Plaintiff In Chief: A Portrait of Donald Trump in 3,500 Lawsuits

Zirin (Supremely Partisan), a former assistant U.S. attorney in the southern district of New York, examines in critical detail a host of President Donald Trump’s entanglements in the civil justice system. Zirin begins with a 1973 case brought by the federal government against Trump and his father for housing discrimination, during which Trump began his relationship with the infamous attorney Roy Cohn, from whom, Zirin contends, Trump learned his slash-and-burn legal tactics. Other cases include his being sued by undocumented people who had worked on a project for him, in which he denied knowledge of their legal status in order to avoid payments to pension funds (the judge deemed his claims “unworthy of belief”); threats of litigation to intimidate Rolling Stone and the Onion; a class action brought by those enrolled in his Trump University; and a defamation suit Trump brought against a New York Times journalist, during which he lied 30 times in one deposition and lost. Most of the critiques Zirin raises have been previously reported, and the effect of putting together all of these lawsuits can be both overwhelming and repetitive. This may not be a fun reading experience, but it’s a well-constructed documentation of Trump’s legal misdeeds. (Sept.)