SUNLIGHT IS THE BEST DISINFECTANT (profanity alert):

"It's a whole different world than he's used to. What he did as a CEO, if he hired somebody, who'd question it? That's not true on the world stage. He just wasn't ready for it," longtime New York lawyer and lobbyist Sid Davidoff said in an interview. "He was a CEO of a privately held corporation that did what he wanted to do. ... It's no news that he wasn't prepared for what was ahead of him. And obviously the learning curve isn't as sharp as it should be."

And others, far more than Trump, are paying the price. That much, at least, is not new.

Three and a half decades ago, he bought the New Jersey Generals of the upstart United States Football League. Riding high thanks to the new Trump Tower, Trump was dead-set on being a George Steinbrenner-like professional sports team owner. "Creating illusions, to an extent, is what has to be done," he told a reporter. Instead, it took him less than three years to effectively extinguish the USFL. One of his fellow owners, John Bassett of the Tampa Bay Bandits, threatened to punch Trump "right in the mouth" in a letter he wrote to Trump in 1986. "You are not only damaging yourself with your associates," he said, "but alienating them as well." Michael Tollin, the film director and producer, made a documentary for ESPN about the USFL. He called it Small Potatoes: Who Killed the USFL? The answer to the question in the title was Trump. "He killed the USFL," said Tollin.

Four years after the Trump-led death of the football league, in early 1990, when his marriage was exploding and his finances were cratering, Trump let go or forced out most of his small cadre of key aides on Trump Tower's 26th floor--public-relations wizard Howard Rubenstein, government-relations point man Tony Gliedman, shrewd attorneys like Gerald Schrager and Harvey Freeman. [...]

On Thursday, former Trump Shuttle president Bruce Nobles recalled Freeman, one of Trump's most important attorneys. "I never went to a meeting that Harvey wasn't in," Nobles told me. "And he was sort of his sounding board. And when Donald got into his real financial trouble, he fired everybody--including Harvey."

"He certainly doesn't ever seem to be loyal to anybody except himself," Trump biographer Gwenda Blair added.

Then and since, Trump has left in his wake small-business wreckage, people who were harmed in measurable ways by their interactions with Trump. 

Why is it that Trump is having little success imposing his will on these various courts?

Until early March, when Daniels sued Trump claiming that her hush agreement was invalid, Trump's legal jeopardy seemed to reside entirely in the probe by special counsel Robert Mueller. All eyes were on that probe, and the possibility that Mueller and his team could marshal evidence that Trump and his associates had broken a wide range of criminal laws.

Now, however, we are witnessing the spectacle of Trump and Cohen trying to figure out how to prevail in individual courts of law, where they cannot browbeat their way through or threaten to fire the other side. And to Trump's likely great chagrin, they are losing -- not because of political opposition but rather because they are on the wrong side of the legal issues.

These cases subject Trump to an entirely different legal regime from the Mueller probe, which is a mixture of law and politics that allows Trump to try to leverage his political power and boorish personality to make mischief.

Mueller is a Department of Justice employee subject to the oversight of the department's political hierarchy, and thus the President. This feature has allowed Trump to rattle sabers and consider various political maneuvers to shut the probe down or at least clip its wings.

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