Taking Down Trump—A Successful Former Prosecutor’s Guide

Tristan Snell reflects on lessons he learned taking down Trump in the successful prosecution of the Trump University fraud case.

Donald Trump holds a media conference announcing the establishment of Trump University May 23, 2005 in New York City. Photo by Thos Robinson/Getty Images.

Lawyer and activist Tristan Snell is known for his popular and often devastating takes on Twitter, but he’s also one of the few attorneys who has taken Trump head on and prevailed. I sat down to lunch a couple times with Tristan recently to talk about social media and the role of legal analysts like we both are. Our conversations proved so interesting that I knew I had to get him in an interview setting for The Big Picture. I hope you enjoy and value his insights on Trump and the intersection of politics and the law.

— Jay Kuo

You’re known for your successful prosecution of the Trump University case. Can you give us the quick version of that case, your role in it, and what your biggest takeaway from it is about Trump?

Absolutely. I was fortunate enough to be in the right place at the right time, at the New York AG’s office, and I ended up heading up the investigation and building the civil prosecution case we filed against Donald Trump, Trump University, the Trump Organization in August 2013. So I interviewed the victims, subpoenaed and reviewed most of the documents, deposed witnesses, and drafted the court papers laying out our case, with a truly outstanding team of colleagues and supervising attorneys.

Trump University was an unlicensed, illegal school: all schools in New York must be licensed and must have approval in order to use “University” in their name, and Trump University had neither. And it was a total scam. The instructors were motivational speakers and high-pressure salesmen; they were supposed to be “handpicked” by Trump, but Trump had nothing to do with their selection. The curriculum was supposed to be comprised of Trump’s secrets for investing in real estate; it was actually designed by a third-party company that created programming for other wealth-creation seminars and timeshare sellers. They sold people a three-day seminar that was supposed to tell you everything you needed to know to invest in real estate, and then they baited-and-switched everyone, pressuring them into buying mentorship programs for $10,000 to $35,000 each. Then even the mentorship was a scam, with tons of broken promises. I go through more of the details in my book, and the court papers that were filed are still worth a read.

Why does the case still resonate today? The man will do literally anything for a buck – even lie, cheat, and steal from his own superfans.

The people who went to Trump University weren’t Trump skeptics. They idolized Trump – they were huge fans of The Apprentice and The Celebrity Apprentice; they believed in the (fake) image of Trump as this paragon of American business success – and he ripped them off.

As for the biggest takeaways from the case? I have my list of 12 rules in my book, but the very quick version is that beating Trump in court requires bold, unwavering leadership and a methodical, grind-it-out approach that can often take years, while forcing one to be steadfast in the face of his attacks and distractions.  

He really can be defeated. The AG’s office built the playbook. And more and more people are now following it.

You’ve written a book and now have a podcast and your own Substack, “Taking Down Trump.” Obviously, you mean just legally or politically, given the news these days. Which is it in your mind, and where do the two overlap?

I mean both. There is a lot of overlap. Winning in court and winning in a campaign have certain things in common.  We have to marshal evidence and craft a compelling narrative that doesn’t get lost in extraneous details. We have to keep it simple and powerful. We have to be patient and play the long game, keep an eye on the big picture (as you do!), and be persistent, not letting ourselves get rattled by the attacks and the insults and the efforts to tear our coalition apart and get us to fight each other rather than Trump and the MAGA cult. We have a very long road ahead of us, to defeat not only Trump but Trumpism as an ideology and fascism as a global scourge.

Or to put it differently, we have to fight fraud and fascism. Fraud is the micro; fascism is the macro. Fraud is the means; fascism is the end goal for these people. Fraud is the way they bankroll themselves (not just Trump but also Alex Jones, Steve Bannon, et al.). Fascism is their ultimate objective, whereby they will control an entire country and its government, privatizing it and selling it off to loyal cronies — a la Putin and the Oligarchs. They want to privatize the entire school system, the military, the post office, the National Weather Service, any government entity they can monetize for their own personal gain. And they want to disenfranchise women, people of color, LGBTQ+ communities, and anyone who fails their religious tests — stripping away voting rights, bodily rights, human rights — so that they can centralize and entrench their power. And this is a global battle, not just in America, but in countries large and small all over the world. 

That is the fight we are in, the ideological battle of our lifetimes. Trump is just the tip of a much larger iceberg of authoritarianism.

Many liberals and progressives have become disheartened over the way Trump continues to escape accountability, through delay that is now assisted by no less than the Supreme Court itself. Do you have any thoughts on how we can regain faith and come back to the fight after these setbacks?

The long view is a difficult one to take, but it is very necessary here. The Trump University case overcame an 18-month delay where we had to go up on appeal and win. The NY AG civil fraud case and the Manhattan DA criminal prosecution would not have been possible were it not for the 2-year battle that the Manhattan DA’s office waged and won to get their hands on Trump’s tax returns and the financial records underpinning them.

Delay is Trump’s most effective weapon in these cases, but it only works in the short term; it does not work in the long term.  The key for prosecutors is persistence. Just an absolute, resolute relentlessness. Keep fighting, stay focused on the goal, no matter how long it takes.

We all need to have the same mentality. And we have a critical role to play in these cases: we must insist on persistence, insist that they keep fighting for justice and finish the job. And in the meantime, we are going to have to be the ones to hold Trump accountable politically so that he may also be held accountable legally and criminally. We need to win in November so that these cases may continue, so that justice is done.  

This is what will restore our faith in the process: turning Trump into a historical precedent, proving that no matter how badly our system appears to be co-opted, we were still able to defeat him politically, give him fair trials, and show that no one is above the law.

Over our lunch, we talked about how the January 6 case in D.C. might still prove to be quite damaging to Trump after all, even before the election. Can you spell out your thoughts on this?

I went into full depth on this in a recent piece on my Substack before SCOTUS issued its opinion; that analysis turned out to be right (unfortunately).

Here’s a shorter and more up-to-date version. The Supreme Court ordered Judge Chutkan to undertake a “fact-specific analysis” on whether Trump’s acts were “official acts” of the office of the President or “unofficial acts” of a private citizen or a candidate for office. This means at least a round of briefing and some sort of evidentiary hearing — and I think that such a hearing, if done properly, could easily take weeks if not months, involving dozens of witnesses and hundreds of exhibits.

Why? Let’s just take one part of the indictment: Trump’s pressure campaign to get Mike Pence to usurp power beyond his ceremonial role in the certification of the Electoral College vote, where Trump almost succeeded in bullying Pence into throwing out or setting aside the legitimate votes of certain contested states (like Arizona, Pennsylvania, Georgia, etc.). In order to determine if Trump’s actions with regard to Pence were “official acts,” Judge Chutkan has to hear evidence about virtually every interaction Trump had with Pence from the election through January 6 and its aftermath, and every communication or action Trump had regarding Pence. This means Pence must take the witness stand, along with his senior staffers, Trump’s senior staffers (like Mark Meadows), and anyone else who was in the room when Trump and Pence spoke, or anyone else who was a go-between; and the court must also see all the emails, call notes, calendar entries, text messages, Twitter direct messages, and everything else related to this factual question of whether the interactions between Trump and Pence were part of Trump’s official job as president or were related to Trump’s candidacy. That alone could take a month, right there.

All of this evidence could then be on display in open court, starting in August and continuing throughout September and October.

Trump’s lawyers have already made it clear that they will oppose such a fact-finding proceeding in open court — but the fact-finding proceeding was ordered by the Supreme Court of the United States in response to Trump’s plea for immunity! And there is no legal justification for holding that proceeding in a closed courtroom, away from the public. So Trump may quickly find himself in a “be careful what you wish for” situation. And this is without even getting into the new twists this case could take, where there could be a superseding indictment, and indictment of the previously unindicted co-conspirators, all of which could happen in the next few weeks.

If we can make this election about Trump, rather than about the current administration, many believe we can win it. But the media doesn’t seem to want to help us out much. As someone who’s amassed quite a following across social media, do you have any thoughts on how we make this a referendum on Trump? Where do you think he is most vulnerable?

I do believe that the pro-democracy coalition already understands the assignment.  We don’t need the media to help with that, although it sure would be nice.

Ultimately I believe that this election — and Joe Biden’s campaign message — can be a simple one.

“I am the only pro-democracy, pro-choice candidate in this race. If you want democracy, vote for me. If you want a president who will protect your right to choose, vote for me.”

(If you like your arguments in groups of three, then the third argument can be the old classic standby: “Are you personally better off financially than you were four years ago? If so, give me another four years.”)

Donald Trump is vulnerable on January 6 and extremism. He incites political violence constantly. He has created chaos and unrest in America that we haven’t seen since the 1960s. He has promised to terminate the Constitution, to throw his political opponents and journalists into prison, to herd immigrants into concentration camps. He got a handpicked Supreme Court to say that he’s immune from prosecution even if he uses the presidency to murder people. A vote for Trump is a vote for violence and mayhem — and the end of freedom. Biden has been hitting this talking point, but he needs to hit it even harder.

Donald Trump is also vulnerable on reproductive rights, where a very strong majority of Americans want some kind of real legal access to abortion. Trump brags about killing Roe v. Wade, and it is very clear that he will sign a nationwide ban on abortion if re-elected. It will be illegal in all 50 states, even the deep blue ones where it’s taken for granted; IVF will be illegal nationally as well. And that won’t be all: Trump and the Republicans will then ban access to contraception, to the pill, Plan B, IUDs, even condoms. This last part is key: Biden needs to make the point that this is not just about women. “Guys, Trump wants to take away your condoms. They want to go back to the 1800s.”  

And the best way for Biden and the Democrats to tie all this together is to take the Project 2025 agenda that Trump’s staffers created with the far-right Heritage Foundation, and use that to drag them down as much as possible.

It is the most extreme far-right policy agenda ever in American history, and it can and must be used against them as much as possible. 

Tristan Snell is a lawyer, legal commentator for MSNBC, fighter for democracy, and creator of the book/podcast/newsletter TAKING DOWN TRUMP. He served as Assistant Attorney General for New York State, where he led the investigation and prosecution of Trump University. Today he’s the founder and managing partner of MainStreet.Law, and a content creator with over 750,000 followers across Twitter, Instagram, Threads, TikTok, and YouTube. He lives in New York City.