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How Lawsuits against the Trump Organization Have Weakened the Presidency

by John Yoo

Trump’s critics chopped down another tree in the forest of laws and legal norms to pursue their devil, but to the harm of future presidents and the country.

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Outside the Trump Building in New York City.

Andrew Kelly/Reuters

Was charging a Trump business aide for tax evasion worth the permanent damage to the presidency? After reading the indictments handed down last week, the former president’s supporters and critics should agree that the answer is no. President Biden may well suffer the harm, too.

After three years of criminal investigations into the businesses of the former president, Manhattan district attorney Cy Vance persuaded a grand jury last week to indict Allen Weisselberg, the chief financial officer of the Trump Organization. Prosecutors claim that Weisselberg, and the company as a whole, engaged in a scheme for the past 15 years to hide fringe benefits — an apartment, car, school tuition — from tax authorities.

John Yoo

About the Author

John Yoo

John Yoo is the Thomas W. Smith Senior Fellow at the Civitas Institute, University of Texas at Austin; Emanuel S. Heller Professor of Law at the University of California at Berkeley; and a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He is a co-author of the just-released two-volume American Constitutional Law (Routledge, 2026).

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