Trump, the Litigious One

The former president exaggerated his net worth by billions of dollars “to unjustly enrich himself and cheat the system.”

The political and personal future of former President Donald Trump is at stake, including the fate of the Republican Party and the direction it will take in the coming years.

The situation became particularly evident after the two judicial blows that Trump received. One was expected: the announced lawsuit by New York State Attorney General Letitia James over a series of issues related to tax matters.

According to the complaint, Trump overstated his net worth by billions of dollars “to unjustly enrich himself and to cheat the system.” The lawsuit lists his children Donald Trump, Jr., Ivanka Trump and Eric Trump as participants in the scheme.

The second blow was the decision of an appeals court, which authorized the Department of Justice to continue the review of classified documents found by FBI agents during a search of Trump’s mansion in Mar-a-Lago (Florida). Trump claims that as president he declassified the papers, although he has not produced anyone who knew about it, including his own lawyers.

The outcome of either of these two processes may hinder, if not completely prevent, a new Trump presidential campaign in 2024, in which he appears today as the most viable Republican candidate.

At the same time, no one denies that he is the top Republican front-runner, that it will be difficult for him to be displaced and that some of his supporters are willing to go to extreme lengths. Trump claims that the first lawsuit is a political witch hunt and that the second is a vendetta by his enemies in the security agencies, the “deep state,” whose existence he denounced during his term in office.

But, to some extent, these are themselves political arguments with the promise of further complications. Trump and some of his supporters have warned about the possibility of violence, perceiving the attacks on him as contributing to the political polarization of the country. More than a few specialists have expressed fears along those lines.

It is true that this may all be part of Trump’s judicial tactics, for he is someone who throughout his adult life has courted controversy and been the focus of more than 4,000 lawsuits, especially commercial ones.

Many of those lawsuits were to seek damages, but also to make the process so expensive that the other side would feel pressured to accept a settlement advantageous to Trump’s interests.

Trump’s willingness to litigate is not simply a desire for litigation, but a calculated strategy to try to put his opponents at a disadvantage. Certainly, one should question to what extent politics influences the proceedings against the former president. But also that he is not above using any argument and strategy for his own benefit.