Trump Goes to Court to Avoid Being a ‘Loser’
The president dusts off his well-worn litigation playbook to point to someone else to blame for his own shortcomings.
Forget self-reflection.
Photographer: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
As expected, Donald Trump has lobbed lawsuits at a few states, challenging the bona fides of presidential voting. In a pair of cases in Michigan and Pennsylvania, he’s pushed to stop ballots from being tallied, while in Georgia he claimed negligence on the part of a single poll worker. He’s also threatened to demand a recount in Wisconsin and to sue Nevada for tallying “illegal votes.”
My Bloomberg Opinion colleague Noah Feldman accurately described the Michigan, Georgia and Pennsylvania lawsuits as toothless. Judges in Michigan and Georgia dismissed the suits there on Thursday. And in Nevada, an NBC reporter, Jacob Soboroff, gamely tried to pin down a former Trump intelligence official, Ric Grenell, for evidence of voter fraud supporting the lawsuit there. Grenell stayed mum.
Trump’s lawsuits are plainly frivolous and manage to equate counting votes with fraud rather than democracy. But the point of the lawsuits isn’t to cure an actual problem. Trump has spent months claiming that elections and mail-in voting in the U.S. are riddled with malfeasance. They’re not, of course. His lawsuits are an extension of that push, and the true goal is to find someone or something that he can blame for his own failures and shortcomings — in this current case, possibly losing a presidential election.
Days, weeks, months and years hence, Trump will point at these lawsuits as tangible proof that something was rotten in the 2020 presidential election. In fact, he will say, had the election not been rigged, he would have won. That’s a two-fer for Trump: It allows him to avoid taking responsibility and helps him dodge the “loser” label he enjoys slapping on everyone else but so fears himself. In that context, the lawsuits are well worth it to him, even if they help erode public trust in the electoral process.
This is all old hat for Trump; he’s been involved in at least 3,500 lawsuits over the last three decades or so. He learned long ago from the late Roy Cohn how to weaponize the legal system against business competitors, the government and critics, gaining the valuable insight that sometimes merely filing a suit got him just as far as actually going to court. If it made a financial or legal problem go away, cowed an opponent or provided him with a fall guy, that was enough.
The media has been a favorite Trump target, and he’s routinely rattled his saber against reporters without following through. (Trump unsuccessfully sued me for libel in 2006, claiming that a biography I wrote, “TrumpNation,” unfairly questioned his business record and the size of his fortune.) But there have been plenty of others:
All of this pre-presidential litigation had less dangerous and damaging echoes than it does now, but the playbook has always been the same. With public faith in our core institutions once again under assault from Trump — and perhaps one of the last times while he’s president — it would be valuable for everyone involved to remember that POTUS is often a paper tiger, especially in court.