By Andrea Widburg
The usual doom-and-gloom has settled like a pall on the conservative commentariat. If our side doesn’t score with a Grand Slam, they invariably consider it a loss. Their attitude is all wrong. When looked at through “real world” lenses, Trump did remarkably well in a venue that was hostile and dishonest—and that many Americans recognized as such. I know this because I’ve been in venues just like that—only without millions of people watching. At the end of the day, I won my case, even though the process was more than usually painful. I believe the same will be true for Donald Trump.
Bear with me while I tell my tale.
Thirty years ago, the opposing counsel on the case, whom I’ll call Smith, had a reputation at the appellate level, where a very nice appellate judge—I know he was nice because I used to babysit for his daughter when I was a teenager—savaged Smith in an opinion. The reason for this savagery was that Smith was a liar. In his briefs before the court, he lied about everything, both facts and law.
Smith did exactly the same thing. During each pre-trial motion (all aimed at either dismissing the case or shaping it before trial), the wave of lies was overwhelming. Each paragraph had multiple lies. Indeed, sometimes each sentence had multiple lies.
Smith misrepresented the record, he misapplied legal authority, and on occasion, he’d go so far as to misrepresent the law. It was a tsunami of lies. He was the legal embodiment of Mary McCarthy’s description of the communist Lillian Hellman: “I think every word she writes is false, including ‘and’ and ‘but.’”
One would think that opposing someone who lies so much would be easy: Simply write a brief rebutting the lies. However, that’s not the case.
Back in the day, courts had page limits. (Now, they have word count limits.) Because rebutting a lie invariably takes longer than stating the lie (it’s not enough just to deny the lie; you must prove why you’re denying it), it would have taken me 50 pages to oppose his 15-page screed, and I never had more than 15 pages and, sometimes, rules being rules, only 10. In the quiet of my office, I had to figure out which lies to tackle and which to ignore. Sometimes, the lies impugned me, sometimes they impugned my client, and always they perverted the issues themselves…and I had so little space.
One also would have thought that the judge handling all these pre-trial motions, having been made aware of Smith’s reputation because of that appellate decision, would have ruled against him when his lies were exposed. However, the opposite was true. The judge decided instantly that my clients were in the wrong and simply overlooked the lies. He was quite explicit about it at times.
Most memorably, after I wrote a bulletproof brief showing that California law prevented Smith’s client from bringing the case, the judge stated, “I understand the law, but I think there’s something here.” The judge’s entire responsibility was to apply the law, but he wanted us to lose, and he was going to keep us in court until that happened.
It was only because I was working with an impressively moral and ferocious senior attorney that the case survived this and went to trial. Most attorneys would have left the client out to dry. But my guy didn’t. He took the case all the way to trial—and we won.
We won because we had a real judge, someone who looked at the facts and the law and recognized that Smith’s client was wrong in every way. Not only did we win the case, but we also won $1.2 million in attorney’s fees. (That’s $2.5 million in today’s dollars.)
Last night, Donald Trump faced exactly what I saw in the San Francisco court system thirty years ago: Kamala Harris was Smith. Everything she said was a lie. She lied about the facts, she lied about Trump, and she lied about her policies. When she wasn’t lying about her policies, she was slithering away from them so the public wouldn’t see the truth.
And then, unlike me, where I at least had a few days to decide on a way to respond, Trump had to decide on the fly what to say. Do I protect my integrity? Do I challenge her lies? Do I just restate my position?
That’s easy to do from the comfort of a living room chair. That’s hard to do when you are on the world stage with a one-minute clock ticking. And yes, Trump is Trump, so he’ll defend his honor first. That’s how he’s wired. And then he restated his position. When you’re under the gun, you make your choices.
And then, instead of a dishonest judge, Trump faced two vicious, dishonest ABC hacks who attacked him with lies, asked him loaded questions that didn’t matter to most voters, and smothered Kamala with kisses. It was, as so many people said, a three-on-one pile-on, not a moderated debate. Or as Juanita Broaddrick memorably tweeted,
What happened last night, though, was just pretrial skirmishing. The true judges are the voters. And I believe that they, like the true judge in my long-ago trial, will look at the facts and discern the truth. The truth is not a smug, condescending liar helped along by two other smug, condescending liars. The truth is the embattled man who, for several years, helped America soar and, given the chance, will do so again.
So, take heart. Trump fought valiantly in a corrupt venue, one so patently dishonest that even ordinary people, the normal people across America facing hordes of violent illegal aliens, unaffordable food, racial divisiveness, and world chaos, will see the truth and vote accordingly.
