Donald Trump’s explanation of payments on his behalf to silence women about his affairs with them reminds me of a story sometimes used to devastating effect by lawyers representing plaintiffs in personal injury cases when the defense is arguing somewhat inconsistent defenses. It goes like this:
“In a simpler time, there was a lawyer defending a client in a dog bite case. He argued as follows:
‘My client isn’t liable for this dog bite because my client doesn’t even own a dog. But if you find that my client does own a dog, it wasn’t his dog that bit the plaintiff. But if you find that it was my client’s dog that bit the plaintiff, my client still isn’t liable because my client didn’t know that his dog would bite.’”
The parallels to Trump’s shifting explanations, which have moved from “If somebody made payments to silence women, I didn’t know anything about it,” to “If I did know about the payments, they were to protect my marriage and had nothing to do with the campaign,” to “Well, if I did know about them and they were to help my campaign, it’s just a civil matter, not a criminal matter,” are pretty obvious.