Trump 2.0 is going to be driven by the president’s “indiscriminate, narcissistic, vengeful nature,” according to former White House attorney Ty Cobb.
Cobb, who worked for the then-president during Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, told Politico that the new Trump Administration is playing to Trump’s “mob boss” qualities.
“What you see here is a group of people who think they missed an opportunity the first time around—that they didn’t fully realize what they now believe to be the powers of the presidency and they didn’t maximize Trump’s indiscriminate, narcissistic, vengeful nature,” Cobb said. “They’re playing to Trump’s strengths, which is as a mob boss.”
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Trump, who called Cobb a “disgruntled former lawyer” in a June 2023 Truth Social post, is on the warpath against his detractors. He has fought, and won, battles against institutions that have dared to cross him in the past.
Law firms Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom and Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton, & Garrison cut deals with Trump rather than battle him in the courts, like some others have opted to do.
Skadden agreed to conduct $100 million worth of pro bono legal work for the president’s administration, Trump said Friday. The second firm agreed to do $40 million of pro-bono work.
Last week, the president bragged about his successful shakedowns. “They’re all bending and saying, ‘Sir, thank you very much,‘” he said and added that they were asking: “‘Where do I sign? Where do I sign?‘”
Trump has also targeted WilmerHale for employing Robert Mueller, the special counsel who investigated his ties to Russia. His revenge campaign saw him sign executive orders that sought to bar the firms’ lawyers from federal buildings, meetings, and jobs.
However, federal judges have stymied Trump’s progress on targeting WilmerHale and Jenner & Block.
Trump, who also barred the Associated Press from access to the Oval Office, won $15 million in damages from an ABC News defamation case in Dec. 2024, and is currently doing battle with CBS for $20 billion over a 60 Minutes interview last year with former Vice President Kamala Harris.
Educational institutions, too, have yielded to Trump’s demands. The interim president of Columbia University stepped down after the institution agreed to a list of changes demanded by the Trump Administration, which had canceled $400 million in federal funding.
Other top universities, like Harvard, have also been scoped by Trump, who cites anti-Israel bias as the reasoning behind his crackdown. The New York Times reports that some institutions are are even hiring Republican lobbyists to their boards to stay on the president’s good side.
The arrests of Mahmoud Khalil, a pro-Palestine activist and Columbia graduate student who is a lawful U.S. resident, and Tufts graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish citizen with a valid visa, also signals Trump’s ruthlessness this time around.
