Donald Trump and the Covenant of Good Faith and Fair Dealing
Everyone else is talking about Donald Trump, so I guess why shouldn’t we hop in, right?
This recent New Yorker Talk of the Town piece introduced me to an ongoing contract dispute involving Trump that I hadn’t been paying attention to, even though now I see it’s been widely reported by various news outlets, including food blogs, because it involves restaurants. So if you don’t normally like to read political stuff but you consider yourself a foodie, this blog entry is also for you!
It turns out that Trump is embroiled in breach of contract lawsuits with a couple of famous chefs who pulled out of commitments to put restaurants into one of Trump’s new developments. According to the reports, the impetus for pulling out of the business deal was Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric during his presidential campaign. Jose Andres, himself an immigrant, was not too happy about Trump’s statements. As seems to be the case with Trump, his business concerns don’t necessarily track his political rhetoric when the bottom line is at issue. Faced with an immigrant refusing him rather than the other way around, Trump sued Andres for breach of contract. Andres counter-sued, alleging that Trump’s many derogatory remarks about Hispanics rendered Andres’s proposed Spanish restaurant “extraordinarily risky.”
The chefs sought partial summary judgment, which a court recently denied, finding that material facts were still in dispute.
The crux of this lawsuit revolves around the covenant of good faith and fair dealing: Did Trump breach that covenant when he made his remarks, which would make him the one in breach of contract? Or were Trump’s remarks not a breach of the covenant, either because they’re not relevant to the contract or because they did not harm the prospects for success of Andres’s restaurant? I don’t know if the parties will continue to litigate this question but I’m curious what the result would be. In the current climate where rhetoric is frequently extremely inflammatory, could there be contract implications to such statements? How far, policy-wise, do we want the covenant of good faith and fair dealing to extend?
The case is Trump Old Post Office LLC v. Topo Atrio LLC, 2015 CA 006624 B (behind paywall), in District of Columbia Superior Court.