Illustration by Tom Bachtell

The enlistment, last Thursday, of Rudolph Giuliani—the former mayor of New York and now a purveyor of security advice and partisan rants—as a personal lawyer to Donald Trump marked the entry into the President’s legal drama of another character whose presence was unlikely and yet somehow inevitable. It was of a piece with the moment, earlier in the week, when lawyers for Michael Cohen, another Trump attorney, asserted that a client whose identity Cohen was anxious to keep secret was Sean Hannity, of Fox News. That came during a court hearing that was also attended by Stormy Daniels, the adult-film actress and director, who is in a legal fight with Cohen and Trump over a hush agreement. Giuliani says that his job is to quickly “negotiate an end” to the investigation by the special counsel Robert Mueller into Russian interference in the 2016 election—as if that matter, and related issues that Mueller has uncovered, were akin to a casino bankruptcy restructuring, in which debts and bad behavior can simply be swept away.

Also last week, in the interval between a statement from Hannity to the effect that he wasn’t exactly Cohen’s client and Giuliani’s claim that he was going to be what might be called the fixer di tutti fixers, James Comey, the former F.B.I. director, published a memoir, “A Higher Loyalty.” (A striking element of the book is Comey’s comparison of Trump’s circle to the Mafia.) To complicate matters even further, Comey, whose firing features prominently in Mueller’s investigation, once worked for Giuliani, when Giuliani was the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. In the book, Comey describes Giuliani standing in his office doorway, giving him a “pep talk” about investigating Al Sharpton, at the time a community activist, for alleged embezzlement, which Giuliani concluded by saying, “Oh, and I want the fucking medal”—meaning the medallion that Sharpton often wore. (Sharpton was eventually acquitted on state charges.)

The Comey-Giuliani connection is another reminder of how the Trump Presidency has dragged us back to the gaudy, big-shouldered Manhattan of the nineteen-eighties. But even Comey appeared thrown by the plot twist involving his old boss. During an interview on Thursday night at Town Hall, when The New Yorker’s David Remnick asked Comey about the Giuliani appointment, he paused for a long moment and said, “I don’t know what to make of it.” He added, “I don’t know what the attorney-client dynamic is like around the President.”

The same night, memos that Comey had written after his meetings and phone calls with Trump, which multiple congressional committees had obtained from the Justice Department, were leaked to the press. In one, about a dinner at the White House at which the President asked for his loyalty, Comey said that the experience of talking to Trump was “chaotic, with topics touched, left, then returned to later, making it very difficult to recount in a linear fashion.” It was, he wrote, “conversation-as-jigsaw-puzzle.” That description could fit any attempt to summarize the various Trump scandals. Trying to explain how they all intersect begins to sound like a verbal version of those charts in investigators’ offices, with pictures and yarn connecting pins in locations as far-flung as Moscow, Washington, Prague, Kiev, Ankara, Baku, Dubai, Hong Kong, a parking lot in Las Vegas, and various suites in Trump Tower—and, at the center, the President.

And yet, in the disparate cases, one can already glimpse a clear theme: Trump’s disdain for legal limits and, perhaps more dangerous, his almost uncanny ability to draw others into his vision. Comey writes in his memoir that, in a White House where lying, or remaining silent as the President lies, is considered an essential act of loyalty, he could “see how easily everyone in the room could become a co-conspirator to his preferred set of facts, or delusions.” Michael Avenatti, the lawyer for Stormy Daniels, whose proper name is Stephanie Clifford, told The New Yorker that he regards her case not as a sideshow but as a “sine qua non.” Avenatti, who is clear-eyed about the uses of publicity, is eagerly envisioning himself sharing headlines with Giuliani as the legal actions converge. What distorts the President’s judgment, Avenatti says, is “a misconception as to the importance of loyalty, or perceived loyalty.”

The assumption that, if one is President, the law hardly matters is apparent even in White House moves that fall within traditional policy areas. Many legal observers, for example, were struck by how poorly written the first versions of Trump’s travel-ban executive orders were, and the Administration’s initial attempts to argue that judges shouldn’t even have a role in reviewing the orders failed badly in several federal courts. This Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in the case of Trump v. Hawaii, about the Administration’s latest revised order. One hurdle for the Administration’s lawyers will be explaining the President’s tweets, in which he suggested that this new version was just a “politically correct” placeholder that should be the basis for something “much tougher.”

Often enough, Trump drives away lawyers when he doesn’t like what they tell him, a culling that might shape the character of the remaining herd. (A similar effect may be seen in the spate of resignations in the Republican congressional caucus.) But the rewards for staying in Trump’s circle are increasingly elusive, even for the ambitious or the public-spirited, who feel that it is their duty to serve any President. There is a growing prospect that the price for doing so is not only indignity but an indictment, or at least lawyers’ fees, when one is called as a witness.

Last Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump had consulted with one of his divorce lawyers, Jay Goldberg, who is also a former prosecutor, about the question of whether Cohen, who seems to be facing a raft of charges for financial crimes, might flip, and become a witness against him. The idea that Trump would consult someone who was also his divorce lawyer on this point is another sign of how much his concept of the law centers on him and his personal needs. Goldberg said that he had advised Trump not to trust Cohen, or almost anyone facing a long jail sentence. The “attorney-client dynamic,” to use Comey’s phrase, between Trump and Cohen may, for the President, turn out to be explosive. And Cohen isn’t the President’s only lawyer, or his only problem. ♦