Donald Trump: This is how he wants to wriggle out of his trials

Restraint has never been a forte of Donald Trump. But with every day that his mountain of legal problems grows, his fuse becomes even shorter. During a speech in New Hampshire, he lost the last bit of composure and loudly shouted expletives into the crowd: Because he was in the courtroom for “bullshit” he would not be able to take part in all campaign events, he complained. Words like bullshit, meaning shit, have not previously been part of the ex-president’s rabble repertoire. His audience immediately responded with shouts of “bullshit, bullshit, bullshit”.

There are still many occasions to curse

As things stand, both the multiple accused himself and his followers will likely have many more reasons to swear in the coming months. Three charges have already been read out, and a fourth is likely to follow in mid-August:

Such a spate of lawsuits is unprecedented in US history, if only because no (former) American head of state has ever stood trial. But Donald Trump himself is more than used to dealing with legal difficulties. He has been involved in an estimated 4,000 cases in his life – both as a defendant and as a plaintiff. The cases revolved around his bankrupt casinos, tax issues, defamation and sex allegations. In the litigious New York real estate business, Trump had accumulated more legal proceedings during his active time than the city’s five largest concrete magnates combined, such as .

Threat of lawsuits as a “negotiation argument”

Some Trump connoisseurs even believe that it was his lavish use of lawyers that made him successful in the first place. Because what the New Yorker lacked in business acumen, he made up for by investing his $200-$900 million inheritance in court cases and lawyers. Litigation quickly becomes a threat to the very existence of small companies in the USA, which is why the corresponding threat can become a convincing “negotiation argument”. Trump has been shown to have bankrupted dozens of handyman companies.

It was Trump’s first lawyer, Roy Cohn, who not only took away the real estate novice’s shyness of going to court, but also taught him how to act successfully in general: “Never apologize, always attack, always hit harder back”. Cohn, who also represented the mafia, remained Trump’s lawyer, intimate and fixer until his death from AIDS. Even decades later, Trump is said to have called for “his Roy” in difficult situations.

Donald Trump uses perpetrator-victim reversal tactics

The two met in 1973, at the first major trial involving Donald Trump. At the time, the family business owned thousands upon thousands of apartments in the boroughs of Queens and Brooklyn, but black people were almost never seen there. The Trumps did not allow African Americans in their homes. The US Department of Justice sued the Trump Organization because of this – and the boss sued back: for 100 million dollars. Reason: The government wants to force him to rent apartments to “welfare recipients”. In the end, Trump lost both processes, but was never convicted, only “reprimanded”.

Biographer Michael D’Antonio wrote: It is the first time that Donald Trump has used the perpetrator-victim reversal tactic and pretended it was he being wronged. Basically, this approach, once devised by gangster lawyer Roy Cohn, has never changed: Whenever things didn’t go the way Trump wanted, and it didn’t and doesn’t quite often, he pointed his finger other. It has now become his trademark.

Often enough, however, his aggressive forward defense came back as a painful boomerang. In 2011, for example, Trump wanted to sue for an incredible five billion dollars in damages from author Timothy O’Brien. For his book “Trump Nation” he had looked at the financial situation of the then TV star and wrote that Trump “only” owned between 150 and 250 million dollars. The self-proclaimed multi-billionaire saw his reputation damaged. In the process, he babbled vaguely and frankly that the information on his assets, which was always different, depended on how “he was feeling that day”. In the end, the court dismissed Trump’s lawsuit because it was based on “feeling” instead of facts.

Donald Trump’s “emotional values”

Trump is said to have approached the tax office and donors in a sensitive but calculating manner. The New York Attorney General’s Office is investigating the Trump Organization family holding company. She is said to have artificially inflated the value of real estate to obtain loans. But when it came to taxes and insurance, the company counted the values ​​down. A fine of 250 million dollars is to be paid for it. Trump personally is not charged in this case.

It is still completely unclear whether Donald Trump will be able to pull his neck out of all these nooses again. “These are all one-off events, nobody has any experience with them. It is therefore also questionable whether there will be one or more convictions at all,” said lawyer Jürgen Rodegra, who has experience in the US, recently star. In any case, his team of lawyers is currently trying to use formalities to trick a passable starting point.

The focus should be on the serious process in Washington. The “New York Times” journalist and probably the best Trump expert Maggie Haberman believes that Trump’s defense team will pounce on Judge Chutkan to remove her for “bias”, as the reporter said on CNN.

Judge: “Presidents are not kings”

Because with Tanya Chutkan he would “under no circumstances get a fair trial,” Trump complained after it became known that she would lead the negotiation on the conspiracy to defraud the United States. She has repeatedly sentenced Capitol attackers, none of whom got away with light sentences. In autumn 2021, she also had to decide whether the ex-head of state had to hand over documents that could have something to do with January 6, 2021 to the investigators. The district judge had a clear opinion on this. Yes, because “Presidents are not kings.”

The ex-president can expect little sympathy from the district judge. In the case of this trial, there is also the fact that it is taking place in the capital Washington – not exactly a Trumpist stronghold. This means that there will be fewer Trump supporters on the jury, which is randomly composed of citizens of the city. The legal team is therefore trying to change the place of jurisdiction. Get out of the capital and into neighboring West Virginia. There, the defendant received almost 70 percent of the votes in 2020. As with the question of female judges, however, the prospect of a change of jurisdiction is slim.

A win for Trump every week without a trial

Such procedural tricks are common, even if they only delay the process. Or sometimes because of that. The US primary begins in January, and then every week without a court date is a small victory for Donald Trump. Although no one in the Republican Party will contest his candidacy, he will hardly win over undecided voters with the expected details of the process. Trump and his lawyers are therefore trying to postpone the start of the proceedings until the end of 2024 – when the election is over. In this way, the election campaign would not be influenced. Plus: The charges are so complex that it takes a lot of time to get used to them. Arguments that are actually difficult to dismiss out of hand.

Sources: USA Today, , “”,, “”, Michael D’Antonio: “The Truth About Donald Trump”, Rick Reilly: “The Man Who Cannot Lose”, Mary Trump: “Too Much and Never Enough”