In the United States this week, the American president sat with an amateur hour Latin American dictator in the Oval Office and joked about sending American citizens to unaccountable concentration camps in that clown’s country. The concentration camp there to which he’s already sending innocent people — CECOT — is his first Dachau, or maybe it’ll prove to be his first Auschwitz.
At the same time, we’ve been watching in horror at how easily many American institutions have caved to Trump’s whims and whinyass demands, making deals with him to try to negotiate away retribution, as if a thirsty, insecure dictator is ever satisfied. All these law firms, all these colleges, paying their tributes to the king, when they could have just locked arms from the beginning and told the clothes-less emperor to go fuck himself. (Easier said than done! they likely would protest. Yes, well nobody said fighting the second coming of Hitler was going to be easy, we reply.)
But some of those law firms are now fighting. And oh boy, here came Harvard yesterday, and then MIT, and more colleges are lining up to take the fight to Trump. (You want to watch something satisfying, watch MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell — who went to Harvard — reporting on his alma mater fighting back against the sniveling shitmouthed tyrant.)
Break the goddamned spell, people.
He’s not a supergenius supervillain, folks. He’s an oversensitive, dumpy, senile old son of a bitch who thinks “groceries” are an exotic concept and whose brain appears to have stopped functioning in 1989. He’s so needy he still brags about (allegedly) getting perfect scores on dementia tests.
If anybody needs more help breaking that spell — and if you want to know how truly fuckin’ embarrassing it is that all these law firms have caved so early and often — the Wall Street Journal reports on exactly which paste-eating Trumper has been running the law firm extortion racket, and Jesus Fucking Christ.
Yes, it’s Trump dipshit personal lawyer Boris Epshteyn, who’s been a hanger-on in Trumpland since the beginning but nobody really knows why he’s there. He’s just some meathead heavy who’s always sitting at the table.
And the table he’s sitting at to shake down the law firms, is apparently in a steakhouse.
On Friday alone, five law firms including Latham & Watkins and Kirkland & Ellis entered into such deals worth some $600 million in pro bono work, after talking with Epshteyn.
Epshteyn, 42, has never tried a criminal or civil case and carries a white business card that reads, “Boris Epshteyn, Esq.” that lists his Gmail email account and a cellphone number. He calls a steakhouse in Washington where he hosts meetings every week his unofficial office. His face is caricatured on the wall and the restaurant even stores a portable phone charger for him.
BORIS EPSHTEYN, ESQ.!
AT GMAIL DOT COM!
Hey, where’d your fancy law firm’s credibility and reputation go? It’s in the bathroom at the Outback, blowing some dude named Boris!
So this is, um, embarrassing.
Some of the law firms privately worried about negotiating with a lawyer who wasn’t employed by the government and didn’t have a government email address, some of the lawyers said. But they decided talking with Epshteyn was their best path to avoid a government investigation or executive order, the people said, after determining he had serious sway with Trump.
Trying to decide if this is one step above or below ending up in a hotel room with Rudy Giuliani trying to show you his chram.
Read the whole WSJ piece, it’s humiliating for everyone involved.
A refresher:
Epshteyn is the one who was bumbling around after the election, followed by a marching band tuba section, trying to sell access to Trump and Cabinet positions. Epshteyn is the Trump lawyer that every other Trump lawyer ends up hating. Enjoy this randomly chosen excerpt about Epshteyn from a previous Wonkette piece:
“I certainly am not relying on any legal analysis from either of you or Boris who — to be clear — I think is an idiot,” Herschmann told Corcoran and Rowley over the summer in emails reported by the New York Times. “When I questioned Boris’s legal experience to work on challenging a presidential election since he appeared to have none — challenges that resulted in multiple court failures — he boasted that he was ‘just having fun,’ while also taking selfies and posting pictures online of his escapades.”
Basically, any time Donald Trump is found to be doing some extremely stupid, legally braindead shit, Boris Ephsteyn is to be found hunkered in a nearby corner with that toddler-taking-a-shit look that’s permanently affixed to his face.
And Trump loves him, because he has famously poor judgment.
He’s indicted in Arizona for trying to help Trump steal the election there. He was arrested in 2021 for allegedly groping women in a nightclub, and in 2014 for getting into a fight in a Scottsdale bar.
As Rachel Maddow said last night, this is some shit directly out of the first season of “The Sopranos.” Epshteyn is just so super super super OMG classy. Definitely the kind of guy white-shoe law firms should be intimidated by, as he comes back from his fourth trip to the steakhouse salad bar with nothing but a plate of croutons.
Goddamn, y’all, get a fucking grip.
But again, there are glimmers of hope, maybe. As noted above, Harvard is choo-choo-ing along on the Grow-A-Dick Express, and MIT and others are coming along. There have been law firms that have told Trump to fuck off, like WilmerHale, Perkins Coie, and Jenner & Block, and they are winning against Trump in court. The Wall Street Journal adds:
Susman Godfrey, which helped Dominion Voting Systems reach a nearly $800 million settlement with Fox News, sued the Trump administration Friday over an executive order imposed last week. […]
“If a president can with impunity seek to destroy a law firm because of the clients it represents, then the rule of law itself is in grave danger,” the firm said in its lawsuit.
Can more universities and law firms that already have capitulated make moves to unfuck themselves? We’ll see. Because to be clear, Harvard had already started to cave, until it stopped doing that. Surely some of the law firms that have already signed extortion deals could find ways to comply with all that billion dollars of pro bono work they’ve offered Trump in a malicious way?
It’s time to be creative, kids, we’ve got a bloodthirsty, mouthbreathing tyrant to defeat.
Maybe they could just do that pro bono work incompetently. You see, the beauty of that plan is that most lawyers willing to work for Trump are incompetent like Boris over here, and have y’all noticed how stupid Trump is? Stable Genius wouldn’t ever know the difference.
The WSJ article ends with a line about these Big Law pro bono deals that will make you smirk broadly, one that could maaaaaaaybe offer a glimmer of hope that some of these law firms have a plan?
[T]he monetary figures were less onerous than they might seem, some lawyers argued. For example, the pro bono commitments in some instances were to be completed “during the Trump administration and beyond.” Beyond, could stretch until the end of time, a lawyer involved in one of the deals said.
Well yes, that would definitely count as malicious compliance.
Let’s have a whole bunch more of that, please.
Evan has a side project called The Moral High Ground, you should check it out and subscribe there too!
Follow Evan Hurst on BlueSky!
Follow Evan on Facebook.
