Politico – ‘This to Him Is the Grand Finale’: “…This country has never seen and therefore is utterly unprepared for what it’s about to endure in the wrenching weeks and months ahead — active challenges based on post-Civil War constitutional amendments to bar insurrectionists from the ballot; existentially important questions about presidential immunity almost certainly to be decided by a U.S. Supreme Court the citizenry has seldom trusted less; and a candidate running for the White House while facing four separate criminal indictments alleging 91 felonies, among them, of course, charges that he tried to overturn an election he lost and overthrow the democracy he swore to defend. And while many found Trump’s conduct in court in New York shocking, it is in fact for Trump not shocking at all. For Trump, it is less an aberration than an extension, an escalation — a culmination. Trump has never been in precisely this position, and the level of the threat that he faces is inarguably new, but it’s just as true, too, that nobody has been preparing for this as long as he has himself. Trump and his allies say he is the victim of the weaponization of the justice system, but the reality is exactly the opposite. For literally more than 50 years, according to thousands of pages of court records and hundreds of interviews with lawyers and legal experts, people who have worked for Trump, against Trump or both, and many of the myriad litigants who’ve been caught in the crossfire, Trump has taught himself how to use and abuse the legal system for his own advantage and aims. Many might view the legal system as a place to try to avoid, or as perhaps a necessary evil, or maybe even as a noble arbiter of equality and fairness. Not Trump. He spent most of his adult life molding it into an arena in which he could stake claims and hunt leverage. It has not been for him a place of last resort so much as a place of constant quarrel. Conflict in courts is not for him the cost of doing business — it is how he does business. Throughout his vast record of (mostly civil) lawsuits, whether on offense, defense or frequently a mix of the two, Trump has become a sort of layman’s master in the law and lawfare…”