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What they're saying: Trump defender Dershowitz shunned by Martha's Vineyard

Donald Trump and Alan Dershowitz
Olivier Douliery/AFP/Getty Images, Lior Mizrahi/Getty Images

In an op-ed for The Hill last week, Harvard law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz lamented that politics have caused him to be shunned by his social circle at his Martha's Vineyard summer retreat.

The big picture: Dershowitz, who maintains that he is a Democrat and disagrees with Trump's policies, has been an outspoken TV critic of Robert Mueller's investigation and a defender of Trump's right to fire James Comey. His claims extend the civility debate currently facing Trump administration officials in their private lives to anyone with a high profile who can be viewed as enabling Trump.

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What they're saying:

Dershowitz's take:

"I am not a Trump supporter nor am I member of the Trump administration. I have strongly and publicly opposed his immigration policies...I oppose other Republican policies as well. I voted for, and contributed handsomely, to Hillary Clinton.
But I have defended Trump’s civil liberties, along with those of all Americans, just as I would have defended Hillary Clinton’s civil liberties had she been elected and subjected to efforts of impeachment tor prosecution. ... I am a liberal Democrat in politics, but a neutral civil libertarian when it comes to the Constitution."

The other side: Emails published in the Boston Globe to Dershowitz from entertainment lawyer Walter Teller, a Vineyard resident, explain the social rejection:

"You thereby gave Trump an opportunity to use you and your positions in his own defense, to wave you like his pom-pom. How unfortunate for all of us.
You defended and gave cover to this president who relentlessly disrupts and destroys all that we value and causes massive and lasting damage to our political system, our courts, our standing in the world, the environment and more. In all of that you are complicit...You proudly announce where you have dined and with whom, going so far as to send out pictures of the menu of your meal with Trump at the White House. And then you complain publicly when you are not invited to dinner."

Go deeper: Trump officials face “public shaming and shunning.”

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