Trump’s election lawsuits are failing. After stalling on tax returns, impeachment, E. Jean Carroll rape accusations, and others, he can’t change the results.
For all his bluster, President Donald Trump’s No.1 preferred legal tactic for the last four years has been markedly passive: At its core, the move is to delay at any and all cost. Trump has faced a litany of lawsuits throughout his term, many of them related to his personal affairs and their effect on his governance. But this time, the calendar is working against him. His most reliable tactic is failing him when he needs it most. This is admittedly a bit of a mea culpa: In the weeks ahead of Election Day, I was distressed by Trump’s clear messaging that he’d challenge the election results and potentially draw the whole mess before the Supreme Court. But that’s not exactly what we’ve seen in the last two weeks. While Trump has threatened litigation as easily as breathing over the course of his career, he has rarely followed through. Instead, he’s more often the defendant in cases in which he or one of his companies is a party. By now, his lawyers have a pretty good playbook: Stall the proceedings. Buy more time for the president to figure out some other way to weasel out of whatever the plaintiff alleges he’s done this time. And it hasn’t just worked — it has worked a lot. Trump has been subpoenaed for his company’s finances in a Manhattan criminal investigation into potential insurance and bank fraud; he has been implicated in a campaign finance scheme to cover up his extramarital fling with a porn actress; he has fought tooth and nail against attempts by Democrats — who claim he’s been violating the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution — to get a peek under the hood of his businesses. And in all of these instances, he has managed to run out the clock. The Supreme Court ruled in July that Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance was within his rights to ask for Trump’s financial records, tossing his claims of “absolute immunity” from state criminal cases while president straight in the trash. The president’s legal team in response simply filed new motions to stay the decision, now arguing that Vance’s subpoena was overly broad and was issued in bad faith. When a district judge rejected that claim, his lawyers appealed. They lost the appeal, too, and now the case seems to be heading to the Supreme Court — again. Meanwhile, aside from what they’ve read in The New York Times, Democratic lawmakers still have seen neither hide nor hair of Trump’s tax returns.
