won the 2020 election or that it was rigged against him. While he may post on his social media platform that he "loves" the Jan. 6 rioters, he does not really believe they are "nice" people. Nor does he believe for one second that "evil" FBI agents planted classified documents at his office in Mar-a-Lago, or that GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell a "DEATH WISH," political or otherwise.

He is a con man, performance artist and demagogue who understands the value of never publicly abandoning his narratives, no matter how absurd or blatantly false they are. He was able to suck in Michael Wolff, along with a whole lot of other people, to believe he was so deranged as to be incapable of forming the intent to stage a coup, let alone organizing one.

Really? This was the man who conducted cursory presidential business every day while watching the tube, eating fast food and tweeting 24/7, except when he was playing at least 27 holes of golf a week, or was out on the campaign trail delivering "greatest hits" monologues of unadulterated nonsense to the loyal followers he viewed with obvious contempt.

In the immortal words attributed to P.T. Barnum (among others), "There's a sucker born every minute." And the former president who was impeached twice and got away scot-free knows how to spot them.

Even folks who support Donald Trump might agree that the former president is a con artist, a master gaslighter and a shrewd racketeer. As I argue in my book "Criminology on Trump," the Houdini of white-collar crime and founder and CEO of the Trump Organization has effectively operated a criminal enterprise, beginning in 1980. He did so for the next 36 years before being elected president in November 2016. Throughout his presidency and afterward, Trump continued running, and even expanding, his criminal enterprise.

Trump's lifetime as an outlaw and a racketeer may finally be coming to an end after more than four decades of eluding the criminal law. He is currently encircled by at least six or seven significant civil or criminal investigations.. Most legal scholars or former U.S. prosecutors will likely approach these white-collar, corporate and state crimes evidently committed by Trump and his associates as disparate and unrelated litigating conflicts.

I would contend, however, that when Trump's fraudulent behavior is seen through the lenses of racketeering and the vantage point of a criminal enterprise, all his offenses or violations, whether civil or criminal, could be legally brought together and prosecuted under RICO, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.

Just as Trump and his allies could be prosecuted for sedition, obstruction of justice and election racketeering, in a classic "hub and spoke" multi-pronged criminal conspiracy, the illegal activities at issue in each of these individual investigations or lawsuits can be viewed over time as spokes of the same criminal enterprise.

Trump is an outlaw, and I mean that literally. He habitually breaks laws of all kinds while remaining a free person. Trump is also a special type of outlaw, because he has no moral compass and no loyalty to anyone besides himself. In fact, he thinks and acts as an authentic sociopath.

Trump is not an outlaw out of negligence, incompetence or ignorance of the illegalities of the marketplace, the civil and criminal laws or the Constitution of the United States. Quite the contrary. Trump knows the subtle differences between what is lawfully right and what is unlawfully wrong. Even more important, Trump is an expert on criminal intent — and the lack thereof.

Moreover, Trump knows all about plausible deniability and has nurtured the idea that throughout his activities he was allegedly following or deferring to other people, such as lawyers, accountants, appraisers, etc. He also appreciates that the legal system is fluid in both theory and practice and is subject to valuation and interpretation. Finally, Trump understands that the administration of justice is malleable and subject to a high degree of internal and external discretionary power.

As a racketeer or mobster, Trump has always intermingled his legitimate affairs of business with the illegitimate affairs of organized crime. As he told a panel at the Museum of Television and Radio in Los Angeles in 2004, shortly after he signed his first contract to do "The Apprentice," he had been reluctant to sign on with the reality TV show because of all the mobsters that frequent his place of work: "I [didn't] want to have cameras all over my office, dealing with contractors, politicians, mobsters and everyone else I have to deal with in my business." More than a decade later as a presidential candidate, in one of his moments of public candor, he responded to a question about his friends in organized crime, "Winners team up with mobsters, losers don't."

Days after Donald Trump became the president-elect in 2016, without any admission of wrongdoing, he settled three civil lawsuits against the defunct Trump University for $25 million, two from California and one from New York, which had been folded into one class-action lawsuit.

One year after the Trump University settlement was approved by the court overseeing the Southern District of New York, Trump was ordered by the New York Supreme Court in November 2019 to pay "$2 million in damages for improperly using charitable assets to intervene in the 2016 presidential primaries and further his own political interests." That award was part of New York Attorney General Letitia James' lawsuit against the Donald J. Trump Foundation and its directors — Trump himself and his three adult children, Donald Jr., Ivanka and Eric.

As part of that settlement, the Trump Foundation was shut down and the funds that were illegally misused had to be restored. The foundation and its directors agreed to multiple stipulations in order to resolve the remaining claims in the lawsuit. Among these, Trump admitted to personally misusing funds at the Trump Foundation, and his adult children were subject to mandatory training requirements. Finally, if the Trump Organization tried to start a new charity, Trump agreed to restrictions on future charitable services and to ongoing reporting to the attorney general's office.

Flash forward from there to the 220-page complaint in the fraud lawsuit filed by James against Trump and those same three adult children last week in state Supreme Court. Trump is accused of padding his net worth by some $2 billion, and James is seeking at least $250 million in damages, the estimated value derived from the alleged fraud between 2010 and 2021.

Compared to $250 million, the Trump University and Trump Foundation fraud lawsuits now seem like chump change — especially because the resolution of this lawsuit may well mean the demise of the Trump Organization. Among other sanctions, James wants the Trump Organization to be placed under a stewardship and not to engage in any commercial real estate acquisitions for five years. She is also asking the court to ban Trump, Donald, Jr., Ivanka and Eric from ever again running a company based in New York.

When we recently learned that James' office had "rebuffed an offer" from Trump's attorneys to settle this civil lawsuit, I wanted to know — and still want to know — how much Trump was willing to pay (or do) to make the case go away, especially knowing that losing the case could mean the end of his family business.

At her news conference last Wednesday, James explained that the investigation not only "revealed that Donald Trump engaged in years of illegal conduct to inflate his worth, to deceive banks and the people of the great state of New York," but also uncovered evidence of potential criminal violations, including insurance, bank and tax fraud. James has shared her findings with both the IRS and the Southern District, where these cases could be pursued as criminal rather than civil matters.

Meanwhile, from the big-picture criminological perspective, we also know the Justice Department has been investigating the fraudulent Save America PAC — Trump's main fund-raising vehicle since he lost the 2020 election — which promotes baseless assertions about election fraud, and also played a role in trying to overturn the election and instigating the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol.

There are also the ongoing DOJ criminal investigations into Trump's seditious conspiracy and obstruction of justice related to the fake electors scheme and failed coup that followed the 2020 election, as well as the stolen or "borrowed" classified documents recovered from Mar-a-Lago this summer.

As I opined in the Miami Herald last Wednesday, "When it comes to prosecuting Trump, it's not a matter of 'if,' but 'when'" the various lawsuits will materialize, and specifically what crimes he will be prosecuted for. After all, the racketeer in chief has literally engaged in decades of lawlessness and hundreds of potential violations spanning the years before, during and after his presidency.

I hedged my answers to these questions:

Unless the DOJ finds a way to combine the crimes of seditious conspiracy and obstruction of justice pertaining to Jan. 6 and the crimes of espionage and obstruction of justice pertaining to Mar-a-Lago into one complicated case — highly unlikely, if not impossible — then look for the Justice Department to either prosecute its classified-documents case in the spring of 2023 or its seditious conspiracy case in the winter of 2024.

Before the June and July select committee hearings on Jan. 6, and the subsequent scandal that emerged surrounding the classified documents found at Mar-a-Lago, I was concerned that Trump would once again most likely escape criminal prosecution. But once it became obvious that the DOJ almost certainly could not refrain from prosecuting the former president for his obvious crimes, secondary concerns kicked in.

I suspect we may see a hierarchy of discretionary prosecutions established, where the DOJ chooses to settle for one prosecution amid the myriad of possibilities, allowing Trump to escape accountability for most of his crimes. Even worse, there's the possibility that Trump would cut a deal to avoid any criminal trials and imprisonment.

This takes us back full circle to my unlikely proposition: The RICO statutes could and should be used as a means of bringing all the related civil and criminal charges from the various legal jurisdictions together, with the goal of prosecuting Donald Trump as a crime boss and his organization as a criminal enterprise.

As the machinery of justice slowly grinds closer to Donald Trump, the Trump Organization and the former president's criminal enterprise for a smorgasbord of possible charges — criminal fraud, defrauding the United States, espionage, falsification of business records, interfering with an official proceeding, insurrection, obstruction of justice, racketeering, seditious conspiracy, solicitation to commit election fraud, tax evasion, wire fraud and more — nobody has ever been as well prepared as the weaponizer-in-chief to do battle with the state and its agents of crime control, especially in the court of public opinion.

Trump filed a largely incoherent lawsuit on Monday seeking the appointment of a "special master" to "review and return evidence collected during last week's FBI search of his Mar-a-Lago estate." Trump had presaged this on his Truth Social platform last Friday: "A major motion pending to the Fourth Amendment will soon be filed concerning the illegal break-in of my home … right before the ever-important Mid-Term Elections."

The legal arguments in that lawsuit were so poorly developed, however, that District Court Judge Aileen Cannon of the Southern District of Florida "ordered Trump's lawyers to elaborate on their arguments for why the court has the ability to step in at this time, explain what exactly Trump is asking for and whether the Justice Department has been served with Trump's special master motion." Their responses are due back to Judge Cannon, a Trump appointee, by the end of this week.

Throughout Trump's professional career he has always been at war with legal standards and normative rules, which he regards as made to be broken or avoided at all costs. His lifetime of adjudication is found in a lengthy background of litigation accompanied by a pathological pattern of lying.

As someone who has been involved in more than 4,000 legal battles going back to 1973, Trump loves litigation as much as his cans of Diet Coke and boxes of fast food. As a real estate developer, entrepreneur, entertainer and politician, Trump boasted in 2015 — when he was merely the frontrunner for the GOP nomination — "I've taken advantage of the laws. And frankly, so has everybody else in my position."

As a defendant, Trump has been sued for race and sex discrimination, sexual harassment and fraud. He has also been sued for breaches of trust, money laundering, defamation, stiffing his creditors and defaulting on loans.

What Trump has successfully learned over five decades of lawlessness and impunity is that the best defense against any opponent is a strong offense. Ergo, Trump has sued others for fraud, for breach of trust, for breach of contract, for violation of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act, for government favoritism, for libel and for misappropriation or adulteration of the brand name "Trump."

Since the FBI carried out its now-legendary search of Trump's home at Mar-a-Lago earlier this month, the ex-president and his allies have stepped up their attacks on both the FBI and the Department of Justice, seeking to demonize them as arms of a "'woke' Democratic deep state mob." Some of Trump's more shameless allies have gone so far as to call for "defunding" the FBI, something no Republican of an earlier era could even have imagined.

Federal Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart arguably bent a little to the intense pushback by Trump and company, and instructed the Justice Department to redact the affidavit for the search warrant "in a way that would not undermine its investigation if made public." Now that the DOJ has complied, Reinhart has ordered that the redacted affidavit be released and shared with the public by 12 noon Eastern time on Friday.

I can state with a high degree of certainty that the redacted affidavit we may see on Friday will reveal nothing of legal substance: To do otherwise would jeopardize the investigation.

I can state with a high degree of certainty that the redacted affidavit delivered to Judge Reinhart on Thursday revealed nothing of legal substance: To do otherwise would jeopardize the investigation and the future cooperation of witnesses. I suspect we will learn little if anything that we didn't know before, except perhaps a bit more about the timeline and the degree of stalling engaged in by the former president and his cronies.

This outcome will not ameliorate the problem. Indeed, it will only exacerbate the situation. It's a genuine "damned if you do, damned if you don't" conundrum, because to Trump and his allies it will appear that the DOJ got its way and that Judge Reinhard sided with the FBI.

Regardless of the merits of the DOJ's position and Reinhart's decision, Trump and his conspirators as well as the Trumpian propagandists at Fox News, et al., will, as Greg Sargent of the Washington Post puts it, "seize on the redactions as 'evidence' that the 'real rationale' for the search is being covered up — and that the entire process is irredeemably illegitimate."

Whether or not the issue of redaction that will surely not be resolved here and now is further appealed by Trump, the weaponizer-in-chief and his gang of conspirators will not only have their talking points about the Democratic regime's totalitarian oppression and persecution of Trump, but will also claim to find "conclusive proof" that the search of Mar-a-Lago could not have been justified by any reasonable suspicions of wrongdoing.

Worse yet for the rule of law and justice, all these bogus excuses and cover-ups — the ones concocted by Boss Trump and his compadres — will be crafted into a narrative in which all the law enforcement agencies pursuing Trump are at least as corrupt and illegitimate as he is.

Putting a former president on trial for alleged criminal behavior would be the first prosecution of its kind in American history. It would also do much toward restoring the myth that no person or corporation is above the law. As James Doyle has explained, putting Trump on trial "redeems American justice."

Looking both backward and forward, I would argue that putting the former racketeer in chief and his accomplices on trial for seditious conspiracy to overthrow the U.S. government — arguably the ultimate constitutional crime — is more tangible than the abstract goal of redeeming American justice. In this insurrectionary moment, "substantive" due process justice trumps "procedural" due process justice.

After the first five public hearings held by the House select committee investigating the organized and coordinated activities of Donald J. Trump and his allies to steal the 2020 presidential election, culminating in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack, it seemed apparent that Attorney General Merrick Garland would not prosecute Trump for two likely federal crimes: "obstructing an official proceeding" and engaging in a "conspiracy to defraud the United States."

But the sixth hearing, and the dramatic testimony of Cassidy Hutchinson, an aide to former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows — the proverbial "fly on the wall" — was truly a game-changer. Knowing that Trump welcomed the armed weapons and the assault on the Capitol was certainly no surprise to most people who have been paying attention.

Knowing Trump as a criminal biographer, I was not surprised to learn that he may have physically assaulted another person under circumstances similar to those on the occasion when he struck his first-grade teacher in the head before a whole classroom of his peers.

It was a surprise to me initially that Trump wanted to be present at the Capitol during the assault. For both legal and safety reasons, that would have been highly inadvisable. Jumping into Trump's fantasy world, however, where he believed that he was not at physical risk, I could also imagine Trump envisioning himself riding up the stairs and into the Capitol on a white stallion, ahead of his troops.

Recall that Trump had successfully defended himself from "incitement of insurrection" during his second impeachment trial, contending that his Ellipse speech was protected by the First Amendment and that he had no knowledge about the crowd's makeup, its intentions or its possible weaponry.

Trump's defense was plausible, at least at that point, because after only four weeks of investigation the House impeachment managers' case against him was based on circumstantial rather than direct evidence. All of that changed with the testimony of Cassidy Hutchinson.

That's why the testimony of Pat Cipollone, Trump's former White House counsel, who was quoted by Hutchinson as saying, "We're going to get charges of every crime imaginable," including seditious conspiracy as well as jury tampering, has now been subpoenaed by the select committee.

I do not imagine that any federal prosecution of Trump will occur before the end of 2023. In the meantime, however, it is likely that the former president will be prosecuted before the end of 2022 for the felony of asking Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to overturn the outcome in that state by "finding" 11,780 fake votes, one more than Trump lost the state by to Joe Biden.

In the Georgia case, Trump could be charged with violating as many as four statutes. These include seeking to have ballots counted that Trump knew were "materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent under the laws" of the State of Georgia; conspiring with Meadows and two other lawyers "to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person…"; "soliciting another person" to willfully tamper "with any electors list, voter's certificate…"; and engaging in "criminal solicitation to commit election fraud."

Following a lifetime of crime, corruption and impunity, it now appears that the criminal law is at last catching up with the man who has operated a criminal enterprise within the Trump Organization since the early 1980s.

Over more than four decades, a non-exhaustive listing of the former president's alleged crimes would include sexual assault; tax evasion; money laundering; the non-payment of employees, contractors and attorneys; financial fraud; racketeering; and obstruction of justice.

Trump is a veritable Houdini of white-collar crime, a master of lawlessness and impunity. Not only has he never been convicted of any crime, he has never even been charged with a felony..

As a litigator, Trump is in a league of his own. Since 1973 he has been involved in more than 4,000 lawsuits, and in some 60 percent of those as the suing plaintiff.

Until now, his litigation has almost always been about attracting attention and wearing down opponents. As the late, great litigator James D. Zirin, author of "Plaintiff in Chief: A Portrait of Donald Trump in 3,500 Lawsuits," wrote of Trump: "What was important was to use the lawsuit to attract attention, to exert economic pressure, and to prove he was the kid on the block not to be messed with."

The impending criminal charges to be filed against Donald Trump by the district attorney of Fulton County, Georgia, and the U.S. Department of Justice are both very different from the thousands of previous lawsuits in Trump's career. Those civil cases, both past and present, have always been about money. The soon-to-be criminal cases will be about Trump's personal freedom — and whether he will be wearing an orange jumpsuit for the next several years.

Donald Trump filed a lawsuit on March 24 in U.S. District Court in the Southern District of Florida charging Hillary Clinton, the Democratic National Committee, former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele and various other people with attempting to rig the 2016 election by tying his campaign to Russian meddling.

Among multiple grandiose claims, the suit alleges both "racketeering" and "conspiracy" to commit injurious untruths: "Acting in concert, the Defendants maliciously conspired to weave a false narrative that their Republican opponent, Donald J. Trump, was colluding with a hostile foreign sovereignty." Trump seeks both compensatory and punitive damages, and claims he incurred expenses of at least $24 million "in the form of defense costs, legal fees, and related expenses."

This comes straight out of the Trump playbook of suing and countersuing, and references a long list of grievances that Trump has been repeatedly airing since he was elected in 2016, not to mention his continued false claims that his 2020 defeat was the product of widespread fraud and conspiracy.

Ordinary people who get caught up in lengthy legal battles, on whatever side of the conflict, generally find the experience to be costly to their pocketbooks, reputations and mental wellness. As someone who has been involved in more than 4,000 legal battles since 1973, Trump is clearly an exception to the rule.

He loves litigation as much as his cans of Diet Coke or boxes of fast food burgers or 36 holes of golf twice weekly. As a real estate tycoon, entrepreneur, entertainer and politician, Trump boasts: "I've taken advantage of the laws. And frankly, so has everybody else in my position."

Trump's modus operandi, whether in politics or litigation, has always been about "the pot calling the kettle black" — or perhaps, in psychological terms, about projection. Here we have a situation where the actual racketeer and conspirator who has escaped two impeachments, the latter for having unsuccessfully conspired to steal the 2020 election, is predictably alleging racketeering, conspiracy and victimization by his opponents.

For Trump, litigation as a weapon has always been about attracting attention, exercising economic pressure, wearing down opponents and letting everyone know not to mess with the Donald. It's rarely about the facts or the law.

As litigator in chief, Donald Trump has been in a league of his own. In some 60 percent of 3,500 lawsuits, Trump has been the suing plaintiff rather than the sued defendant. His win-loss record is undeniably impressive: He has won 451 times and lost only 38.

As a defendant, Trump has persuaded judges to dismiss some 500 plaintiffs' cases against him. Hundreds of other cases have ended with unclear legal resolutions, according to available public records.

Trump has sued and been sued by personal assistants, celebrities, mental patients, prisoners, unions, rival businesspeople and his own family members.

Since the 1970s, he has been sued for race and sex discrimination, sexual harassment, fraud, breaches of trust, money laundering, defamation, stiffing creditors and defaulting on loans.

In turn, plaintiff Trump has sued people for fraud, breach of trust, breach of contract, violation of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, for government favoritism, and for misappropriation or adulteration of the Trump name.

Once again, it seems that Trump's weaponization of the law is paying off. It now appears almost certain that neither the district attorney in Manhattan nor the U.S. attorney general will ever criminally charge Trump for his crimes of racketeering or insurrection.

Roy Cohn, who was the first of Trump's personal attorneys and "fixers" to be disbarred or suspended for lawless conduct — followed by Michael Cohen and Rudy Giuliani — taught Trump the art of the linguistic lie as a way of moving through life, business, politics and the law.

Trump's primer on the law included Cohn's three rules of litigation: Never settle, never surrender; counterattack immediately; no matter the outcome, always claim victory. Over the course of his litigious life, Trump was better at adhering to the latter two rules than the first, because the social reality of legal facts often dictates settling.

Cohn also taught Trump other related lessons, including but not limited to focusing on short-term victories, employing any unscrupulous means necessary to achieve them, doing end-runs around the judicial system, fixing disputed outcomes and the value of always defending yourself by going on the offensive.

As Cohn's apprentice, Trump would eventually take the art of the lie to an even higher (or lower) level than Cohn himself or Trump's father, Fred Trump Sr., who was also a serial fabricator of the truth, could possibly have imagined.

Gregg Barak is an emeritus professor of criminology and criminal justice at Eastern Michigan University, co-founder and North American editor of the Journal of White Collar and Corporate Crime, and author of the forthcoming book "Criminology on Trump."