The Bad Part of Being a Lawyer in Trumpworld

As his legal woes pile up, it’s been no secret that former President Donald Trump has employed more than a handful of lawyers in his time.

David Enrich, business investigations editor at The New York Times and author of the new book, Servants of the Damned: Giant Law Firms, Donald Trump, and the Corruption of Justice, tells hosts Molly Jong-Fast and Andy Levy on this episode of political podcast The New Abnormal that it’s certainly a pattern.

“This is something that was happening for decades before Trump ever started flirting with the White House,” Enrich says.

“And it’s happening to this day, that lawyers who cast their line with Donald Trump often find themselves in legal peril themselves, which is the last place a lawyer ever wants to be.”

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In August, the Department of Justice named two Trump attorneys, Evan Corcoran and Christina Bobb, alleging the pair may have misinformed government attorneys about the location of sensitive governments held at Mar-a-Lago, or whether they were even there. Bobb recently obtained an attorney for herself, The New York Times noted.

Then there is Michael Cohen, Rudy Giuliani, and John Eastman, to name but a few, who have all had trouble with the law.

So why get involved? Enrich notes former White House Counsel Don McGahn “liked the fact that they had what they regarded as a pliable president.

“McGahn famously battled with Trump and had these screaming matches with him. I don’t think personally they got along all that well, but it was worth the distastefulness, because they had this really once-in-a-generation opportunity to, in particular, remake the federal judiciary.”

Also on the podcast, G. Elliot Morris, data-driven journalist and author of the book Strength in Numbers: How Polls Work and Why We Need Them, describes the “pretty complex” world of polling and sampling.

“Even if you have an accurate demographic portrait… there’s just this extra layer of guesswork that people have to do when they’re consuming polls,” he says.

“You can’t trust the sampling to provide you a 100 percent accurate portrait, or you cannot trust the sampling to deliver the percentage of Republicans in the electorate today that there will be in November. And that could be because you get too many Republicans now and then, like people changing their minds or those Republicans are just not answering the phones, which is pretty much what happened in 2020.

“If that’s happening this year again, then the polls are going to be biased in pretty much the same exact way. But I guess, you know, that is a big ‘if.’ We do not know.”

Morris says there’s a problem in the media where “people overinterpret polls, they expect too much accuracy from them.

“So when they’re wrong by a percentage point or two, just by virtue of them not understanding the uncertainty and the sampling error or non-sampling error or whatever, people are going to overreact to those misses and they shouldn’t.”

However, he says, “that’s kind of letting the pollsters off the hook. They were, at the end of the day, wrong about the percentage of Trump voters in the electorate in 2020 and in 2016. And they missed some key races in governor and Senate races in 2018. And maybe this year.”

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