American Idol

Roy Den Hollander, the 72-year-old lawyer who tried to murder federal judge Esther Salas, and ended up killing her son and wounding her husband (Hollander probably also murdered another man a few days earlier), was a racist misogynistic crackpot, aka a Trump supporter:

“Female judges didn’t bother me as long as they were middle age or older black ladies,” he writes when discussing a lawsuit he filed that went before Judge Salas, the first Hispanic woman appointed a federal judge in New Jersey. “They seemed to have an understanding of how life worked and were not about to be conned by any foot dragging lawyer. Latinas, however, were usually a problem—driven by an inferiority complex.”

Along with the attacks on Salas, Den Hollander’s writings also go after President Barack Obama (who he said has an “obsession to turn America into a banana republic”), Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor (who he claimed was “angry that nobody had invited her to her high school senior prom”), Hillary Clinton (whose supporters were “teary-eyed, sad-sack, PC loonies watching their power of intolerance go down the drain”), and an Obama appointee (whom he describes as part of “that Orwellian party of feminists, ethnics, Muslims, illegals and queers who think they are superior to everyone else, especially white males.”)

In contrast, he writes in the same sprawling document that he was a volunteer for the presidential campaign of Donald Trump, who he said “was telling the truth about illegal aliens in his bid for the Presidency.” Den Hollander describes “leaving the law library in the early afternoon for Trump Tower, 12 blocks up Fifth Avenue, to make telephone calls during the primaries and the general election.” Recounting his time working for the campaign, he says most of his fellow volunteers “were aging baby boomers like me. Once in a while some hot young model chick would show up to make calls. They never sat next to me.”

I think this might be a good time to recall that, when Sonia Sotomayor was nominated to the Supreme Court, some very genteel and respectable voices indeed suggested that Sotomayor — like Salas, a Latina from a distinctly modest background — might not be smart enough to be a SCOTUS justice. Affirmative action is an insidious thing after all — you can’t always expect to get products of pure meritocracy like Brett Kavanaugh to fill high judicial offices.

Anyhow, Hollander’s unhinged ranting was hardly random: in Trump’s America, it was overdetermined. A rage-filled older white man who can’t stand how his country has been taken over by women who won’t sleep with him, queers, uppity coloreds, etc. etc. isn’t some sort of anomaly: he is the modal Trump supporter.

The only thing that keeps Hollander from being a completely ideal type is that he was a college and law school graduate.

About that: if any enterprising journalist should happen to read this, Hollander’s legal career was very . . . strange, in potentially interesting ways.

Born in 1947, Hollander didn’t go to law school until his mid-30s. Prior to then he seems to have been a sort of typical for the time white middle class early boomer delinquent/slacker turned semi-professional journalist. (Plenty of possibly true details here).

In 1981 he enrolled at Brooklyn, a NYC law school of modest reputation, apparently as a night student. I’m assuming he was in the night program because he didn’t transfer to George Washington until 1983, which fits with being in the part-time program. He did well in law school, although he obviously wasn’t at the top of his class [this is significant, as we’ll see below] and he snagged a fairly competitive gig upon graduation in 1985: a one-year posting in the U.S. Department of Treasury Honors Program. (These honors programs are roughly the equivalent of postdocs for grad students).

Here’s where things get a little strange. Hollander’s first permanent legal job was as an associate for the New York law firm of Cravath, Swaine & Moore. This is very inside baseball stuff, but that is just . . . weird. At the time, Cravath was without a doubt the most prestigious law firm in the country (It’s still way up there, but in the 1980s it was the firm.)

Normally, there’s no way somebody with Hollander’s resume could have gotten a job at Cravath. There just isn’t. To return to the grad student analogy, this is like somebody who did well but not spectacularly well at a second-tier sociology Ph.D. program getting their initial tenure-track job at Princeton. Normally, the only way to have gotten an entry-level associates position at Cravath at the time would have been to have done very well at an elite law school, and gotten a summer position after the student’s second year. A Brooklyn transfer to GW who didn’t do a summer clerkship? And who was almost 40 to boot? That would have been a total non-starter on many levels.

Maybe there’s nothing more interesting going on here than a particularly egregious example of WASP privilege. Maybe Hollander “networked” at Treasury with people with far tonier resumes, and thereby managed to snag the Cravath job despite his previous 35-year interlude as a juvenile delinquent college dropout draft dodging alcoholic etc. (The Meritocracy!).

I probably wouldn’t consider any other possibility if not for the next stage of his career, which was as a ten-year gig as some sort of international solo practitioner, specializing in business dealings with post-Soviet Russia. Again, that is a really weird resume line item for a guy who just left Cravath. Normally a three-year stint at Cravath would lead to being a senior associate at another white shoe firm, or a lucrative if deathly boring in-house gig with a Fortune 500 company, or some sort of federal government law job. That’s what ex-Cravath associates do. Setting up shop immediately as a solo with a shingle in Cyrillic? Not so much.

Again, maybe this is all perfectly innocuous. Maybe he went home with a waitress, the way he always did. Maybe satisfactory answers to these questions I’m just asking are found in the thousands of pages of ravings Hollander published on the Internet (I haven’t looked). It’s interesting though.

The last twenty years of Hollander’s career were a descent into increasingly unhinged fourth-tier wingnuttery, which he supported via the sort of marginal legal work — contract attorney document review — that is about as far from Cravath as you can get in the legal practitioner universe (Which isn’t to say you can’t find plenty of white shoe law firm washouts in that world: you most definitely can, which is a story unto itself).

Hollander will no doubt be dismissed as another “mentally ill” white guy with a gun. That he was crazy is true enough: but he was a crazy in a very specific sort of way. He was driven crazy by exactly the same toxic cultural stew that has driven the Republican party crazy, and which has given us Hollander’s idol Donald Trump as president. Roy Den Hollander’s name is legion.