Trump lawyers should know better

I used to think lawyers had to have above-average intelligence and more than their share of common sense.

Now, I see an army of attorneys spouting mindless conspiracy theories and ignoring mountains of evidence to the contrary as they file more than 50 doomed lawsuits in an attempt to overturn an election their client, President Donald Trump, lost fair and square last month.

Lawyers have never had the reputation for operating ethically, although most attorneys I know do conduct their affairs with honor.

The cynic in me, and I assume in Trump’s legal team, sees legal fees piling up as Trump’s legal vultures write fiction worthy of surrealist Franz Kafka in the form of legal briefs. Maybe they’re just feeding their legal training like quarters into a slot machine hoping for a triple-7 jackpot that would cement their reputations and bring astronomical hourly rates for their future services.

Or maybe they want to be remembered in Trump’s will.

Maybe, but I think they may be uniting to suspend our democracy.

If they were defending democracy, they would say “no” to the opportunity to represent a 74-year-old child who is having a screaming fit because democratic reality isn’t fair.

Instead of recoiling from the unseemly spectacle of a willfully ignorant tycoon playing the blubbering victim, Trump’s unexplainably huge base is patting him on the shoulder and saying, “there, there” in genuine sympathy.

The lawyers who have rushed to the side of The Donald’s tear-stained face should know better, and I have to conclude that their support of Trump is motivated in part by contempt for the will of mere voters. They do not want the U.S. to continue as a democracy.

In their defense, most of Trump’s base truly believes he is the small-d democratic choice. We have become so polarized that Democrats and Trumpists only acknowledge those who agree with their views. They follow the lead of the Congress in shutting out the other side.

If you do not acknowledge the existence, let alone the humanity, of the opposition, you cannot accept their victory.

Lawyers, however, should know better, and I submit Trump’s attorneys do.

Most are well-versed in history. They should see the parallels between the rise of past totalitarian regimes and the patterns that Trump has established in his first term.

Like past autocrats, Trump tells his faithful flock he alone can achieve their goals. Like them, he brooks no criticism. Like them, he purges anyone who disagrees with him, especially if they know more than he does. Like them, he encourages armed goons to threaten violence in his name. Like them, he bulldozes established norms and Constitutional limits on his power.

Trump’s lawyers cannot have missed this. Maybe they are jockeying for positions in what I fear could become the equivalent of Vichy France, the Nazi regime that ruled normally democratic France during World War II.

But I will warn them that if they achieve this improbable success, advocates of democracy will unite as they did in WWII to undermine and overwhelm their illegitimate rule.

Steve Hansen writes for Clovis Media Inc. Contact him at:

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