Again, you have to marvel. The characters and the stories that arise naturally in Trump world are utterly beyond the capacity of the most gifted scenarist to create. No writer can come up with this. This is the doing of the Great Screenwriter In the Sky, whose imagination is limitless.
Donald Trump has a new lawyer to prosecute his defamation suit against Hillary Clinton and others. His name is Peter Ticktin and he has worshipped Trump since they went to high school at the military academy 60 years ago. He wrote a book about the experience, “What Makes Trump Tick: My Years with Donald Trump from New York Military Academy to the Present.” His law license has been suspended twice by the Florida bar and he’s undergoing a third investigation into shady billing practices but what the hey, nobody’s perfect, right? We’re all works in progress, as Will Smith pointed out the other night.
And this you’ll love: the guy’s a poet. If you go over to his Legal Brains website, you will be able to view poetic wonders with the titles
“MOTEL,” “THE TORONTO SUBWAY SYSTEM,” “THE LITTLE ROOM,” “OH WHAT A SHAME,” “WANTING TO LOVE YOU,” and “THE HAMBURGER.”
Some of the poems have to do with loneliness and heartache. More than one is Toronto-themed—a nod to Ticktin’s family roots and early professional years. And one contemplates a “Miss Playboy” that has apparently been “chopped up.”
“At last the market place has brought / A toy that causes lasting thought / Of life and sex and puzzled joy, / A chopped up mess of Miss Playboy. / A jig sawed copy of past releases, / The poor girl has gone to pieces, / Cut apart by some contraption / As she longed for loving action,” reads the poem, “A PLAYBOY PUZZLE.”
“They actually had puzzles—they were in little cans,” Ticktin explained when asked about that composition. “And you put it all together and you got your Playboy.”
This is the mind that is going to take down Hillary Clinton, Christopher Steele, Jake Sullivan, the lot of them, folks. This guy here. Daily Beast:
Decades before he became the ex-president’s lawyer, Ticktin’s writing work was already serving Trump’s interests and feeding his ego—even if accidentally.
Ticktin’s role on a student newspaper may have helped set the stage for The Donald’s many years of claiming to be an ultimate womanizer—long before he drew accusations of sexual assault and harassment by numerous women.
“He was really liked by our whole class,” Ticktin said. “That’s why we made him ‘Ladies’ Man.’”
At the military academy, it was the job of the newspaper staff to decide who won the year-end superlatives, “not like it is today where people run for election to become ‘Class Clown’ or whatever,” Ticktin explained.
And that “Ladies’ Man” award, according to Ticktin, was not only just an “inside joke” at the all-boys school; it was also a consolation prize.
“Somebody else got ‘Most Popular,’ and we wanted to give him something, so we made him ‘Ladies’ Man,’ which to us was kind of an inside joke because there really were no ladies,” Ticktin said.
Trump was voted Ladies Man at an all boy’s school, a feat engineered by his poet lawyer. And it gets better — or worse, depending.
The Times also reported that Trump’s classmates had “crowned him” ladies’ man as “a nod to the volume of his dates.” When the Times asked Trump why he took that title, he replied, “I better not tell you—I’ll get myself in trouble,” adding he had “a great feeling” and “a great like” for women.
But in contrast to a classmate’s claim in the Times report that Trump had “a variety of girls coming up,” Ticktin said that he helped stage the yearbook superlative photo.
“In order to get a picture with him and a lady, you know, a girlfriend—supposedly—in the yearbook, we had to find the secretary out of the administration building that was young enough to fit the part, because we have no girls,” he explained. (That secretary was previously identified and found by the New York Daily News.)
Let’s agree to give Donald Trump a “C” here (unquestionably the highest grade he actually ever earned) for consistency, because starting even back as far as high school who he was was all fabrication and lies. The stage was set very young.
And what about the lawsuit?
“It’s dumb,” one lawyer, who also works in the upper echelons of Trumpworld, succinctly assessed this week. This attorney requested anonymity in order to speak freely.
Ken White, a First Amendment lawyer and former federal prosecutor, had an even rougher take on the twice-impeached former president’s newest vengeful lawsuit.
“Trump’s RICO complaint is freakishly unprofessional and legally bumptious. Rather than a serious effort by serious lawyers, it’s a performative caper by injudiciously barred clowns,” White said on Tuesday. “This sort of fundraising-and-rabble-rousing-by-litigation is unethical and bad for the legal system.”
However performative the suit is, Ticktin is simply doing exactly what his high-profile client craves.
Indeed he is. And with his track record with Trump, indeed he will continue. This is the level of legal talent that Trump attracts. Forget the white shoe firms, if this guy is wearing shoes at all, they’re the big floppy clown shoes, along with red and white tights and a rubber nose. It’s tabloid time, folks. Law in the Big Ring. Bread and circus.
As I said about this guy elseweb, neither of them seems to get that “military school” is just juvie for rich kids.
Is that a fact? I didn’t know that. I grew up with other poor or middle class kids. I knew a few rich kids later on, when I went to high school, because I met them at speech meets. They went to Catholic schools. But I never knew anybody who went to military school. Thanks for teaching me something new.