Spencer Platt/Getty Images Fourth Estate Michael Avenatti’s Rules for Radicals Where Stormy Daniels’ lawyer got his tricks.

Jack Shafer is Politico’s senior media writer.

Stormy Daniels’ attorney Michael Avenatti recently achieved status as a Permanent Guest on CNN. He’s appeared on one of its shows more than 60 times in the two months since filing the lawsuit to invalidate the nondisclosure agreement the adult-film actress entered into with Donald Trump.

Go ahead and joke about TV’s bright lights sunburning his bald head all the way to skin cancer. Avenatti won’t mind. All the world is his court and all the men and women in it merely jurors. Appearing on Anderson Cooper 360° on Tuesday night, where he was as poised as a fat cat taking a limousine to the airport, he explained his method.


“There’s been some criticism about our media strategy and how often I’ve been on CNN and how often I’ve been on your show and other networks,” Avenatti said. “Here’s the bottom line, Anderson. It’s working. OK? It’s working in spades. And one of the reasons, and one of the ways that it’s working, is because we’re so out front on this, people send us information. People want to help our cause. People contact us with information.”

Help our cause! Asked to define his cause, Avenatti retreated to the prosaic, speaking not of some great movement but of getting the NDA annulled, punishing Trump and his attorney, Michael Cohen, for their alleged defamations of his client, and exposing the financial workings of Cohen’s Delaware shell company, Essential Consultants LLC. This elaborate framing of his simple legal case inside the romantic casement of a cause—repeatedly stating on TV how important his litigation is to “the American people”—makes his business sound monumentally important. But further inspection reveals it to be just a bag of decades-old rhetorical tricks.

Avenatti grew up in St. Louis, and attended college at the University of Pennsylvania, and graduated from law school in Washington, D.C. His media politics owe much to the famous teachings of Chicago political organizer Saul Alinsky (1909-1972), who formulated a set of 13 “rules for radicals” that have gained devotees on both the left and right for several generations, including Barack Obama and Rahm Emanuel, for whom Avenatti worked while in college.



Appearing on TV, Avenatti wears down his opponents by deploying Alinsky’s Rule No. 5, one that Trump has long observed in his own battles: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.” Avenatti routinely mocks Cohen as a “thug,” “beyond stupid,” legally “radioactive” and “not that bright.” and goes after Cohen’s attorney with an ack-ack of insults and slights. Wherever possible, Avenatti makes personal everything that is legal, perhaps because he figures that a temperamental opponent like Cohen will grow unsettled and erratic in the face of ridicule, unable to muster any real defense.

“Keep the pressure on. Never let up,” Alinsky’s Rule No. 8, has guided Avenatti’s nonstop, inventive TV campaign. Yesterday, for example, he broadened his attack on Cohen by releasing leaked financial documents that documented suspicious cash transfers from corporations to Cohen. What, if anything this new, damning information has to do with liberating Daniels from her NDA, isn’t readily apparent. But it fills the ditch that Cohen occupies with fast-drying concrete. “Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have,” Alinsky’s Rule No. 1, has piloted Avenatti’s moves from the beginning: He teased his Twitter audience by posting a picture of a DVD, implying that it contains smutty pictures of Trump and constantly hints that new, detrimental evidence against Cohen is about to emerge, such as his prediction that new hush payments will be revealed or that the Russians might have covered the $130,000 silence payment to his client. Overstatement is one of his favorite games. Staging media events that please the gallery is another area in which the Avenatti and Alinsky worlds intersect (Rule No. 6: “A good tactic is one your people enjoy.”).

Alinsky believed so deeply in sucker-punching and winning at any cost that he tipped his hat to his ultimate inspiration in the introduction to his 1971 book, Rules for Radicals, writing appreciatively of “the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom—Lucifer.”

Some of Avenatti’s media techniques have less to do with Alinsky’s organizing in Chicago than they do with the usual courtroom theatrics of a showboating lawyer. For instance, Avenatti keeps claiming that he’s fighting for Daniels’ right to be free of the NDA and to tell her story. But who among us hasn’t heard her story 7 million times by this point? He has also favored the use of props, such as making public the picture of Daniels taking a polygraph test and appearing on CNN with a super-sized headshot of Cohen and asking why he won’t appear on TV for a debate. Somebody should add these prop techniques to Alinsky’s list.

If Cohen were a better lawyer representing a better client, he might have a chance against a rowdy like Avenatti. But he is a bad lawyer working for a rotten client. That’s given Avenatti license to savage the poor sod, who has become the living embodiment of Alinsky’s Rule No. 13: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”

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