Things are tough for Donald Trump defender Alan Dershowitz. The attorney and Harvard law professor complained ― again ― on Saturday about being shunned by “McCarthy-like” progressives on Martha’s Vineyard, the famed affluent summer getaway in Massachusetts.
Dershowitz told CNN that his “shunning” is “about small-minded intolerance” roused by the questions he’s raised ― often and on national TV ― about the legitimacy of special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into possible collusion between Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and the Russian government.
He added: “Conservatives are being shunned. Conservatives are being denied the right to speak on campus.”
Dershowitz, who describes himself as a liberal Democrat who voted for Hillary Clinton in the White House race, made his comments to CNN after a New York Times interview with him appeared on Saturday. He told the Times that he gets more heat for siding with Trump’s attacks on the Mueller investigation than he did when he helped defend suspected wife killer O.J. Simpson and convicted insider trader Michael Milken.
“The passions are so strong that if I do anything that is perceived as helping Donald Trump, I am an evil conspirator,” Dershowitz said.
It’s even downright scary. At one Martha’s Vineyard party, a woman vowed that if “Dershowitz were here tonight, I’d stab him through the heart,” he claimed Thursday on Fox News.
He’s not so shunned, though, that it stopped a gaggle of friends, neighbors and complimentary strangers from gathering around him when he met with the Times reporter outside a local grocery store on the island off Cape Cod.
Dershowitz conceded to CNN, though, that things are looking up. The “decent” people of Martha’s Vineyard are starting to “condemn the small number of people who have said, because you have spent your life defending everybody’s civil liberties, we’re going to stop talking to you.”
He crowed: “I’m winning the battle on Martha’s Vineyard.”
Dershowitz launched his litany of complaints about being ostracized in a column last month in The Hill in which he complained that Martha’s Vineyard residents were trying to “ban me from their social life.” He added: “I never thought I would see McCarthyism come to Martha’s Vineyard, but I have.”
Check out his interview on CNN above. His digs at Martha’s Vineyard residents begins at 3:50.
