What is the deal with Alina Habba? She reminds one of a Fox news host. On the surface, she appears to be utterly incompetent as an attorney; (in)famously doing things like neglecting to request a jury trial for Trump’s New York civil fraud case, and if a tithe of the allegations against her are true, she appears not to have a shred of integrity. Yet she’s managed to get into Trump’s inner circle probably because she has no conscience and displays the willingness to publicly and privately tell the sort of bald faced lies that Trump loves so very much. Does she have some sort of animal cunning, or deep game that will reveal her true genius at some later time? How has she managed to escape consequences for her actions thus far?
What do you think? Sometimes and idiot is just an idiot.
Yes, but she had to get through law school and she had to have passed the New Jersey bar exam, so she can’t possibly be as stupid as she appears to be.
What’s your opinion of Giuliani?
Someone has to finish last in their class.
His turn of fortunes we can argue are the result of a decline of mental state owing to either age or booze, or both. Not much else would make sense to explain it.
She’s not a very good lawyer, but like many of Trump’s sycophants, she’s a predatory leech with no sense of morality or shame who has latched onto her target and will continue sucking money from it until it dies. i.e. She’s Trump’s type of scum. Her deep game is that her primary role is not that of an attorney but as a mouthpiece for Trump. Trump has essentially given up on any serious effort to defend himself in court and is relying on winning the 2024 election. Habba can’t help him win in court, but maybe she can help him get elected.
And if she can’t she can absolutely become a talking head/“law expert” on whatever right-wing platform she wants after her usefulness to Trump is over. As long as she doesn’t burn him and become persona-non-grata to the MAGA crowd.
I think she’s Trump’s new girlfriend. No particular basis for that speculation but I would not be surprised.
She’s essentially admitted she was hired, in part, for her looks. During the same interview she said she’d rather be pretty than smart becaue she can fake being smart. She can’t really fake being smart though.
I think acting supremely confident where confidence appears to be completely unwarranted passes for looking smart these days. Trump is always ten moves ahead playing five dimensional chess after all.
There’s no “probably” about it; we know exactly how she got into his inner circle, and she might lose her law license for it.
She targeted a Trump employee who had been a victim of sexual assault by her manager (not Trump himself) and pretended to be the employee’s friend, offering to take care of her. Then she got that person to sign away her ability to go after her attacker or Trump’s business. This was all in a scheme to impress Trump and it worked.
Here’s a very thorough and entertaining Legal Eagle video about it.
It wouldn’t surprise me if they do have something going on. Habba attends social events (UFC fights) with him. She even wore a necklace with the initials FJB. Habba may be attractive but she’s a lousy lawyer with zero class.
I am not a lawyer and I have never taken any legal classes so I’m just hypothesizing here.
From what I have read from lawyers, on the SDMB, I understand that there’s two parts to lawyering: theoretical and application. You learn theory in school and then you actually learn how to be a lawyer once you’re in the business. The theory is entirely insufficient for doing the job. I’d assume (?) that the Bar Exam largely tests theory.
The ability to pass tests is often tightly coupled to the ability to memorize things. If you check, you’ll find lots of developmentally disabled people performing mental feats like listing every capital on the planet or every bone in the human body. The popular impression that you have to be smart to know lots of stuff isn’t really correct and likewise the idea that you need to understand something to remember it is also incorrect. I could perfectly memorize 50 pages of Farsi and not understand a single word of it. It’s a chore but, technically, I or you or anyone could do it if willing to put in the brute effort. That’s a matter of willpower, not intellect.
In general, I’d suggest being more skeptical of the lower bound of intellect that it takes to become a lawyer or a doctor. As said, passing tests is highly connected to memorization. Having an actual understanding of a matter does help your average person to remember something and having an actual understanding is what you want in a lawyer and a doctor so being able to pass those tests is often going to remove people who lack understanding. But that’s not the only path to memorization so while the test will retain people with true understanding, it’s also going to preserve people who simply are good at rote memorization.
Given that Habba is a good looking lady and that requires a good fitness regime, I’d suggest that her main talent is willpower. She’s able to force herself to do things that are gruelling - like controlling her macros and working out, and like brute forcing herself through dumbly memorizing legal jargon and famous decisions without really understanding the import of them. The tests rule out people who have neither of those talents.
She’s found a niche where her looks and shamelessness will pay off, either in direct access to the nation’s most powerful office or with a television career in right wing media, depending on the outcome of the November election.
The Trump circle is like a private works program for the mediocre whose best talent is grifting.
Reminds me of a old joke…
Q: What do you call the person who barely got through medical school and ranked lower than anyone else who made it?
A: Doctor
In Habba’s defense…what are you left to do but performance art when the person you are representing is guilty AF.
It isn’t clear that this is a fair knock on her:
Pretty much everything else you could throw out there, OTOH, is.
ETA: Supreme Court Justice? Attorney General??
In terms of ability I think that she is probably a middle of the road lawyer who would be perfectly fine drafting wills, evicting tenets and suing for back child support, but who is in way over her head when it comes to the complexity of Trumps current legal issues. The one thing that gets her into serious trouble is also the one thing that has catapulted to the top of Trump’s Lawyer scrum, is that she does what Trump tells her. So if Trump come up with a hairbrained legal strategy, rather than doing her job as legal advisor and telling him “No, that is a terrible idea, and probably illegal. It will never fly, and will get us in big trouble.” She just says “Sure I’ll get right on it!” and writes it up.
I don’t think it’s that complicated. Being smart in one area doesn’t correlate with being smart in others. It’s not a single dimensional quantity, but a multifaceted complex structure.
You can be a genius, Nobel-winning chemist one day, and pill-hocking snake oil salesman the next, just ask Linus Pauling. Or look at Ben Carson. World renowned pediatric brain surgeon, at the top of his field and respected by all, and also one of the stupidest people I’ve ever seen speak on live TV. So it goes.