Donald Trump is the king of loafers | Opinion

With the conviction of President Biden’s son Hunter following the conviction of former President Donald Trump, it is hard to blame either prosecution on a corrupt justice system.

President Trump’s accusations that “law enforcement” was orchestrated by a vast conspiracy orchestrated by the current president could not ring truer after his son was convicted in Delaware as easily as President Trump was convicted in New York. When President Trump says that Hunter Biden’s conviction was just a ploy to cover up his father’s wrongdoing, it is clear that this is not true. One only needs to observe the president’s abiding affection for his son to know that he would never use him so cynically.

Still, Trump is right to acknowledge the existence of what we now call “loafers,” but he is wrong to claim that they were invented to persecute him: Trump himself mastered the technique long before anyone began using the term.

With his “loafer” allegations, Trump is once again projecting his own views. Critics have long noted Trump’s tendency to deflect attention from his own misdeeds by loudly accusing others of doing the things he is trying to get away with. After “Bad Hillary” in Trump’s vocabulary comes “Bad Joe.” “Liar Ted Cruz” became “Liar Hillary” and then “Liar James Comey,” and now he has applied the term to his opponents in court, his former White House chief of staff, and his own handpicked chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

“loafers” Against Trump? Donald Trump may not have invented the loafer, but if there was a monument to the loafer, Trump should be the Michelangelo who carved it. Next to his claims about lying, the allegations that Trump is doing the loafer to himself are a masterpiece of his projection.

It is unfortunate that our legal system is slow and expensive. Most legal systems have been criticized for this and defended with the expression, “the wheels of justice turn slowly.”

Many remember the fictitious probate case Jarndyce v. Jarndyce From an 1852 book by Charles Dickens Bleak HouseThe lawsuit dragged on for decades. In the end, everyone lost the money at stake except the lawyers. Since then, allegations of litigation abuse have continued, from James Bond actor Roger Moore’s wife trying to harass and destroy her ex-husbands with lawsuits, to the man who filed 180 disability lawsuits against companies, to Trump’s mentor Roy Cohn, who taught him how to be a “loafer” before the word was popular: to exploit a weakness in the system to beat your opponent.

But no one is better at this craft than Donald Trump. By some calculations, Trump and his companies have been embroiled in more than 4,000 lawsuits over the past 30 years. Trump has repeatedly failed to pay contractors and openly threatened not to pay a teleprompter company at a recent rally in Las Vegas. Six of Trump’s companies have filed for bankruptcy. Trump and his surrogates have filed more than 60 lawsuits in an unsuccessful attempt to disrupt the electoral system that rightfully certified him as losing the 2020 election. Trump continues to sue the media for reporting him to this day.

He is also a master of defense. He has stumped up most of the criminal cases against him. His election fraud prosecution in Washington is stalled in the Supreme Court. His election fraud case in Georgia was put on hold while a higher court considers lurid allegations about the prosecutor’s sex life, and a trial date for the Florida secret documents case was canceled. Only the New York hush money case went to trial, and he was convicted of the most minor of the cases.

When Trump complains about loafers, it’s not just the pot blaming the kettle. It’s the boiling cauldron, the original source of toxic litigation, that is speaking to us. If we were to put the nation’s courts on trial for misconduct, Trump is the perfect example. It is precisely because of Trump and people like him that the judiciary must be tougher on litigants and ensure that the legal process does not become a means of punishing our opponents when we are wrong as well as when we are right. Until that reform is made, loafers will only grow.

Thomas G. Moukausha He is a former Connecticut Complex Litigation Judge and former co-chair of the American Bar Association Committee on Employee Benefits. Common Flaws: Unnecessary Complexity in the Courts and 50 Ways to Reduce It.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own.