“He sues,” said Barbara Res, the Trump Tower construction manager and a former executive vice president of the Trump Organization. “That’s his M.O. He sues.”
“It’s just another tool in his war chest,” said Jack O’Donnell, the former president of the Trump Plaza casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey. “He uses it to wear people out, whether it’s financially or emotionally.”
“He’s used litigation historically to keep hostile forces at bay and to delay reckonings,”
If nothing else, Trump has had an abundance of practice. His exhaustive history of weaponizing the courts started in 1973, when DOJ sued Trump and his father for racist rental policies in their fiefdom of outer-borough apartment buildings. Trump responded by hiring Roy Cohn, the notorious judicial and political fixer who’s been called “pure evil,” “a legal executioner,” and “one of the most despicable people in American history.” Cohn and Trump sued the feds right back—for $100 million. “The countersuit was bull****,” said Elyse Goldweber, one of the prosecutors involved. But it extended the timetable of the case and turned it into a public relations skirmish as much as a matter to be settled purely in court. Nearly two years later, Trump and his father signed a consent decree pledging to change their ways, “one of the most far-reaching ever negotiated,” as DOJ put it. Trump, unchastened, insisted it was a win—a precursor to one of his most telltale maneuvers. Furthermore, for the government, the aftermath was galling. With Cohn at the point, the Trumps for years dragged their feet, exasperating subsequent prosecutors and effectively defanging the enforcement of the decree. As a whole, it would prove to be a singular font of so much of what was to come.
“Trump claims he went to Wharton business school,” presidential historian Doug Brinkley said. “What he did was attend Roy Cohn University.”
“Everything Trump does is steeped in Roy Cohn’s mentoring and teaching,” Cohn cousin David Lloyd Marcus said. “Roy knew that you could threaten to litigate, and that often that was enough. But also Roy knew that you could tie up things in the courts for years. Years. This is all right from the Roy playbook.”
A voracious pupil of the ruthless attorney, Trump has sued or been sued at least 4,000 times, according to the yeoman’s work of reporters from USA Today. He has sued people over unpaid royalties in licensing deals. He has sued Miss Pennsylvania. He has sued Bill Maher. He has sued the creator of Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune. He has sued Scotland. He has sued New Jersey. He has sued New York City, and he has sued New York state. He has sued Palm Beach. He has sued an architecture critic from Chicago. He has sued the secretary of the Interior and the National Indian Gaming Commission. He has sued people for using his surname in businesses … even though it was also their surname. He has sued and been sued by his first ex-wife. He has sued and been sued by Steve Wynn. He has sued and been sued by longtime business partners. “Just another lawsuit filed by Trump as a diversionary tactic,” a spokesman for one of those partners once said, “attempting to intimidate and to substitute publicity for substance.” He has threatened to file countless lawsuits he then hasn’t filed.
