a major component of his business model has always been to litigate.
he'd hire a contractor to do something on one of his building projects for, say, $100,000. the contractor would do a perfectly reasonable job, then donnie would find something trivial to complain about and refuse to pay anything. this would force the contractor to sue to collect, or donnie would even sue the contractor for breach.
either way, the contractor would be in a position where they would have to pay tens of thousands of dollars to collect, so donnie would offer to "settle" for $70,000 or maybe as low as $30,000. the contractor would invariably settle because there's risk and expense in ongoing litigation and a sure $70k minus $10k in legal fees now is better than an uncertain outcome years later after racking up serious legal bills.
he did this literally thousands of times.
politically, republicans have long abused congressional investigative powers (ask hillary, e.g.) for political advantage. there's rarely any great consequence, it's basically a political free roll for them. they often smear their political opponent if only through relentless if baseless accusations, and they pretty much never suffer for "simply asking questions".
so again, here, donnie is in a position to gain political advantage by attacking democrats, once again abusing the law and his powers of office to do so, and there's not likely to be any real consequence to him.
it's hard to imagine and legal consequence, and the media will never make him pay a political price for this abuse. the most we can hope for from the media is that they dismiss or ignore the claims, so democrats aren't damaged. but the point is, republicans never have to pay a price for this, so they can't lose by trying this crap again and again.
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