It matters that Donald Trump can’t find a great lawyer to represent him. Just ask Richard Nixon.

In disgrace following his 1974 White House resignation, Nixon paced and pondered the “what ifs” from exile in San Clemente, California. He placed a call to Washington, DC to the one man he thought could have made a difference and saved him from his ignominious fate and place in American history as the only president to resign from the job.

“I wish you were my lawyer,” he told Edward Bennett Williams, who, at the time, was the most famous litigator since Clarence Darrow. But it was way too late for such regrets. It may be too late for Donald Trump, too.



Lawyers, including John Dowd, have been ousted. Lawyers, most notably Michael Cohen, have been exposed as thugs allegedly paying hush money to a porn star. Lawyers, well-placed Republicans like Ted Olsen, have said no. More recently, other lawyers, like Chicago’s Dan Webb, also declined to come aboard. Lawyers found conflicts to prevent them from representing Trump, like Joe DeGenova and his wife, Victoria Toensing.

Lawyers, lawyers everywhere but none who jump for Trump.

He will, of course, eventually find someone willing to serve as lead counsel alongside his existing, threadbare team. Unsurprisingly, he seems in utter denial that there is any problem with his legal representation.

On Sunday, peeved by news reports that he cannot find a willing lawyer, the President tweeted: “Many lawyers and top law firms want to represent me in the Russia case...don’t believe the Fake News narrative that it is hard to find a lawyer who wants to take this on. Fame & fortune will NEVER be turned down by a lawyer…”

The problem for the white-collar defense bar’s crème de la crème is that Donald Trump is so blatantly the client from hell. He won’t listen. He won’t obey instructions. He is headstrong. He is a bully. Sometimes, he doesn’t pay his bills. Most of all, it’s possible that he isn’t capable of discerning fact from fiction. This last foible could get any lawyer who represents him into very deep legal hot water. No one wants to get disbarred for the fame and fortune of representing President Trump.

Then there’s the justifiable concern over all the unforced legal errors that the defense side, led by Trump himself, has already committed. They begin with Trump’s disastrous appointment of Michael Flynn as his first National Security Adviser. Flynn, who was indicted last year, is now believed to be cooperating with Special Counsel Robert Mueller.



The Flynn error was soon followed by the even more disastrous decision by Trump to fire former FBI Director James Comey when he refused to dump the Flynn investigation. The Comey firing is being fly-specked by Mueller and his team of investigators to see whether there were White House efforts to obstruct justice.

The trail leads way back to the 2016 campaign, when Jared Kushner, Donald Trump Jr and Paul Manafort met with the Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian lawyer, who claimed to have valuable dirt on Hillary Clinton. Was this meeting early evidence of collusion with Russia to bend the American election Trump’s way? Mr Manafort has also been indicted, on multiple counts, by Mueller with a trial expected to begin in September.

That’s a lot of pre-game action for any lawyer, no matter how experienced, to handle.

Then there’s the storminess of the Stormy Daniels mess and Cohen’s unsavory $130,000 to buy her silence. There’s been speculation that those funds could constitute an illegal in-kind campaign donation. Of all white collar cases, election law violations are ones many of the best white-collar defense lawyers view as chicken shit and not worth their time.



So good luck finding a strong lawyer to go up against Stormy’s media-savvy and smart-on-his-feet lawyer Michael Avenatti, who only the other day was on cable television musing about the stupidity of Trump’s existing lawyers. On Morning Joe on Tuesday, Avenatti uttered this eminently quotable line: “In 18 years of practice I’ve seen some really good chess players. These folks are paying tic tac toe.”

It’s hard to disagree with that.