Five years after Alan Dershowitz joined Donald Trump’s first impeachment defense team, and five years after Larry David stopped speaking to him over it, only one of them appears to still be fighting about it.
A new Atlantic profile of Dershowitz, written by Mark Leibovich and published this week, accidentally documents which one.
The quote getting passed around is David’s, and it is a good one. Asked about the friendship, he offered a verdict that manages to be both a eulogy and a punchline.
I’m loath to say anything mean because he’s been so ostracized. But he only has himself to blame. He made a deal with the devil. Literally. And I’d bet the devil hasn’t said a word to him since the impeachment.
That last sentence is the whole piece in miniature, and it is worth pausing on before the celebrity-feud framing swallows it.
The Asymmetry Is the Story
Feuds require two participants. What Leibovich caught, and what most of the aggregation around Variety’s writeup has skated past, is that this one has roughly one and a half.
Dershowitz, per the profile, discusses the breach in the present tense, as an active grievance and a wound that has not closed. He reports that David still screams at him on sight. He has spent years describing his Martha’s Vineyard neighbors as McCarthyites, a framing Above the Law has been documenting with the weary amusement of a publication that has watched the bit run a long time.
David, meanwhile, told The Atlantic he is living rent-free in Dershowitz’s head, which is both accurate and the least generous thing you can say about someone who is still thinking about you. As TheWrap noted, David’s tone about the whole thing is closer to reluctant pity than anger. He does not want to be mean. He has just also not changed his mind.
What Actually Happened at the General Store
The founding incident has been retold enough times to have shed its details, so here they are. In August 2021, outside the Chilmark General Store on Martha’s Vineyard, David confronted Dershowitz over a photograph of him with his arm around Mike Pompeo. The Boston Globe reported at the time that Dershowitz tried to defuse it with “we can still talk, Larry,” and got back a refusal that has aged into a minor classic: “No. No. We really can’t. I saw you with your arm around Pompeo. It’s disgusting.”
Dershowitz later took to wearing a hat reading “It’s the Constitution, Stupid,” which tells you how he understood the exchange. He read it as a dispute about principle: he defended an unpopular client, the liberals of Martha’s Vineyard could not tolerate it, and the correct response was to remind them what lawyers are for.
That reading requires ignoring what David actually objected to, which was not the representation. It was the arm around Pompeo. Nobody screams at a defense attorney in a parking lot for taking a client. They scream when the professional distance that justifies the work has visibly collapsed into friendship.
Nobody Comes Out of This Perfectly
The progressive version of this story is too tidy, and it should be resisted. The right to counsel is not contingent on the client being sympathetic, that principle is load-bearing for the entire justice system, and Dershowitz spent decades on the correct side of it, including on cases his current critics would applaud. Social ostracism as a response to whom a lawyer represents is a genuinely bad norm, and it is worth being uncomfortable about the fact that a lot of people cheering David’s line would not accept the same logic applied to a public defender.
But that principle covers the representation. It does not cover the decade of cable hits, the book deals, the hat. It does not cover the specific constitutional argument Dershowitz made during that impeachment, which held that a president acting to secure reelection in what he believes is the public interest cannot be impeachable for it, a position most constitutional scholars found untenable at the time and which has aged worse than almost anything else said that year. The client was defensible. The argument was his own.
Which brings the thing back to David’s line about the devil not calling. The Daily Beast’s account frames it as a joke, and it lands as one. It is also a fairly precise description of the transaction. Proximity to Trump has never been a durable asset for anyone who has traded reputation for it. The people who made that trade in 2020 largely did not get the influence they expected, did not get protected when it mattered, and mostly ended up with a smaller life and a grievance they cannot put down.
The comedian, for his part, got a bit. He is a man who built a career out of being unable to let small social infractions go, and in this one case he seems to be the one who let it go. That is either the least funny outcome available or the funniest one, depending on how you feel about Larry David.