Former President Donald Trump, not surprisingly, is claiming, after a jury found on Tuesday that he sexually assaulted journalist E. Jean Carroll, that he has “absolutely no idea who this woman is,” that the verdict is a “disgrace,” and a “continuation of the greatest witch hunt of all time.”
That’s for the court of MAGA public opinion.
In that New York City courtroom where a jury ordered him to pay $5 million in damages to Carroll, who we can now say with authority was sexually assaulted in a dressing room of a department store in the mid-1990s, his denials and tired claims that he’s the victim of a “witch hunt” rang hollow.
Now, Carroll will, of course, never see a dime of that money. Trump is famous for stiffing contractors, lawyers, pretty much anybody and everybody that he owes a buck to, and he’ll have whatever attorneys he can convince to take up this cause for him do what they can to tie this judgment up in court for as long as it takes.
Carroll didn’t file suit expecting to get money out of Trump, who’s almost certainly going to use the verdict to raise money from his MAGA minions – the same folks who gave him $250 million in small-dollar increments after he lost the 2020 election to “stop the steal,” though the joke was on them, because he was fleecing them to get a head start on 2024.
Trump hasn’t faced accountability for that fraud, for inciting the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, in which thousands of his supporters tried to overturn the 2020 election, for his own actions trying to overturn the election.
His has been a lifetime with no accountability.
Until today.
Carroll won’t get money, but she has the verdict, and no matter what happens from here, no one will be able to take that away from her.
And it’s ironic that Trump literally talked himself into this, basically inviting Carroll to sue when he dismissed her account that he had raped her in the 1990s by saying publicly, repeatedly, that she had made it all up.
If he just keeps his mouth shut, she doesn’t sue, we don’t see him defend his right to grab women by the p—y in a deposition, we also don’t see him mistake Carroll for his ex-wife, Marla Maples, and a jury doesn’t find him liable.
As is obvious from his post-verdict statement, Trump doesn’t plan to, today, finally, start following everybody’s advice that he just shut his stupid mouth for once.
He’ll raise millions off this, disgustingly – that he’d even try, one, but two, more so that people with the “Don’t Blame Me, I Voted For Trump” signs in their front yards will give him their money.
This is just the beginning of the legal woes for the disgraced former president, who also faces a $250 million civil fraud trial in New York, and criminal charges expected to come down in Georgia related to his effort to pressure state officials into throwing the election to him.
That this is the guy currently lapping the Republican presidential field says a lot about how much our democratic way of life is hanging on by the thinnest of threads.
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Chris Graham
