Trump’s War on Lawyers Is Just Starting

“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”

—Dick the Butcher, Henry VI

Donald Trump’s crusade against his opponent’s lawyers represents a new front in his war on the rule of law. 

In a series of moves that seem culled from the authoritarian playbooks of Tayyip Erdoğan, Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán abroad, and that harken back to the dark days of McCarthyism and the second Red Scare here at home, Trump has slapped three prominent private law firms with longstanding ties to the Democratic Party with executive orders designed to impose crippling sanctions on their operations. The orders charge the law offices with “weaponizing the judicial process” against Trump, and call for terminating their federal contracts; suspending the security clearances of at least some of their attorneys; and limiting their access to federal government buildings, presumably including courtrooms. 

In an astonishing development, the New York Times reported last week that one of the firms — Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP (Paul Weiss), headquartered in New York City — has buckled under the pressure and negotiated a deal with Trump to rescind the executive order issued against the firm on March 14. In return, Paul Weiss agreed to end its diversity, equity and inclusion hiring and promotion practices, as well as to represent clients regardless of their political party affiliations. The firm has also agreed to contribute $40 million in legal services to promote causes Trump has championed, such as his presidential task force to combat antisemitism. 

What did Paul Weiss do to warrant such humiliation? Its “offense,” as outlined in the March 14 executive order, involved the decision of one of its former partners, Mark Pomerantz, to enlist as a special assistant to the Manhattan district attorney in 2021 to investigate Trump’s hush-money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels and his pre-presidential business practices, a full nine years after Pomerantz had resigned from the firm. Pomerantz abruptly ended his stint with the D.A. in 2022, but subsequently made the talk-show circuit hawking his memoir on the experience, “People v. Donald Trump: An Inside Account,” outraging our thin-skinned president. 

The settlement has left legal observers dumbstruck and dismayed, with many describing the outcome as an unethical “shakedown” that will embolden Trump to seek even more revenge in the future. In a post on X, Bulwark editor Sarah Longwell referred to the settlement as an illustration of “mob boss government.”

The two other targeted firms — Covington & Burling of Washington, D.C., and Perkins Coie of Seattle — have so far refused to buckle. 

Trump’s beef with Covington was set forth in a presidential memorandum issued on Feb. 25 that directed the attorney general, the secretary of state and five other cabinet officials to investigate the firm for its pro bono (“for the public good”) representation of former special counsel Jack Smith. A financial disclosure filed by Smith in January disclosed that he had received $140,000 in free legal services from the firm to help him prepare for potential investigations launched by the administration and MAGA zealots in Congress.

Trump’s contempt for Perkins Coie, which regularly represents the Democratic National Committee and worked for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, runs deeper. On March 6, he signed an executive order that referred to the firm as “dishonest and dangerous” and accused it of teaming up with George Soros to fund the opposition research that helped create the controversial “Steele dossier” on Trump’s alleged ties to Russia. At the time, the firm’s election-law practice group was headed by Marc Elias, who left the office in 2021, and has since become the Democrats’ go-to advocate for voting rights and a constant thorn in Trump’s side. 

Rather than cave, Perkins Coie filed suit against the administration. On March 12, it obtained a temporary restraining order from District Court Judge Beryl Howell that halts the bulk of the executive order from taking effect pending further litigation. In comments from the bench, Howell denounced the order as an unconstitutional “use of taxpayer dollars and government resources … to pursue a personal vendetta” that “threatens to undermine our entire legal system and the ability of all individuals to access justice in the American judicial system.” In a pointed reference to Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”, she declared, when “the Queen of Hearts yells ‘off with their heads’ for her subjects, that cannot be the reality we are living under.” 

And yet, that is indeed fast becoming our reality. No matter how the Covington and Perkins Coie cases are resolved, Trump has signaled his assault on the legal profession is just beginning. In a rambling and sometimes incoherent speech delivered to Justice Department staff on March 14, he reprised his disputes with Elias and Pomerantz, blasting them as “radicals” and “really bad people” who … “tried to turn America into a corrupt communist and Third World country.” He also called Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg, New York attorney general and attorneys Norm Eisen and Andrew Weissman, “scum” who “coordinate” their legal work with liberal media outlets like CNN and “MSDNC.” Their work, he warned, is “illegal” and “has to stop.”       

As another portent of further reprisals to come, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, once a staunch defender of civil rights, has sent letters to 20 major law firms, including Perkins Coie, seeking detailed information about their DEI practices that the agency asserts may violate the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits employment discrimination.

And on March 21, Trump sent a lengthy memo to Attorney General Pam Bondi, instructing her to flag any law firms that have filed “frivolous” lawsuits against his first and second administrations so they can be targeted for penalties like those imposed on Paul Weiss, Perkins Coie and Covington & Burling. 

Trump has coupled his assault on the legal profession with heated attacks on federal judges, including a demand for the impeachment of District Judge James Boasberg for issuing a temporary restraining order to halt the deportation of suspected Venezuelan gang members under the auspices of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act. Echoing the president, Elon Musk has called for the impeachment of all federal judges who rule against Trump’s initiatives. The resulting hostility to the courts has become so extreme that some judges have begun to voice concerns for their physical safety.

Trump may not be the sharpest student of history, but he is a master of the art of intimidation, having learned the craft at the at the feet of Roy Cohn, the deeply immoral lawyer who served as Sen. Joseph McCarthy‘s chief counsel during the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings, and who operated as Trump’s mentor and general consigliere in the 1970s. Trump knows from firsthand experience that intimidation works.

If the past is prologue, Trump will not easily or soon reverse course. If he succeeds in bringing the nation’s biggest law firms to heel, he may well turn his attention to the progressive legal community and organizations like the ACLU, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the National Lawyers Guild. We have been there before with McCarthyism and COINTELPRO, when lawyers on the left were routinely surveilled, cited for contempt of court and sometimes jailed simply for doing their jobs.  We cannot afford to go back.