President Donald Trump's ability to bend federal law to build unwanted monuments and constitutionally questionable ballrooms demonstrates that a basic myth about his legacy is fundamentally wrong, his biographer argued Saturday.

The argument appears in a New York Times column by Maureen Dowd, in which she discusses Trump's various legal battles to build ballrooms, bunkers and arches — battles that have drawn concern even from conservative Supreme Court Justice John Roberts.

"It's crazy to think about Donald Trump outrunning anything," Dowd wrote. "But in legal terms, the president is an Olympic-class sprinter. He breaks the law so fast that the law is left in his orange dust."

Dowd offered Trump back-handed praise for what she described as his ability to zero in on legal loopholes with the dexterity of "voracious scam artists."

As proof, the Times columnist cited the dissent Roberts penned this week regarding the $300 million "ballroom behemoth" that Trump was granted permission to complete by the nation's highest court.

"That construction is likely unlawful," Roberts wrote in his dissent. "Today's decision is no victory for the separation of powers."

Dowd then turned to Trump biographer Tim O'Brien for an explanation of how and why the president has been able to skirt the law with what Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson called a "catch me if you can" approach.

O'Brien gave a surprising answer, one that cuts against the popular narrative in which Roy Cohn — the combative New York lawyer who represented Trump during the 1970s and 1980s and famously urged him never to settle or admit fault — is cast as the formative influence on Trump's confrontational style.

"This idea that Trump's mentor was Roy Cohn was profoundly wrong," O'Brien said. "Donald Trump's mentor was Fred from day one. His father showed him how to exploit the government system, the legal system and business. His whole worldview is built around the idea that you exploit systems for personal gain, and there's nothing wrong with doing that because the world's populated by sharks and you just have to be the biggest shark."

Fred Trump, a prolific New York outer-borough apartment developer, ran a real estate business that itself drew scrutiny over its use of government programs and tax mechanisms, including a decades-long relationship with federal housing subsidies. O'Brien, who wrote the 2005 biography "TrumpNation," has covered Trump's business career extensively, giving his reading of the family's formative dynamics particular weight in debates over the president's approach to power and the law.