Would it be Alan Dershowitz, the president’s volunteer Harvard professor lawyer advocate? Judge Pirro of Fox News, his favorite TV judge? America’s Mayor, Rudy Giuliani, the Oliver Wendell Holmes of his legal team?
Those were the possible questions the president contemplated as he wrestled with naming the successor to the still-vacant seat left by the late Justice Scalia.
Trump had been teasing the choice. Originally, it was to be announced at 9 a.m. that Monday (July 9, 2019). Then twelve noon. He was still deliberating, the word was. I kept adjusting my schedule, so as not to miss what Jake Tapper of CNN called “a momentous event in the history of the nation.” It was like the opening of the envelopes at the Emmys, or the ribbon cutting at a new golf course. HUGE. Finally at 9 p.m., the door was opened.
The winner was none of the above. It turned out to be some judge I had never heard of. The major asset of an unknown named “Kavanaugh” seemed to be a legal paper he had written, saying presidents couldn’t be indicted or otherwise harassed by the courts while in office.
It was disappointing to learn that all the president’s time-consuming deliberations were limited to a short list handed to him as a public service by unbiased right-wing institutions (Federalist Society, Heritage Foundation, among other stink tanks). Sad.
It wasn’t as if our commander in chief had no training in the law. He had studied as a callow youth at the Roy Cohn School of Law.
The most despicable lawyer in the country at the time, Roy Cohn mentored a man who some believe is the most despicable president. The dean of attack law already had taught young Trump that, when accused of lying about groping, or fleecing students at Trump University (known in academia as Fuck U.), or stiffing his Atlantic City casino contractors, the legal defense is “See you in court.” At the time of his inauguration, more than 1,200 (New York Times count) to 3,500 (per USA Today) cases were still waiting to be seen to.
For Trump to file a lawsuit is nothing, Vincent Lo, a former Trump partner, said after Trump sued him for $1 billion. “It’s just like having lunch.” At the time of his election, according to James D. Zirin in Plaintiff in Chief, the reported 3,500 lawsuits in which he had been involved would average roughly three per business day spanning the forty-eight years from 1968, when he graduated from Wharton, until election day 2016.
Serial litigator in chief Trump, Esq. had a full docket picking a new Supreme Court justice that week. There was his obligation of creating controversies and other distractions on the official Twitter feed every morning. Where would the cable news shows get their false facts, lies, and other bubbe meises to fill their hours?
Then there was finding new ways to attack our friends and allies while kissing up to traditional enemies. Just the other day he was accusing the Canadians of scuffing up new shoes, so they could cheat us on new shoe tariffs. “Something he picked up from an FDR speech,” speculated Joe Scarborough on Morning Joe (July 9, 2019). “In 1943.”
He was also busy kowtowing to Chairman Kim, as he now called the former “fat little rocket man.”
Which NATO alliance leader should he push out of the class photo in the Brussels meeting next week, as he did Montenegro last time?
The biggest presidential chore on the to-do list was figuring out what to say to Putin at the private one-on-one summit meeting in Helsinki. People were starting to talk about how enamored he is of the ex-KGB killer, what they used to call “a crush.” Maybe he only admired Putin as the master of all Russia. If only he could become the master of all America.
It made some law junkies a little sick to hear the president talk in his brief remarks announcing his choice about revering the rule of law and the Constitution, a document that he still may not have read or had someone translate, especially Article 1, Section 9, Clause 8, dealing with the inappropriateness of emoluments. Apparently, some limited government purists thought, it is not okay, during a press conference on the White House lawn, to urge us to buy Ivanka’s products, even if she is a member of his brain trust.