Most business executives tend to be lawyer-dependent, but for the better part of 50 years, lawyers have done everything for Trump except have his children. They have finagled unprecedented tax abatements, kept him going through multiple corporate bankruptcies (and out of personal bankruptcy), protected his finances from public scrutiny. They are so entwined with every aspect of his public and private life, it is unimaginable that Trump could have gotten anywhere close to where he is today without them. But now, in the aftermath of the FBI raid on the offices and residences of his most prominent personal attorney and fixer, Michael Cohen—he of the $130,000 pre-election payment to the porn star—the same techniques that Trump’s lawyers have employed for decades to smooth his business path are the very things that threaten to blow holes in his still-young political career. For perhaps the first time in his life, a lawyer has become Trump’s biggest problem—instead of his salvation…

It’s been close to half a century since Trump retained Cohn (and more than 30 years since the iconic fixer, who died in 1986, performed an act of legal brutality for Trump). But at nearly every stage since then, Trump has hired a no-holds-barred lawyer to make a problem disappear. When he had to squeeze extra floors into a new building, he called Sandy Lindenbaum, a zoning-law guru who called himself “the last of the gunslingers”; when he needed the New Jersey Casino Control Commission to see things his way, he turned to Atlantic City fixture Nick Ribis; when he wanted to divorce Ivana (and, later on, her successor, Marla Maples), he retained Jay Goldberg, a self-described “killer” who says he can “rip skin off a body”; when it was tax time, he reversed decades of bragging about his billions and had tax attorneys say his properties were worth only a fraction of what he had publicly proclaimed (an ongoing tax appeal in Chicago declares Trump Tower Chicago “a failed business”); when he was in the market for a troubleshooter, he hired Michael Cohen, who has threatened journalists who’ve written about Trump with bodily harm. In the summer of 2015, Cohen told a Daily Beast reporter to “tread very fucking lightly, because what I’m going to do to you is going to be fucking disgusting,” and last fall he told Vanity Fair he’s “the guy who would take a bullet for the president.”