In the episodic melodrama that doubles as the application process for the world’s most powerful job, an 80-year-woman has been causing more problems for Donald Trump these past few days than the 81-year-old incumbent whom he hopes to succeed.

E. Jean Carroll, a one-time advice columnist who a jury last year found had been sexually abused by Trump in a Fifth Avenue department store in the mid-1990s, on Friday won a stunning court victory that resulted in the former president being ordered to pay $US83 million ($127 million) for repeatedly defaming her.

Donald Trump has more than one woman problem. Credit: Marija Ercegovac

Few things pain the tycoon more than losing and being forced to part company with his cash, but the jury’s mammoth penalty also hits his political bottom line. Though these civil and criminal legal cases have bestowed a form of MAGA martyrdom, and powered his bid for the Republican presidential nomination, they make it harder for him to win the presidency.

Just days before the Carroll verdict, it was a 50-something female who got under his tangerine skin. Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor, refused to end her long-shot campaign for the Republican presidential nomination despite being convincingly beaten by Trump in the New Hampshire primary.

Expecting a coronation rather than a contest, Trump thought Haley should kiss his ring the instant she appeared before her supporters that night “all dressed up nicely”, as he chauvinistically put it. But the former UN ambassador vowed to fight on after winning 43 per cent of the vote, and afterwards escalated her attacks on her former boss by describing him as “totally unhinged”.

Haley has as much likelihood of winning the Republican nomination as Trump does of converting to Buddhism, then shaving off his feather-light wedge of corn-coloured hair. Yet in New Hampshire last week, she scored particularly well with college-educated women. In the very demographic that could decide the November election, Trump won just 36 per cent.

For these crucial swing voters, who boosted Joe Biden in 2020, the Carroll case and the Haley campaign may well be serving as a memory jog – if one is needed – by bringing to the surface Trump’s bullying misogyny.

The former president has mocked his former UN ambassador as a “birdbrain”. On the eve of last week’s defamation verdict, in posts on his Truth Social website, Trump attacked Carroll 40 times in less than an hour. Both Carroll and Haley have therefore become important character witnesses. Women in the all-important suburbs of battleground states such as Pennsylvania and Georgia will hopefully be taking note.