Trump Will Happily Settle for an Acquittal

Believing he also needs lawyers comfortable in front of the cameras, Trump is considering additional attorneys to mount his defense. “This is not a venue for a legal beagle person. It’s someone who needs political chops and TV skills,” an administration official told me. “This is not a court of law, which Pat would be great at. It’s political theater.”

Trump advisers tell me that among those who could play a role are Jay Sekulow, the longtime Trump lawyer with his own radio show who represented the president in the Mueller investigation, and Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard Law School professor emeritus practiced in the art of cable-news combat. “Of course it would be interesting. No doubt about that,” Dershowitz told me when I asked him about whether he might join Trump’s defense team. A messy complication is Dershowitz’s connection to Jeffrey Epstein, the billionaire convicted sex offender who killed himself in his jail cell earlier this year. Dershowitz once represented Epstein, and he himself is embroiled in litigation with one of Epstein’s accusers, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who has alleged that Dershowitz had sex with her when she was a teenager. Dershowitz has denied the allegation. He could prove a distraction, to say the least, were he to show up on the Senate floor to defend the president, but Trump still has him under active consideration.

Read: Trump is surrounded

Making it tough for his staff to plot an impeachment defense is Trump’s habit of taking advice wherever it comes, depending on who gets his ear and what he sees on Fox News. One former senior White House official told me that if Trump were to venture to the gas station and talk to an attendant who recommended a lawyer who once quashed his uncle’s subpoena, the president might be sufficiently impressed to hire the guy. What would serve him best, at this stage, is getting out of his own way. That’s not how he’s wired, though. “It’s in Trump’s interests to get it over with and put this chapter behind him, and not make it more of a spectacle,” Scott Reed, a longtime Republican strategist, told me.

With impeachment an indelible part of Trump’s legacy, his advisers are arguing, predictably, that the historical stigma is actually helping the president—that the scandal has energized his base and led to fundraising windfalls. (Of course, impeachment is galvanizing Trump’s opponents too.) In focus groups of independent women voters conducted by the Trump political team amid the impeachment hearings, the results suggested that people weren’t following the proceedings with any great interest, two Trump advisers familiar with the exercise told me.

The complexity of the Ukraine matter plays to Trump’s advantage, his allies argue. It’s hopelessly obscure compared to, say, former President Bill Clinton’s impeachment a generation ago, one person close to Trump’s campaign told me. “Clinton was easy to understand,” the person said. “With this one, I do this for a living and I have a hard time. It gets real complicated, real quick.” Maybe not that complicated. Boiled down to one sentence: Trump is accused of using presidential powers to strongarm a foreign country into damaging a political rival, at the expense of American interests.

Trump has no incentive to keep matters clear and simple. If impeachment leaves voters confused, he benefits. When a Senate trial rolls around, we can expect him to keep up a running commentary about how his rights were trampled and how his accusers have been improperly shielded. It’ll be empty rhetoric, though. Trump will be happy with the acquittal. He long ago backed off.

Peter Nicholas is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers the White House.