Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern on what Trump’s inability to get good lawyers to work for him has revealed about the US legal system.

The ongoing and increasingly worrying problem for Trump is that he has lived for so long in the world of rich-man business-mogul law that his conception of lawyers and lawyering is badly skewed. He genuinely believes that attorneys like Michael Cohen—who is now embroiled in a wrestling match with a pugnacious Stormy Daniels and her lawyer—and Marc Kasowitz—who has represented Trump in litigation ranging from his divorce and bankruptcy proceedings to the Trump University lawsuit—can handle any type of legal proceeding…What’s really new here isn’t so much that no serious lawyer wants to work for Donald Trump; we’ve known that for more than a year. The revelation is that corporate America is built less on a formal system of laws and rules and norms than on an elaborate and expensive set of mechanisms for getting around that formal system.

In New York Real Estate Land, Multiple Divorce Land, and Repeated Bankruptcy Land, one can string together a lifetime’s worth of mandatory arbitration clauses, nondisclosure agreements, prenups, and frivolous lawsuits. The only legal system Trump can comprehend—and the only legal system the Cohens and the Kasowitzes are good at navigating—is one that consists entirely of loopholes and workarounds. That system, which runs on threats and intimidation and huge sums of cash, has made a lot of men who look and sound like Donald Trump obscenely wealthy. It is, like it or lump it, the American way.

It’s lump it, then, because I sure as hell don’t like it.

Robert Mueller doesn’t practice rich white guy law, and he didn’t cut his teeth in Alito Land. He comes from Serious Criminal Law Land, which adheres to precedents and principles over and above what powerful men can contract around. Mueller, James Comey, Rod Rosenstein, Andrew McCabe, and the myriad lawyers who have said “no” to Donald Trump are, on balance, Republicans and small-c conservatives. But they don’t believe the rule of law exists to enrich their bosses, and they don’t believe you can buy or bully your way out of that fact.

Trump doesn’t know how to deal with Serious Criminal Law Land. He can’t keep anybody from that world on his payroll, and nobody from that world is eager to tag in now. That’s why he’s kept his “fixer”—Michael Cohen—and glommed onto the likes of Jay Sekulow.

Why wouldn’t serious criminal lawyers rush to take a seat at Trump’s counsel table? One after the other has said that the notion of representing a man who doesn’t take legal advice, insists he is his own master legal tactician, and is likely to fire you at 5 a.m. in a tweet is not a smart career move. Ted Boutrous, a prominent lawyer at Ted Olson’s firm of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, told CNN that the president is a “notoriously difficult client who disregards the advice of his lawyers and asks them to engage in questionable activities.” Lawyers, especially inside-the-Beltway lawyers, trade in decadeslong relationships that put courts and law before any one case. The prospect of blowing up a lifetime of professional goodwill for a three-week stint working for a ticking time bomb of potential liability probably isn’t an attractive prospect.

The question isn’t why wouldn’t they but why would they.

Bob Bauer, who served as White House counsel in the Obama era, told us that lawyers “are understandably wary of Trump as a client: he has unreasonable expectations (Fire Mueller! Tell Sessions to ignore the recusal rules!), he abuses them verbally, interviews their replacements behind their backs, and to top it off, the kind of lawyer he likes should be prepared to advance personal funds and tell tall tales to cover up extramarital trysts.” Bauer added that, on the pro side, “it is probably a memorable professional experience.” Also, “they might even get the chance to testify before a grand jury.”

Perhaps that’s the simplest answer to the mystery of Trump’s missing lawyers. Work for the president, and you might soon wind up in front of a grand jury getting grilled by Bob Mueller. That might make for exceptional reality television. It doesn’t look so good on a résumé.

Not worth it for only one scoop of ice cream.