Donald Trump may have become the first impeached ex-president in US history this week, but fighting in court is nothing new for him. When he became president, he already had some 3,500 lawsuits behind him and, perhaps because he has almost always gotten away with it, that has been a constant impulse to bypass the law to bullfighters and then give work to lawyers.
It’s been 50 years since he first faced justice, when he was a twentysomething playboy working for his father. The Trumps had apartments, but he only wanted white tenants in them: the African-Americans who came inquiring were told that they were full. The Department of Justice sued Trump for discrimination and he reacted with the same tactic that he has later used all his life: the counterattack.
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Trump responded to one lawsuit with another. He took the government to court and demanded 100 million 1973 dollars for tarnishing his image. As would happen so many times in the future, he was bluffing. He ended up accepting a plea agreement not to go to trial and agreed to place newspaper ads explaining to African-Americans that his apartments were available to them as well.
Since then he has not stopped receiving lawsuits: he has been accused of evading taxes, mistreating workers, defrauding partners, swindling ex-wives… and although he has said publicly that he never signs out-of-court agreements because that makes them sue you more, the reality It is that many times he has preferred to pay rather than risk: 25 million to the students cheated by “Trump University”, almost 3 million to those who bought overpriced apartments, 1 million to the undocumented Polish workers that he had exploited…
However, the former president has not only played the role of accused but has loved the role of accuser. The list of all the people Trump has threatened to sue in recent decades does not fit here. There are, for example, few major media outlets that are free: the New York Times several times, but also CNN, the conservative FOX News or the entire Pulitzer Prize jury.
Many of these lawsuits have ended in nothing, but some have frightened a journalist or publication enough to give up publishing a story about Trump. His threats to Forbes magazine prevented him from losing places on the famous list of the world’s richest that it publishes annually and with the same tactic he threatened to ruin journalists who had written critical books about him.
After a lifetime on the judicial razor’s edge, Trump is at his worst. In addition to sitting on the bench for having paid a porn star not to reveal a relationship with him during the 2016 campaign, he has many other open fronts. Also in New York, to begin with, the state attorney’s office is investigating him for fraudulent practices in his companies.
There are also the causes related to his conspiracy theory that the last elections were “stolen” from him: he is being investigated in Georgia for pressuring public officials from his party to manipulate the result, but there is also a special prosecutor who is analyzing his role in the attempted coup on January 6, where some of the injured police officers also claimed personal responsibility.
Apart from all this, he has another possible charge pending for having hidden classified documents in his Florida home, but above all for refusing to return them until the FBI showed up there to recover them. And to this we must add a possible trial for slandering a woman who accused him of having raped her years ago and who is demanding compensation.
No one is more prepared than him to cope with this judicial pressure because he has been in a similar situation almost all his life. At the moment these upsets are not only going to make him leave the campaign, but he is using them for his benefit. Right now, in fact, he is rising in the polls for the upcoming Republican primaries…we’ll see how the electorate takes it if they start to see him walk the bench or even wear handcuffs.
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