For someone so cowardly, Donald Trump is not a man gifted with a sense of prudence. Once at a safe distance from immediate danger, he's always been possessed by a sociopath's impulsivity and haunted by a narcissist's inability to accept criticism with a modicum of grace. And, as I detailed in Tuesday's Standing Room Only newsletter, Trump loves to boast about his crimes and troll his critics by flaunting his apparent immunity from consequences.
With all that in mind, it seems inevitable now that he would learn nothing from a jury declaring definitively that he sexually assaulted journalist E. Jean Carroll in the 90s, and that he defamed her with insults and lies when she spoke out about it during his presidency. Despite facing a $5 million judgment, Trump went straight onto CNN and defamed her again. To make it worse, after his perfunctory denials, he bragged about the assault. When asked how he feels about men getting away with sexual assault, he replied, "Fortunately." As the MAGA crowd laughed in approval, he blamed Carroll for the assault, saying, "What kind of a woman meets somebody and brings them up and within minutes you're playing hanky panky in a dressing room?
Of course, as the jury found, Carroll did no such thing. She gently ribbed a man who invited her to go shopping, and because he's a sociopathic narcissist, he responded with violence. Trump was lying about Carroll again. So, showing more spine than legions of more powerful men have, Carroll is taking his sorry ass back to court. Her lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, has filed an amendment to the case Carroll already won. As former U.S. attorney Joyce Vance explained in her newsletter, "These new claims could cost Trump even more money than the $5 million he already owes Carroll," because, "flagrant abuse could support a substantial punitive damages award to punish Trump."
Likely, Trump doesn't care about the money. He no doubt believes, from long experience, that he can use frivolous court filings until the end of time to avoid actually paying Carroll. And even if he does end up with a bill, he probably can get one of his many GOP donors, if not the party itself, to foot it for him.
But even if the financial aspect of this doesn't worry Trump, the politics of it should. The real impact of Carroll's continued legal action is that it will likely keep this story in the news, reminding voters repeatedly that Trump both sexually assaults women and then gloats about it later. Republicans are already paying a steep political price for their misogyny, losing elections they may have otherwise won but for their obsessive attacks on reproductive rights. With this story in the news all the time, it will only intensify the GOP's branding as the Grab Them By The Pussy Party.
Trump has always been possessed by a sociopath's impulsivity and haunted by a narcissist's inability to accept criticism with a modicum of grace.
Right now, the major losses to the GOP fueled by women's rage are being attributed, with good reason, to the 2022 Supreme Court decision, Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health, that ended abortion rights. But while that escalated women's fury, it's worth remembering the female-led backlash to Trumpism started well before then. Millions of women were shocked out of complacency in 2016 because a proud sex offender had been elected president. The result was the first Women's March and a 2018 "blue wave" that saw a record number of female candidates getting elected, both to Congress and on a state and local level. Then the first female vice president. Now, repeatedly, we're seeing women take to the polls to fight back against abortion bans.
Because the male-dominated press still underrates the importance of "women's issues," Carroll's case initially received muted attention in the media — until she won. At that point, the outpouring of audience interest and public support for Carroll indicated that the women's anger that fueled the Women's March, the #MeToo movement and the backlash to Dobbs has not disappeared at all. Every time women are reminded of this crap, they get angry all over again — and become more likely to vote, organize, and donate.
On this front, Trump may prove to be his own worst enemy.
As the CNN town hall showed, Trump cannot shut his giant mouth, especially when he feels the urge to put a woman down for standing up to him. On Tuesday, he proved it again. A smart person would respond to Carroll's new court filing by buttoning up. Trump, however, kept up the defamation, insisting she was lying, falsely accusing her of being part of a grand conspiracy against him, and even using racist language against her ex-husband.
With this story in the news all the time, it will only intensify the GOP's branding as the Grab Them By The Pussy Party.
Trump's loyalist voters, of course, love this behavior, hooting and hollering with joy as their cowardly bully of a leader lashes out at people from a safe distance. But a not-insubstantial number of swing voters tend to react quite negatively to reminders of Trump's pettiness. Trump needs those voters to forget about the parts of him that they don't like. Watching him freak out on the regular on Carroll will make it a lot harder to push his history of sexual abuse down the memory hole. Especially since, due to the jury verdict, this sexual assault is no longer in the "alleged" column. It's now a publicly acknowledged fact.
The media tends to focus on the loyal MAGA voters, driven by a morbid fascination with their endless capacity to reject the overwhelming evidence of Trump's repugnant character. It's especially hard not to gawk at Republican women making excuses for Trump's sexual abuse, and wonder out loud how they can live with themselves. But, in truth, those women and their support were already baked in. What Trump actually needs to do to win is persuade Joe Biden voters to stay home and/or convince reluctant swing voters he's not so bad.
Continuing to defame a woman he's already sexually assaulted does the opposite. It instead mobilizes Trump's opposition, which was already led by women appalled by his misogyny. At the same time, it discourages his more fairweather supporters, causing them to either sit out the 2024 election or even vote for Biden. Trump likely knows that his political fortunes are best served if Carroll fades from the public memory. But, being a sexist bully, he can't accept that the best way to make that happen is to leave the poor woman alone. He thinks he can defame her into silence. Instead, she's fighting back, just like she did in the dressing room that fateful day. Trump keeps underestimating women, even though they defeated him at the polls in 2020. If he keeps it up, he's making it that much more likely they'll do it again in 2024.
