Harvard constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe on Monday suggested Donald Trump had thrown his own defence in his election obstruction case “not just under a bus but under a freight train” when he boasted to NBC’s Kristen Welker that it was his decision to challenge the 2020 result.
And it was all down to the former president’s narcissism.
It would now be very hard for Trump to argue at trial that he was acting on the advice of his attorneys, Tribe told CNN’s Anderson Cooper.
“It’s said sometimes that only a fool hires himself as a lawyer to defend himself. I don’t think Trump is a fool, but he’s certainly a narcissist,” he noted.
“He just has to say that he is responsible for everything. He doesn’t depend on anybody,” Tribe added. “That’s all very nice politically. But in the courtroom, he’s just blown that defence, the defence that I was just relying on my lawyers and therefore I didn’t have a state of mind that it takes to commit these crimes. He’s just blown that out of the water.”
Trump acknowledged to Welker on Meet the Press that he’d ignored the attorneys who told him that he should concede in 2020.
“I didn’t respect them,” Trump said. “In many cases, I didn’t respect them. But I did respect others. I respected many others that said the election was rigged.”
Instead, Trump continued to falsely claim he won the election. He is currently facing criminal charges at the federal level and in Georgia over his push to overturn the 2020 election results.