It's almost quaint now to look back at the shock we all felt at presidential candidate Donald Trump attacking the judge presiding in the Trump University fraud lawsuit as biased because he was Latino and Trump was talking about building a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. Most Americans assumed that it would be impossible for such a disrespectful and, frankly, racist person to be elected in the 21st century but as it turned out that was just a preview of many such attacks to come. (Trump eventually settled that lawsuit for $25 million.)
Because Trump is such an inveterate lawbreaker, he has been the subject of many legal cases over the years and biographers and armchair psychologists have speculated that his strategy has always been to denigrate the judges and the prosecutors in those cases publicly. It is due to his father's advice to always fight with everything they have. But it's just as likely that he's following the advice of his mentor, the odious attorney Roy Cohn, who has been called "one of the most reviled men in American history." If anything, it was Cohn who pulled Trump out from under his father's shadow.
