Maggie Haberman Explains Why Trump Wanted To ‘Humiliate’ His Own Lawyers

Donald Trump slammed his attorneys — while they were all lined up behind him — at a press conference on Friday.

The former president’s criticism was all about exerting “dominance,” New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins.

Trump said he was “disappointed” with his legal team during a press event after a courtroom appeal to overturn a jury’s verdict that found him liable for the sexual abuse of writer E. Jean Carroll in a department store in the 1990s.

The GOP nominee took no questions from reporters during what became a lengthy rant about Carroll and another woman who has alleged that she was sexually assaulted by Trump.

“It’s a way to show dominance,” Haberman said of Trump’s criticism of his own lawyers. “It’s a way to say what he wants knowing they’re not going to say anything back to him, because this a public setting and they’re not going to turn to him and argue, and it’s a way to humiliate.”

Trump has done the same with “any number of aides and lawyers and advisers and employees over a number of decades. He is constantly complaining about his lawyers,” Haberman added, recalling Trump being “really critical” at the time of mentor Roy Cohn, who he has since mythologized as “the most perfect lawyer” since his death, she said.

“These people who have defended him pretty aggressively and in the ways he has asked, more often than not, up to a line that they try not to cross where it would cause problems with a judge or with a jury, it’s still not enough for him,” Haberman concluded.

Watch Haberman’s full analysis here: