TRUMPOLOGY. Trump's Lifelong Addiction

It’s not alcohol, or even women. It’s his lawyers, and they’re now his biggest vulnerability.

By GWENDA BLAIR April 17, 2018

t is a truth universally acknowledged that Donald Trump has a thing about women. In addition to his three wives, there are scores, perhaps hundreds, possibly thousands of women he’s hit on, dated, married, cheated on, employed, promoted, denounced and ridiculed.

But there’s another type of individual he has a thing for—some might even say it’s an addiction. And it’s a group that may be far more essential to his way of being: lawyers.

Most business executives tend to be lawyer-dependent, but for the better part of 50 years, lawyers have done everything for Trump except have his children. They have finagled unprecedented tax abatements, kept him going through multiple corporate bankruptcies (and out of personal bankruptcy), protected his finances from public scrutiny. They are so entwined with every aspect of his public and private life, it is unimaginable that Trump could have gotten anywhere close to where he is today without them. But now, in the aftermath of the FBI raid on the offices and residences of his most prominent personal attorney and fixer, Michael Cohen—he of the $130,000 pre-election payment to the porn star—the same techniques that Trump’s lawyers have employed for decades to smooth his business path are the very things that threaten to blow holes in his still-young political career. For perhaps the first time in his life, a lawyer has become Trump’s biggest problem—instead of his salvation.

Trump inherited his love of lawyers from his father, Fred Trump. In the 1930s, the elder Trump began to put together what would be the first Trump real estate empire. While other builders were still reeling from the Great Depression, Fred had a secret weapon: a beneath-the-radar attorney named Bill Hyman who used pseudonyms, stand-ins at auctions, even dummy subsidiary corporations to avoid tipping off Brooklyn landowners who might have held out for higher prices if they knew Fred Trump was assembling packages of adjacent lots for large-scale housing developments.

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https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/04/17/trumps-lifelong-addiction-218003