Will This Man Take Down Donald Trump? (Politico)
New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has spent years squaring off against Donald Trump. Now, he's one of the few officials left with the ability to limit the President's efforts. Read the article here.
"Schneiderman took up the state’s existing case against Trump University—New York wanted the school to drop the 'university' from its name, since it was not chartered as an institution of higher learning and lacked a license to offer instruction—and as he pursued it over the next five years, he became the target of a relentless series of personal attacks from the Trump camp. Trump filed an ethics complaint alleging that Schneiderman offered to drop the suit in exchange for donations; he went on television to denounce Schneiderman as a hack and a lightweight, and said he was wasting millions of taxpayer dollars when he should have been going after Wall Street. (Never mind that Schneiderman had already been declared 'the man the banks fear most' by the liberal magazine The American Prospect.) 'The whole scorched-earth strategy towards those who would challenge him, we got a preview of,' says Schneiderman.
Schneiderman is a slender, slightly built former corporate lawyer, the only son of a New York philanthropist whose last names adorns several city cultural institutions. One never senses from him the kind of comfort and ease that people from his position tend to radiate, but rather a twitchy impatience, as if the vein on his forehead is going to pop while he busts some of the high-priced glassware in the political china shop. In the six years after he won that race, Schneiderman has emerged as perhaps the lefty media’s favorite lawyer, tangling with mortgage bankers, ExxonMobil, and national retailers like Abercrombie & Fitch, J Crew and The Gap. And on November 9, he was handed what might become his largest target when Donald Trump, his longtime nemesis, was elected president.
...At a post-election town hall, Schneiderman said his immediate role after the election was in talking people off the ledge. If there is a sanguinity to him these days, it is because Schneiderman sees this as a moment when Democrats can at last learn the lessons that Republicans have internalized over the past 70 years: that the real power in the Constitution lies in the states. The long-term political project he envisions is building a progressive grass-roots answer to what the right has been building for decades—not in the halls of Washington, but in 'sexy towns like Tallahassee and Columbus and Madison and Albany.'"
