Donald Trump faced his first lawsuit in 1973, at the age of 27. He and his father were accused of discriminating against blacks in New York in renting apartments. The young hunk of the real estate industry was mentored and mentored by ex-prosecutor, lawyer and notorious conspirator Roy Cohn, one of the country’s darkest figures, known for his crucial intervention in the dubious prosecution that brought him to the chair electrified the Rosenbergs for espionage, as well as for his role as Senator Joseph McCarthy’s right-hand man in the witch hunt against suspected communists.
During the first meeting with Cohn to plan his defense, the future president told him, as he would explain in his book The Art of Negotiation (1987): “I don’t like lawyers… They always want to reach an agreement in instead of fightingâ€. Cohn agreed and encouraged him to tell the investigators “to go to hell and fight in court.” The idea was: when they attack you, respond with a much bigger offensive. In that case, Cohn and Trump’s counteroffensive consisted of a $100 million lawsuit against the government. The judge dismissed it, but the businessman and his adviser delayed the proceedings for two years, during which Trump achieved massive publicity. In the end he signed a plea deal in which he admitted no wrongdoing.
This first case would serve Trump as a playbook in all the litigations in which he would be embroiled since then, which would not be few; as he himself testified in 2012, by then he had already given a hundred statements and other testimonies in proceedings of all kinds.
Fifty years after this first case, it seems difficult that the Republican leader can survive such serious causes as his intervention in the storming of the Capitol, the attempts to falsify the 2020 elections, the hiding in his home of hundreds of secret documents…or the $130,000 bribe to porn actress Stormy Daniels not to talk about the relationship they had in 2016, for which he just earned the not-so-honorable title of the country’s first criminally indicted president .
Attacking, delaying, appearing as a victim and turning the process in his favor, as an electoral asset for the 2024 presidential elections, are the main elements of the strategy that he has already begun to foreshadow with his lawyers, Joe Tacopina and Susan Necheles.
The ex-president and his defense will appear tomorrow, Tuesday, before Judge Juan Merchan so that the team of prosecutors headed by Alvin Bragg will read the charges related to bribery, which may be more than 30. “Merchan hates me”; Bragg is “an animal” who acts like “a degenerate psychopath”, said Trump of the judge and prosecutor. And it is foreseeable that this kind of banter, as well as complaints of “political persecution”, will continue in the coming days.
After this reading of the charges in a courthouse in New York, where he will have previously been fingerprinted and signed, the former president plans to return to his home, in Florida, to make a statement. It will, for sure, be a resounding proclamation of innocence with attribution of blame to the promoters of the imputation under the principle that the best defense is an overwhelming attack. It will be, at the same time, an act of electoral campaign; a campaign of martyrology that starts like a viacrucis, in the middle of Easter, but with a Donald Trump very unwilling to be crucified.
