A good year and a half after his election defeat, Donald Trump has not been quiet. As far as his legal support is concerned, things have gotten lonely for the former US President.
Until recently, Trump had relied on his presidential powers as a protective shield, but now he is more or less on his own. “Right now he’s more vulnerable than ever,” said American author Tim O’Brien in a New York Times article.
It was only announced on Monday that, according to the American National Archives, Donald Trump had taken at least 700 pages of secret documents with him after leaving the White House. Some of them are apparently assigned to the highest levels of secrecy, as can be seen from a letter to a Trump lawyer that the archive published on Tuesday night.
On the same day, Donald Trump filed a request for review of documents confiscated from his Mar-a-Lago estate just under two weeks ago. He drafted the application himself, so it sounded “more like a press release he wrote himself” than an official legal document. Since the loss of the presidency no longer a rarity for Trump
The explanation for this is obvious: for years, the Republican fired one lawyer after the next. Today he only has a small pool of lawyers whose skills seem to range from good to poor.
The “New York Times” states in a report that Trump’s lawyers did not fill out the simplest papers relating to the FBI search in Mar-a-Lago correctly. The lawyers in question did not have a license in the relevant US state either.
Added to this is the well-known impulsive nature of Donald Trump. From government circles it is said that his spokesman can hardly bring himself to make any official statements, since the ex-president can change his mind at any time or withhold information. Only very few of his close advisors knew about the letter to Trump’s lawyer on Monday.
And so the only constant in every trial surrounding Trump is exactly one person: himself. For strategic decisions, he falls back on his own supposed talent, which often leads to legal errors.
The problem for the former US President could be that the entire investigation into the secret documents is more tangible for the American population than perhaps the Russian election rigging in 2016 was. From private conversations, the Times says that Trump himself is increasingly concerned about the course of the investigation.
Trump’s team tries to uphold the argument that the search in Mar-a-Lago, for example, was a staging by order of US President Joe Biden. However, the White House and the Justice Department have repeatedly confirmed that there was no connection and that Biden had no knowledge of it prior to the search.
For years, Trump has relied on a strategy dating back to former US Attorney Roy Cohn: portraying himself as a victim, labeling criticism a witch hunt, intimidating allies. Suddenly that doesn’t seem to work anymore.
Political adviser Alan Marcus, who once worked for Trump, found an even shorter motto for the Republican’s actions in The Times: “First shoot, then aim”. And logically, this way you quickly miss the target.
