Support at elite law firms for Trump

I have a piece on how Trump’s inability to hire lawyers who know something about criminal law may reflect something in addition to the fact that he’s a terrible client by all conventional measures:

I examined federal records of presidential campaign contributions in 2012 and 2016 at the nation’s 10 highest-ranked law firms and other elite institutions known for their political and economic influence, such as Goldman Sachs. The results were striking.

In 2012, employees at these companies made 3,552 contributions to presidential campaigns. Barack Obama received 58.6 percent of these contributions while 40.6 percent went to Mitt Romney (the remainder going to other candidates in the Republican primary). Mr. Romney’s percentage of contributions was very similar to the percentage of the vote — 42 percent — he received in the election from voters with any postgraduate education.

The same data for the 2016 election provide a stark contrast. Of the 4,812 contributions originating from these companies, Mr. Trump received a total of 40. Meanwhile, contributions to Hillary Clinton outnumbered those to Mr. Trump by a ratio of more than 100 to 1.

One place where Trump is remarkably unpopular is Goldman Sachs:

The notable lack of support for Mr. Trump inside top law firms reflects a broader pattern among elite institutions. For example, at the investment bank Goldman Sachs, contributions to the Trump campaign were 99 percent lower than those to Mr. Romney’s campaign four years earlier. Indeed, the total number of Goldman Sachs executives who to date have taken senior positions in the Trump administration (five) is greater than the total number of the firm’s approximately 34,000 employees who contributed to Trump’s campaign (three).

Now the fact that Trump’s campaign got amazingly little support from various elite law firms and other elite institutions — including some which gave many more contributions to Mitt Romney than Barack Obama in 2012 — doesn’t mean he isn’t supported by one especially key elite demographic:

The revealed preferences, in the form of 2016 campaign contributions, of these elite professionals suggest that Mr. Trump’s inability to hire top lawyers to help him with his mounting legal troubles is not merely because he has various hallmarks of a troublesome client. Rather, they suggest the depth of the misgivings Mr. Trump has raised among American elites, and which persist today.

Of course, those misgivings do not appear to extend to one particularly crucial elite: the leadership of the Republican Party. Whether that changes because of the outcome of the Mueller investigation, and in particular because of whatever role the refusal of so many elite lawyers to represent the president plays in that outcome, remains to be seen.