Trump is facing multiple legal challenges and this is how he chooses who to represent him?
Seated far to the left of the defendant, former President Donald J. Trump, in a Manhattan criminal courtroom on Tuesday was a lawyer who has never tried a case in court, whose phone was seized by federal agents executing a warrant last year, and who once hosted syndicated news segments bombastically defending the Trump White House.
Seated to Mr. Trump’s far right was Todd Blanche, a newly hired criminal defense lawyer who also represents the lawyer at the far-left end of the table, Boris Epshteyn. In between them was Joe Tacopina, a combative presence on cable television who recently represented Mr. Trump’s future daughter-in-law, Kimberly Guilfoyle, before the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
The tableau, rounded out by another lawyer, Susan R. Necheles, from Mr. Trump’s arraignment on felony charges of falsifying business records, revealed more about the client than about the case at hand. It was emblematic of his relentless search for the perfect lawyer — and of his frequent replacement of his lawyers when they fail to live up to his ideal for how the perfect lawyer should operate.
Mr. Trump has long been obsessed with lawyers: obsessed with finding what he thinks are good lawyers, and obsessed with ensuring that his lawyers defend him zealously in the court of public opinion.
His lawyers’ own foibles are seldom disqualifying, so long as they defend him in the manner he desires.
That often means measuring up to the example of Roy M. Cohn, Mr. Trump’s first fixer-lawyer, who represented him in the 1970s and early 1980s. Mr. Cohn, whose background included being indicted himself and who was eventually disbarred, earned a reputation for practicing with threats, scorched-earth attacks and media manipulation.
Mr. Trump’s continual efforts to identify and recruit the newest Roy Cohn have always been unusual and impulsive, according to interviews with a half-dozen people who have represented or been involved in Mr. Trump’s legal travails over the past seven years.
He has occasionally hired lawyers after only the briefest phone call, knowing little to nothing about their background but having been impressed by a quick introduction or by seeing them praise him on Fox News.
It took only an introduction over the phone by Mr. Epshteyn on a conference call for Mr. Trump to hire Evan Corcoran, a former federal prosecutor, to handle discussions with the government over its efforts to recover classified materials in Mr. Trump’s possession. (Mr. Corcoran has since become the focus of government efforts to pierce attorney-client privilege and learn about his discussions with Mr. Trump in connection with a grand-jury subpoena for classified material at Mar-a-Lago, as the government amasses evidence of obstruction of justice. Prosecutors believe Mr. Trump may have misled Mr. Corcoran during those discussions.)
Mr. Trump hired Jim Trusty, a former federal prosecutor, to work on the classified-documents case after seeing him discuss one of Mr. Trump’s legal entanglements as a commentator on television.
“That’s one of the first questions: ‘Can you go on TV?’ He picks his lawyers literally off of TV,” said one lawyer who used to represent Mr. Trump, who insisted on anonymity to avoid publicly breaking confidence with a former client. “It’s more important that you go on TV for him, and how you look on TV, than what you actually say in the courtroom.”
The same lawyer cited Mr. Trump’s lawsuits against the journalist Bob Woodward and the Pulitzer Prize Board as actions that any experienced lawyer would have known would get him or her “laughed out of court.”
Trump is a TV addict who has formed his entire worldview based upon what he sees on the screen. And he didn’t learn otherwise as president which is still astonishing. So it’s not unusual for him to judge the acumen of a lawyer from the way they defend him on Fox News.
The real question, as always, is how so many Republicans can support him, knowing this about him.