trump 23/23

A few weeks ago, a Syrian friend of mine, Kassem Eid, came to talk to the class I teach at Columbia. Kassem comes from Moadhamiyeh, a suburb of Damascus that had been besieged, starved and bombed. One August morning in 2013, he woke early for his morning prayers. As he tried to go back to sleep, he heard air raid sirens. Then he heard his roommates screaming — they were being attacked with chemical weapons.

Kassem lived through that awful day and wrote about the attack for The Times, as well as his subsequent decision to become a fighter against the regime of Bashar al-Assad. Five more years of war left Kassem an exhausted and frustrated survivor. His words to my class were harsh and angry, the words of someone whose country has been beaten down by seven years of conflict.

What surprised my students the most was Kassem’s enthusiastic support for President Trump’s past decisions in Syria. He praised his airstrikes in 2017, which President Obama had never ordered, launched in retaliation for Mr. Assad’s chemical attack on Khan Sheikhoun, which killed more than 70 people.

On Friday, I called Kassem to find out his thoughts about President Trump’s decision, announced this week, to pull American troops from Syria, despite the Pentagon and others warning him that it will create a vacuum for Iran and Russia, both patrons of Mr. Assad.

He was dismayed, but not surprised. The Americans had already seemed to lighten up on Mr. Assad. “I was brokenhearted to see how they let Assad massacre 2,000 people in less than two weeks,” he said, referring to the attacks on eastern Ghouta, which fell to Mr. Assad’s forces last month. “There were more chemical attacks, more atrocities. More people displaced from their homes. And no one did anything.”

I called other friends in Syria; they all said the same thing. Mr. Trump is sending a clear message to Mr. Assad: As long as we can claim victory over the Islamic State, we don’t care what you do, or what Russia or Iran does.

The message has already been received, in fact. In parts of Damascus, I was told, Iranian military officials are buying up real estate using Syrian businessmen as their front, turning it into an Iranian mini-fief within Syria. Their dream of an Iranian “land bridge” that allows them access to the Mediterranean is not quite there, but their influence will surely grow, as it has in neighboring Iraq.

As for the Russians, the withdrawal of American troops is a huge victory. Without them, the war will come to a faster, more brutal end, a win for Mr. Assad and his patrons and proof that Moscow has the stamina to stay in a conflict until the end. This week, as Mr. Trump planned his exit, the presidents of Iran, Turkey and Russia met to decide Syria’s fate. Mr. Assad was not there.

Realistically, the 2,000 American troops have not made a huge difference to the landscape of the war in terms of humanitarian assistance, because the United States never had a vested interest in protecting the Syrian population; the troops were not deployed in a way that, say, could ensure the delivery of food or medicine, or open up besieged towns. But the signal their sudden withdrawal sends to the Syrian people, especially the Syrian Kurds, and the rest of the world will be damning.

Kassem told me that living under the Assad dictatorship for 40 years, the national ideology taught him and his friends that America was the devil. “We were taught that America was the enemy,” he said. “Then we figured out it was all propaganda. But after seven years of atrocities, do you know what my friends and people around the Middle East are saying? That America is the enemy again. Because they see the Russians bombing us and the United States doing nothing. Now they pull out — when they could have been our friend or ally.”

Of course, Mr. Trump is not concerned about these things; his sole metric for success is defeating the Islamic State — though the vast majority of Syrian civilians were killed by Mr. Assad’s forces. But any claim of victory over the Islamic State is premature and naïve. As Kassem and others note, the seeds of “ISIS 2.0” are already planted in the thousands of angry people who have lost their families, their homes, their country. “When there are a million people dead,” Kassem said, “when most have lost everything, ISIS will say, ‘We told you so.’”

Mr. Trump has said that with America gone, its regional allies, especially Israel and Saudi Arabia, should pick up the slack. But that could make things even worse. Israel has a long and complicated relationship with Syria, and it has shown little willingness to get more involved. And Mr. Trump is perhaps forgetting that Saudi Arabia is the birthplace of the hard-core Wahhabi branch of Islam, which has inspired jihadists around the globe and could turbocharge a revived Islamic State.

As long as America has had troops in Syria, there was at least hope for a peaceful resolution to the war. Now the bottom is falling out. Kassem says he hears talk about the coming of the Mahdi, whom many Muslims believe will bring about Judgment Day, because the region is engulfed in chaos — a precondition for his arrival. “Everyone is talking end of days,” he says.

In what is becoming one of the most remarkable chapters in American legal history, the president of the United States is in serious need of top-notch legal help, but apparently cannot find top-notch lawyers to represent him.

As Robert Mueller’s Russia probe moves forward, the Trump administration has approached a slew of prominent law firms and attorneys, only to be told that while, in the words of Dan Webb and Tom Buchanan of Winston & Strawn, “the opportunity to represent the president [is] the highest honor” that can come a lawyer’s way, they must respectfully decline that honor. This left the president relying on a legal team who, with the exception of former Hogan Lovells lawyer Ty Cobb, features no criminal defense lawyers, let alone attorneys with experience in the sort of investigation Mr. Mueller is conducting.

The reasons top firms and lawyers are giving for refusing to work for Trump include conflicts of interests with current clients, the possibility of alienating sources of future business, the president’s reluctance to follow legal advice, his tendency to ask lawyers to engage in what Ted Boutrous of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher referred to delicately as “questionable activities,” and his history of not paying his bills.

Although these reasons for not taking on the president as a client are plausible, it seems something more profound is at work. After all, given the nature of white-collar criminal defense work, all these firms have extensive experience dealing with complicated conflicts issues, as well as difficult, controversial and otherwise unsavory clients. (By contrast, Bill Clinton secured the services of Bob Bennett, arguably the nation’s top white-collar criminal defense attorney, to defend him in the context of Ken Starr’s independent counsel investigation.)

Is there something else about Mr. Trump that makes elite lawyers especially reluctant to represent him? It is true that he presented himself as an anti-establishment populist and that more highly educated voters in general were less likely to vote for him. Yet campaign contributions to presidential candidates from lawyers at America’s top law firms suggest strongly that the antipathy toward Trump among elite lawyers is especially intense.

I examined federal records of presidential campaign contributions in 2012 and 2016 at the nation’s 10 highest-ranked law firms and other elite institutions known for their political and economic influence, such as Goldman Sachs. The results were striking.

In 2012, employees at these companies made 3,552 contributions to presidential campaigns. Barack Obama received 58.6 percent of these contributions while 40.6 percent went to Mitt Romney (the remainder going to other candidates in the Republican primary). Mr. Romney’s percentage of contributions was very similar to the percentage of the vote — 42 percent — he received in the election from voters with any postgraduate education.

The same data for the 2016 election provide a stark contrast. Of the 4,812 contributions originating from these companies, Mr. Trump received a total of 40. Meanwhile, contributions to Hillary Clinton outnumbered those to Mr. Trump by a ratio of more than 100 to 1.

Mrs. Clinton received nearly twice as many contributions from lawyers in these companies than Mr. Obama received four years earlier. (The latter fact is all the more striking, given that Mrs. Clinton raised 22 percent less money from the electorate as a whole than Mr. Obama raised in 2012.)

Meanwhile, compared with the support they gave to Mr. Romney, contributions from lawyers at these elite firms to Mr. Trump declined by a remarkable 98 percent. (Overall, Mr. Trump raised 26 percent less money than Mr. Romney raised in 2012.)

Some of the reluctance to contribute to the Trump campaign may be explained by the belief that he was unlikely to win. Yet the shift in support among elite lawyers between the Democratic and Republican nominees in 2012 and 2016 is extraordinary.

Data from Kirkland & Ellis, a Top 10 firm with a reputation for leaning Republican, highlight how extreme that shift was. In 2012, Kirkland & Ellis’s lawyers made 20.6 percent more contributions to Mr. Romney’s campaign than they made to Mr. Obama’s. In 2016, the same firm’s lawyers were 34 times more likely to contribute to Mrs. Clinton’s campaign than to Mr. Trump’s.

The notable lack of support for Mr. Trump inside top law firms reflects a broader pattern among elite institutions. For example, at the investment bank Goldman Sachs, contributions to the Trump campaign were 99 percent lower than those to Mr. Romney’s campaign four years earlier. Indeed, the total number of Goldman Sachs executives who to date have taken senior positions in the Trump administration (five) is greater than the total number of the firm’s approximately 34,000 employees who contributed to Trump’s campaign (three).

The revealed preferences, in the form of 2016 campaign contributions, of these elite professionals suggest that Mr. Trump’s inability to hire top lawyers to help him with his mounting legal troubles is not merely because he has various hallmarks of a troublesome client. Rather, they suggest the depth of the misgivings Mr. Trump has raised among American elites, and which persist today.

Of course, those misgivings do not appear to extend to one particularly crucial elite: the leadership of the Republican Party. Whether that changes because of the outcome of the Mueller investigation, and in particular because of whatever role the refusal of so many elite lawyers to represent the president plays in that outcome, remains to be seen.

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trump 23/23

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