Unless former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley somehow manages to pull off a major upset, the 2024 presidential race will likely be a rematch between GOP frontrunner Donald Trump and Democratic incumbent President Joe Biden. This comes at a time when Trump is up against four criminal indictments and a variety of civil lawsuits — an unprecedented situation for the presumptive presidential nominee of a major political party in the United States.
Trump has been angrily railing against the judges and prosecutors in the criminal and civil cases he is facing, and his critics on both the left and the right have been warning that he is waging a full-fledged assault on the rule of law.
But in an article published on January 12, Politico’s Michael Kruse emphasizes that Trump’s battle with the American legal system didn’t begin when he became a politician — it has been going for over half a century.
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“Trump and his allies say he is the victim of the weaponization of the justice system, but the reality is exactly the opposite,” Kruse explains. “For literally more than 50 years, according to thousands of pages of court records and hundreds of interviews with lawyers and legal experts, people who have worked for Trump, against Trump or both, and many of the myriad litigants who’ve been caught in the crossfire, Trump has taught himself how to use and abuse the legal system for his own advantage and aims.”
Kruse continues, “Many might view the legal system as a place to try to avoid, or as perhaps a necessary evil, or maybe even as a noble arbiter of equality and fairness. Not Trump. He spent most of his adult life molding it into an arena in which he could stake claims and hunt leverage. It has not been for him a place of last resort so much as a place of constant quarrel.”
As a young real estate mogul back in 1973, the Politico reporter notes, Trump was carefully studying the methods used by the “notorious” lawyer Roy Cohn. Trump, according to Kruse, “exploited as loopholes the legal system’s bedrock tenets” when, in 1973, the federal government sued him for “racist rental practices.”
Conservative legal expert J. Michael Luttig, a retired judge, told Politico, “He has attacked the judicial system, our system of justice and the rule of law his entire life. And this, to him, is the grand finale.”
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Similarly, Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-California) told Politico, “There’s probably no single person in America who is more, I would say, knowledgeable and experienced in our legal system — as both a plaintiff and as a defendant — than Donald Trump…. Trump is a legal terrorist.”
Another prominent Democrat, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-California), warns that 2024 could determine whether the rule of law survives of collapses in the U.S.
Schiff told Politico, “We’re about to go through a great trial in this country.… We’re going to be testing the proposition that the rule of law applies to everyone and no one’s above the law. It will be particularly wrenching because Trump will continue to make the false claim that he’s being politically persecuted, and it will also give Trump the continuing opportunity to tear down the system.”
Read Michael Kruse’s full report for Politico at this link.
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