tom girardi: worse than trump

the supposed champion for the little guy is the latest example of the generational failure of third way, centrist democrats

tom girardi / bravo t.v.

Just over 50 years ago, in 1970, a 31-year-old Tom Girardi scored his first big verdict. It was against Bon Air Hospital, and it was the first $1 million verdict in the state of California for a med mal case. Heads started to turn for the young, affable lawyer.

Around the same time, a new movement was joining the power ranks throughout the country. Young, idealistic, educated, and very white, this was the emergence of the New Left. Its demands were racial equality, ending wars, and protecting the environment. All solid choices, right? Just a few years prior, this movement was sticking flowers into the barrels of rifles and doing sit ins to end American imperialism abroad. Now it was entering the work force. These utopianists also started getting into elected office. People like Gary Hart, Chris Dodd, and Max Baucus. They were called the Watergate Babies. One of the most famous Watergate Babies is Bill Clinton. Joe Biden is also a Watergate Baby.

In what the beltway progressive Matt Stoller describes as “the politics of affluence,” this new class of liberals was more well off than their parents. They weren’t children of the Great Depression or war. And with their privilege, they weren’t as sensitive to New Deal issues such as workers’ rights, antitrust, and breaking up monopolies. So what slowly began to rise over the next few decades was growing corporate power. And Republicans really ignored it. It’s a big reason why we’re in the place we are in today: we’re ruled by a bunch out of touch politicians who know nothing about economics. Instead, the New Left became the collective blank slate transnational corporations like Wal Mart, Amazon, and Google could project their divisive policies onto.

This was a turn away from the Brandeisian era views of keeping monopolies in check. As Stoller points out, one of the people who came to shape a generation of consumer lawyers like Girardi was Ralph Nader. Nader came on the scene in 1969, dropping a critical report on the Federal Trade Commission, the government agency that’s supposed to police companies. In short, the FTC wasn’t doing its job protecting the public.

But Nader, long since the authority on corporate crime, wasn’t really concerned about how companies treated workers. From his perspective, what mattered was that America, which was fast becoming a massive consumer culture in the 70s, was getting safe, quality products.

“Nader did not particularly care who had control of commerce as long as the consumer was protected,” wrote Stoller in his book Goliath: The 100-year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy.

To enforce this, Nader relied on a contingent of plaintiffs lawyers who sued companies for insurance bad faith, products liability and toxic torts. And it got me thinking: Tom Girardi was a product of this new movement; one of the ground soldiers, who became a star extracting millions from big business. In many ways, he was patient zero.

These lawyers, and this new thinking that attorneys like Girardi subscribed to, didn’t care about regulating companies. They wanted money. Left out of this equation was any actual enforcement of companies, any long-term solutions. Many companies would rather pay money in court over changing their practices or product. It’s cheaper. And this all has largely amounted to an unbroken transfer of wealth from companies to high-end lawyers, as part of a sue-for-sport mentality that has always been uniquely American.

A lot of the intellectual foundation the 60s New Left absorbed low key came from conservative thinkers, such as future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Bork, an early hater of antitrust. Democrats in the 70s started getting behind deregulation, and by the 80s came to the conclusion the party had to act more like Republicans to attain and keep power.

Girardi is just the 7 millionth example of how far the movement has fallen. He almost certainly read The Economics of Regulation by Alfred Kahn, a bible of deregulation for many lawyers of the time. He’s a typical Third Way corporate Democrat who loved that Bill Clinton was able to “walk across the isle” with Republicans, even if it meant collectively brokering the crime bill, or deregulating Wall Street and telecommunications. Girardi told me a conversation he once had with Bill Clinton ended up in one of Clinton’s speeches. Joe Biden is also Girardi’s boy.

Girardi’s donated millions to the Democratic Party and has operated as its bundler, funneling gobs of money to limousine liberals at lavish cults in LA like the Jonathan Club. He wanted Hillary Clinton over Obama. And Biden was his candidate from the beginning of the 2020 race. At one point, Girardi Keese was one of the biggest donors to Democratic presidential candidates. During the 2004 presidential cycle, the firm was the third biggest contributor to the party, only eclipsed by Texas law firm Baron & Budd and financial services ghoul Goldman Sachs. And the candidacy of future vice presidential candidate John Edwards, a centrist personal injury lawyer with iridescent skin who cheated on his wife while she was dying of cancer, was mostly funded by Girardi Keese. Girardi loved this guy. He called him “geographically correct,” which meant that because he was from the South, he was more electable. This, to him, was a spicy candidate. Girardi once said that he would support Edwards in any office, “from pope down to city council.” Lol. Sorry this guy couldn’t even get First Selectman in a flyover town with an opioid crisis. The John Kerry-John Edwards ticket is arguably one of the worst Dem tickets of all time. These were the kinds of people Girardi thought could beat Republicans. Edwards eventually was indicted by the federal government on charges he used his campaign to cover up his extramarital affair. A jury couldn’t reach a verdict and the Justice Department stopped pursuing charges. Today he’s quietly back to practicing law.

At least Donald Trump was a piece of shit who didn’t try to pretend to be a good person. Tom Girardi is a terrible person who tried to pass as a moralizing crusader. And it worked for years. Trump largely carried out things that the beltway establishment before him already did: tax cuts for billionaires, deregulation, and murdering people abroad. Girardi directly stole money from powerless people that trusted him. He took the shortest route to shittiness. And worst of all, mainstream Democrats like him created Trump. Those working class, every day voters got so disillusioned by Dem policies over the years they turned to someone like Trump.

Girardi represents the late stage decline of the establishment left. It’s turned its back on working people, abused identity politics, unions, and instead embraced monopoly power. California is the liberal bastion of America. Although it has been pioneering in many good ways, it has largely failed on the issue of economic disparity. Look at San Francisco or Los Angeles. They are technocratic ghettos with an exploding homelessness and housing crisis. Somewhere today, there is another Tom Girardi in the making. And he or she is probably on Instagram or TikTok, dishing feel-good bromides about wellness and how to optimize your important little professional life. Who’s next?