First of all, kudos to the 80-year-old woman who has more guts and moral fortitude than the entire gutless Republicult.
Secondly, only a stable genius can turn a $5-million jury judgment (last year) into an $83 million jury judgment (last night). Welcome to MAGAnomics.
The latest jury took a long look at the unrepentant rapist and grabbed him by the purse strings. Naturally, he frothed last night on social media about how the judicial system is a terrible disgrace blah blah, but we all know he has only himself to blame. This sick dude has zero impulse control, and nothing triggers him more than a mere woman who has the temerity to confront him.
E. Jean Carroll, Nikki Haley, Nancy Pelosi…how dare these women do what they do! At some point soon, probably on the toilet at 2 a.m., the addled gasbag will paw his phone and mock Carroll for losing the New Hampshire primary and screwing up Capitol security on January 6.
Yet this is the guy that a morally degenerate political party thinks should be its 2024 presidential nominee. Has it not occurred to anyone in the cult, anyone with even a scintilla of cognitive awareness, that it might be foolish to award the big prize to an adjudicated rapist who never shuts the fuck up?
Even Andrew McCarthy, a conservative lawyer who thinks the $83 million damage tab is way too high, acknowledges that it’d be nuts to make Trump the nominee. After last night’s verdict he wrote: “I don’t think (Carroll) would be much of a political issue if he had simply stopped talking about her once the first trial (in 2023) was over…Instead, Trump couldn’t help himself. He just can’t stop talking about her. With two jury verdicts against him now, the case is a political liability – especially for a guy who needs all the help he can get with women voters.” (My italics.)
The women voters who are cocooned within his cult are undoubtedly fuming about the damage verdicts, and, going forward, they’ll predictably echo whatever Trump says about Carroll or “the system.” His whole game is grievance – trashing judges and juries whenever they go against him; trashing the electoral process whenever it goes against him – and his tear-it-all-down ‘tude works like a charm within the cozy confines of MAGA world.
But this presidential election will be decided by independent swing voters in a handful of critical states – most notably Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Georgia – and a sizable share of those swing voters are educated suburban women. Good luck trying to woo those folks. A rapist who continues to slime his rape victim…that’s not a good look.
And his inevitable attempts to stiff Carroll on the damage payment will keep this case in the news. Even though he and his Z-list lawyers plan to appeal, he’s still on the hook. He can shell out $83 million to the court, which would hold the money in escrow until his appeals play out. Or he can secure a bond (paying deposits, interests, and fees); that way he can avoid coughing up the full $83 mil. But, as The Times points out, a bond “would also require Mr. Trump to find a financial institution willing to lend him a large sum of money at a time when he is in significant legal jeopardy.”
Maybe he can make Mexico pay for it.
And the Carroll fallout is just the start of his legal travails. He’ll be hit soon with the damage tab in the New York civil fraud case (remember, he’s already an adjudicated financial fraudster for trying to inflate the value of his assets). He’ll soon lose his preposterous claim that an ex-president deserves total immunity for any and all crimes. He’ll be on trial this spring for faking business accounts to cover his payments to Stormy Daniels (another woman who plagues him). He’ll be on trial, at some point, in the biggest case of all, his attempted coup, and fomenting of an insurrection, to overturn his 2020 election defeat.
McCarthy, the conservative lawyer, wisely warns that all this legal baggage would burden the GOP if Trump is the nominee: “With the relevant audience shifting from Republican primary voters to the national electorate, with whom Trump is unpopular, any momentum Trump had gained would peter out, the bottom would fall out of his support, and the Democrats would cruise to victory in November…This is what it is going to be like for the next nine months, every day, if Republicans nominate Trump.”
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Let’s just put our hands together for the judicial process and the rule of law.
As a fan of cinema, I couldn’t help but notice that the punitive damage award was announced on the 99th birthday of the late great Paul Newman – who, as plaintiff’s attorney Frank Galvin in The Verdict, delivered his summation to the jurors: “Today you are the law. You. Are. The Law…If we are to have faith in justice, we need only to believe in ourselves. And act with justice. I believe there is justice in our hearts.”