Does Donald Trump need new lawyers?

According to the Daily Beast—citing one source within the White House and one outside—former chief strategist/ evil mastermind Steve Bannon is urging the president to bulk up his legal team.

Not to fire his existing lawyers, John Dowd, Ty Cobb and Jay Sekulow, but to “bring in new lawyers to work over them, in the hopes that fresh blood would bring an order and 'ruthlessness' to Trump's legal team that Bannon sees as desperately incompetent.”

The observation that Trump is being out-lawyered by Special Counsel Robert Mueller III is not new. Bloomberg's Tom Schoenberg, a National Law Journal alum and keen legal observer, wrote a piece in August headlined “Trump's Legal Team Is No Match for Mueller's.”

He's right—it's not. In the intervening three months, that's only become more apparent, what with the indiscreet lunchtime chatter and email trolling and Robert E. Lee praising—not to mention being caught flat-footed by the indictments of Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, and the guilty plea by George Papadopoulos.

The president is represented by a hodge-podge of lawyers with no big law firms behind them. John Dowd is a well-known white-collar defender, but he retired from Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld in 2015.

Also, he doesn't seem to be one for keeping his cool under pressure.

When Dowd's client Raj Rajaratnam was convicted of securities fraud in 2011, a CNBC reporter outside the courthouse asked his reaction to the verdict. With the cameras rolling, Dowd said, “Get the fuck out of here,” and gave them the finger. (Watch the video here.)

Seriously, who does that? What you say is “We respectfully disagree with the jury's findings and are confident we will be vindicated on appeal.”

Maybe Trump thinks that kind of boorish behavior means Dowd is tough, but I don't think it will impress Mueller and his disciplined team of prosecutors.

Then there's Ty Cobb and his moustache, who left Hogan Lovells to work in the White House to oversee the Russia investigation. But Cobb is likely hampered by an inability assert attorney-client privilege in advising the president.

In 1998, the U.S. Supreme Court let stand a ruling that White House lawyer Bruce Lindsey had to answer a federal grand jury's questions about President Bill Clinton, and could not claim privilege. Presumably that holding would apply to Cobb as well.

Marc Kasowitz appears to have been sidelined, and white collar defense/ government investigations are not his specialty anyway.

As for Jay Sekulow? I honestly don't understand what he's doing on the legal team at all, except that the combative radio host is beloved by the Christian Right. Which OK, might be the answer right there, but still, come on. His prior cases involved things like abortion clinic protestors and monuments to the Ten Commandments and school prayer.

Would you want that guy defending you against someone like Andrew Weissmann, Mueller's deputy who was recently described by The New York Times as “a legal pit bull with two Ivy League degrees”?

Bottom line: Steve Bannon is right that Trump's legal team is not first-rate. Almost surely it would benefit from adding the legal equivalent of White House Chief of Staff John Kelly—someone to take charge and impose discipline.

For a model, look no further than the Clintons, who tapped Williams & Connolly's David Kendall to oversee their defense in the Whitewater/Monica Lewinsky investigation.

As the Clintons' personal lawyer, Kendall was backed by the resources of his top-notch firm. He served as the hub of the wheel, formulating strategy and coordinating joint defense agreements.

“The Clinton defense was a very well-oiled machine,” said Solomon Wisenberg, a partner at Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough who served as deputy independent counsel, the No. 2 position in the Whitewater/Lewinsky Investigation. “I don't see evidence of that with the Trump team. It's not a criticism, and there may be coordination we don't know about. But there's no comparison.”

Indeed, it seems clear Trump has no equivalent to Kendall his corner. His longtime personal lawyer Michael Cohen is himself on the hot seat. In June, NBC News reported that Cohen hired his own lawyer, Stephen Ryan of McDermott Will & Emery.

Cohen, who has faced closed-door grilling by House and Senate intelligence committees, issued a statement that he “had nothing to do with any Russian involvement in our electoral process.”

But documents submitted to Congress revealed that Cohen had “emailed Russian President Vladi­mir Putin's personal spokesman during the U.S. presidential campaign last year to ask for help advancing a stalled Trump Tower development project in Moscow,” The Washington Post reported in August. “Cohen's email marks the most direct outreach documented by a top Trump aide to a similarly senior member of Putin's government.”

So yeah, he's not in a great position to lead the president's defense right now.

You get the feeling Trump mostly sees lawyers as fungible—annoying people who tell him what he can and can't do and expect him to pay their bills.

He's been fickle about loyalty to outside counsel. Over the years, he's turned to Kasowitz Benson and (for tax issues) Morgan, Lewis & Bockius repeatedly, but also retained firms including O'Melveny & Myers; Cooley; Foley & Lardner; Proskauer Rose; Goldberg & Allen; Ackerman Link & Sartory; Tomplins, McGuire, Wachenfeld & Barry; McCarter & English ; Belkin Burden Wenig & Goldman and Mrachek Fitgerald Rose Konopka Thomas & Weiss.

And we all know he's a terrible client, tweeting out legally unhelpful (or outright damaging) statements right and left.

Little wonder Trump lacks a David Kendall to summon in his time of need. He hasn't cultivated one, and it may be too late for him to hire one.