Lando Calrissian famously complained, “This deal keeps getting worse all the time.” How many law firms are saying the same thing about their Trump deals?
Remember when Lando Calrissian complained, in reference to his agreement with Darth Vader, “This deal keeps getting worse all the time�
I wonder how many law firms are now saying the same thing about their deals with Trump. www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddo...
— Steve Benen (@stevebenen.com) 2025-04-17T15:57:45.276Z
Remember when Lando Calrissian complained, in reference to his agreement with Darth Vader, “This deal keeps getting worse all the time”?
I wonder how many law firms are now saying the same thing about their deals with Trump
https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/prominent-law-firms-lando-calrissian-common-rcna201726
In “The Empire Strikes Back,”
Lando Calrissian struck an agreement with Darth Vader, which probably made sense to him at the time. In fact, Calrissian told Han Solo in the 1980 “Star Wars” movie that
he had made a deal that would keep the Empire out of Cloud City “forever.”
As the Cloud City administrator soon learned, however, the Empire did not fully intend to follow through on its commitments, even if Calrissian held up his end of the bargain. As the film’s dramatic third act, Vader told his ostensible partner:
“I am altering the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further.”
As he realized that he had reached an agreement with someone he shouldn’t have trusted, Calrissian complained, “
This deal keeps getting worse all the time.”.....
But as The New York Times reported, some of these same firms are finding, as Calrissian put it, that their deals keep getting worse all the time.
When some of the nation’s biggest law firms agreed to deals with President Trump, the terms appeared straightforward: In return for escaping the full force of his retribution campaign, the firms would do some free legal work on behalf of largely uncontroversial causes like helping veterans. Mr. Trump, it turns out, has a far more expansive view of what those firms can be called on to do.
Instead of working on anodyne causes,
the firms are discovering that the president effectively believes that he sees their attorneys as his own. The Times’ report, which has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, added that Trump has suggested in recent days that
he wants the firms to help him negotiate trade deals and possibly help revive the coal industry, too......
Harold Hongju Koh, a professor of international law at Yale Law School, told the Times, in reference to the firms,
“They thought they made one-shot deals which they would fulfill. But the administration seems to think that they have subjected these firms to indentured servitude.”
Putting aside the question of whether the firms, like Calrissian, should’ve seen this coming, the broader question
is whether the firms will do what Calrissian ultimately did and reverse course.
Indeed, it’s not my place to give the firms’ partners advice, but
it is worth noting that if they didn’t enter into a legally binding contract with Trump, and they’re no longer pleased with the president’s demands and expectations, there’s nothing stopping them from joining the firms that have already decided to fight back.I love the Star Wars analogy
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