In June, Trump added Jay Sekulow to his team to advise on constitutional issues and to help with strategy and messaging. Sekulow is a well-known advocate for Christian causes who hosts a syndicated daily radio show and appears frequently on Fox News. (Sekulow’s own virtuousness has been called into question by a recent report in The Guardian that accused his Christian charity of paying $60 million to him and his family members since 2000; Sekulow’s spokesman said the charity has passed all I.R.S. audits.) To appease advisers who said he needed an experienced Washington defense lawyer, Trump added John Dowd, who oversaw Major League Baseball’s investigation into Pete Rose’s gambling. A former Marine Corps captain, Dowd had not softened with age. ‘‘This is the worst piece of whoring journalism I have read in a long time,’’ he once wrote to a Wall Street Journal reporter who was covering the insider-­trading case of one of his clients. And if he was going to be in a fight, Trump knew he needed his longtime personal attorney Michael Cohen, who has described Trump as his ‘‘patriarch.’’

They came from different places, but they were all Trump Lawyers, which is to say that they shared certain characteristics. Trump Lawyers seldom shape or massage their client’s rhetoric in the fashion of, say, President John F. Kennedy’s counselor, Ted Sorensen, who drafted the letter from Kennedy to Nikita Khrushchev that helped end the Cuban Missile Crisis. They bear no resemblance to David Kendall, the reserved Washington superlawyer who led the defense of President Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Trump Lawyers do not devote countless hours to construing the fine print of the law in a very particular way to prevent prosecution, as John Yoo, a lawyer in President George W. Bush’s Justice Department, did when he drafted the legal guidelines for the administration’s interrogation techniques.

Indeed, Trump Lawyers don’t anticipate problems or take precautions at all. Trump Lawyers fight — occasionally in courtrooms, but mostly on TV. It didn’t matter that Kasowitz isn’t known for criminal defense — until recently, his claim to legal fame was that he negotiated the settlement that saved the maker of Chesterfield cigarettes from financial ruin — any more than it mattered that Goldberg had never handled a divorce. Like Trump, Trump Lawyers tend to have something of an attention-­grabbing rebellious streak: Sekulow, who grew up Jewish in Brooklyn, now identifies as a messianic Jew; he believes that Jesus is the messiah. Until recently, McGahn played guitar in a classic-­rock cover band. At the same time, Trump Lawyers embody the cliché of a certain type of litigator in much the same way that Trump’s properties embody the cliché of luxury. They are rainmakers; they are flamboyant; they are bare-­knuckled; they are hard-­charging.

Trump Lawyers practice Trump Law. Trump Law is not about the merits of a case or even its resolution. It doesn’t matter if you’re threatening to sue, suing or being sued yourself. What matters is that you dominate, or be seen as dominating. In Trump Law, you can lose and still win, or at least declare victory, as Trump did after losing his defamation suit against the author Timothy O’Brien, claiming, falsely, that he had succeeded in his goal of costing O’Brien a lot of money. ‘‘Trump and Kasowitz saw our litigation as a form of guerrilla warfare, I think, and were less concerned about facts and the law,’’ says O’Brien, whose publisher covered all of his legal expenses. After the suit was filed, O’Brien realized that he had met Kasowitz before: The lawyer had been in the audience at one of his readings and told O’Brien afterward — elliptically at the time, ominously in retrospect — that they would be seeing each other again.

Trump Law is theater. What matters most is showmanship. The proof that the president-­elect was relinquishing control of his companies before taking the oath of office was right there in the stacks of manila folders piled up beside him at the pre-­inauguration news conference inside Trump Tower. Don Jr. and Eric Trump, who would be taking over the Trump Organization, watched solemnly as Sheri Dillon gestured at the files, explaining that they contained just some of the paperwork that would ensure that President Trump would be completely isolated from the businesses. Were the pages inside actually blank? In the world of Trump Law, that’s irrelevant.

‘‘One of the things you discover about being president,’’ President Barack Obama said during a lengthy news conference several days after the 2016 election, ‘‘is that there are all these rules and norms and laws, and you’ve got to pay attention to them. And the people who work for you are also subject to those rules and norms, and that’s a piece of advice that I gave to the incoming president.’’ In terms of ethics, he said: ‘‘I will put this administration against any administration in history. And the reason is because, frankly, we listened to the lawyers. We had a strong White House Counsel’s Office. We had a strong ethics office. We had people in every agency whose job it was to remind people: This is how you’re supposed to do things.’’

Trump Law does not concern itself with how you’re supposed to do things. ‘‘Donald would say, ‘I hate lawyers who tell me that I can’t do this or that,’ ’’ Goldberg told me. And so Trump Lawyers don’t. It was an arrangement that worked for Trump and his legal teams for years. And so it continues in Washington. Under Trump Law, it is perfectly fine for the president of China to stay as a guest at Mar-­a-­Lago, for the lobbying arm of the Saudi government to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars at Trump’s Washington hotel, for Trump to have a private dinner with the director of the F.B.I., James Comey, even as his agency was investigating Trump’s campaign. Under Trump Law, it is O.K. for Trump not to divest himself of his assets or place them in a blind trust, and for the drafting and rollout of his Muslim travel ban to be overseen not by experienced government lawyers but by his 31-year-old senior adviser, Stephen Miller. Under Trump Law, Trump can appoint a national security adviser, Gen. Michael Flynn, who had worked secretly as a paid lobbyist for Turkey, and fire Comey, as he himself explained, to relieve the pressure of the Russia investigation.