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That’s a lot of money, even if his legal appeals lower it in the end. So I had to ask my Post Opinions colleague Ruth Marcus for her thoughts on all of it: Has Trump finally been corralled?
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Alexi McCammond: Maybe people are just over the Donald Trump legal drama, but I’m surprised E. Jean Carroll isn’t being more heralded as a feminist icon/Trump slayer.
Ruth Marcus: Actually, it feels to me like it’s getting quite a bit of attention — maybe even more than it should. To the extent it’s not getting that much attention, I suspect that’s because the underlying question — did he sexually assault her? — was already decided. The jury was told to assume that was correct, so it’s not as if another jury has found against Trump as a sexual predator. That was predetermined.
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Alexi: Hm. I don’t know if I’m with you on the ruling getting more attention than it should. Do you think it doesn’t matter all that much in the end?
Ruth: I think it very much matters that he is held to account — criminally or, in this case, civilly — for his outrageous conduct, and clearly his conduct with Carroll was appalling to the point of rape, as Judge Lewis A. Kaplan said. If anything, we have gotten past that too quickly.
Alexi: Honestly, it feels like there’s little respect for the rule of law these days, and so people are kinda like “meh” after something like this happens. I mean, it’s a big freaking deal that the former president was confirmed in civil court to be a sexual abuser and a liar.
Ruth: I do think there is a very interesting question about whether any amount of damages can deter Trump from repeating his defamatory comments. Our legal system presumes rational actors are deterred from bad conduct by the fear of consequences, either punitive (such as imprisonment) or monetary (including punitive damages). But Trump doesn’t seem to have been deterred — at all. And I wonder whether he is even capable of restraining himself. His conduct in court was not the conduct of a person who was behaving in accordance with his own best interests.
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Alexi: Right, that’s the big question. He is so unpredictable and undisciplined. I would imagine he’ll lash out again. If he’s not capable of restraining himself, do you think there’s a world in which we should, I don’t know, amend our libel laws? Do we need to increase the punishments because Trump is this way?
Ruth: Unlike Trump, I am pretty much a defender of libel laws as they now stand. Remember that Trump is the one who talked about loosening up the libel laws to make it easier for public figures to recover damages from media outlets. That is a terrifying thought. His irrationality can’t drive the standards for the rest of the saner world. It’s just that the law is often an imperfect tool. But he is going to have to pay here — and pay some substantial sum. So that is justice, even if he can’t contain himself. And kudos to Carroll for saying she wants to put the money to good use.
Alexi: Also thank God for New York’s Adult Survivors Act from 2022, which just recently expired. Every state needs that, in my opinion. Does he have a lifetime to pay? Or a certain amount of time in which he has to cough up the money?
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Ruth: Eventually — that is, after appeal — a judge will order him to pay up, whatever the amount ends up being. And I believe he needs to put up a bond for a certain amount in order to appeal. None of this is going to be painless for him. And remember, there’s a significant sum that is going to come due in the Trump Organization civil fraud trial. And this money he can’t take from his campaign coffers.
Alexi: That’s right — he’s basically going to be exiled from New York after that trial. I don’t know if Trump feels pain, but I know what you mean.
Ruth: Well, we know he feels anger. And he feels angry that he is being held to account and angry that it hurts him where it matters, which is his pocketbook.
Alexi: So true. He cares about money and winning. And he lost both to E. Jean Carroll.
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Ruth: From the start at the Bergdorf Goodman department store, this was all about the freedom to do as he wishes. To stick his fingers in a woman’s private parts. Remember, we’ve gone from “locker room talk” to convincing accounts of sexual assault to a jury determination of sexual abuse. So it is hard to comprehend the “boys will be boys” or other forms of discounting. But some people crave a strong man, and I guess they think this goes with the territory. Ugh and alas.
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🙅🏽♀️ 🙅🏽♀️ 🙅🏽♀️
The next word
Much of the focus from the latest Carroll lawsuit has rightly been on the eye-popping $83.3 million in damages that Trump must pay, but there are bigger lessons to learn from the episode.
The first is how much Trump is disrupting our legal system. As Dahlia Lithwick wrote for Slate, Trump was “quite literally using the courtroom to reenact the behavior for which he is on the hook, threatening and abusing the plaintiff. ... The ability to replicate the very conduct you are denying having done is a magnificent way to show that you own the law.”
Similarly, as University of Utah law professor RonNell Andersen Jones wrote for the New York Times: “What we are seeing, for the first time, is a lack of surety that the foundations upon which our libel doctrine is built remain intact. ... Libel law assumes that we wish to share a single, objective reality. ... We have entered an era in which the incentives to serve up lies for politics or profit are so strong that libel damage awards and settlements may not meaningfully change behaviors.”
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If it doesn’t change Trump’s behavior, then it should change that of voters. How can the Republican Party — or large swaths of the country, for that matter — support someone who dismissed accusations of rape by saying the alleged victim is not his “type”?
It’s not even clear that Trump understood what he was on trial for this time. As lawyer George Conway said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe”: “This damage verdict is not just a verdict about defamation. I think it’s a verdict about [Trump’s] incredibly distorted state of mind.” Lithwick picked up on a similar vibe: “Perhaps the only question that Trump answered in a way that suggested he even understood what this second trial was about was whether he had ever ‘instructed anyone to hurt Ms. Carroll.’ ‘No,’ Trump answered. ‘I just wanted to defend myself and my family and, frankly, the presidency.’”
Another lesson, as Jessica Bennett captures for the New York Times, has to do with how we should view accusers. For Carroll, who is 80 years old, this case was not about money but preserving her dignity. We live in “a culture that most certainly doesn’t look kindly on women her age,” Bennett wrote, so for Carroll to insist that she has value “was ballsy enough to be almost Trumpian.”
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Carroll’s fight against one of the country’s most powerful men should give women a glimpse of a more hopeful and empowered future. She grew up in a generation in which women didn’t dare speak up about any type of harassment or abuse from men. In fact, as writer Molly Jong-Fast noted for MSNBC, women like Carroll “have seen some of their biggest victories of our society reversed by Trump.” That makes her courtroom triumph all the more satisfying.
🖥️ 🖥️ 🖥️
r/Politics
After a user on the subreddit r/moderatepolitics shared an article about how some Democrats are questioning whether it’s a good idea for President Biden to debate Trump ahead of the election, another redditor, MrPrezident0, responded: “The 2020 debates showed that Biden was a very capable debater despite all of the rhetoric about him being senile. If nothing else, it would be helpful to use the debates as a checkup to see how mentally capable each of them are despite both of their advanced ages.”
What do you think? Do you want Biden-Trump debates? How many, and when? Reply to this email and let me know! I’ll plan to share some of your responses in a future newsletter.
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Brain dump
- There’s a political brain disease going around. At least, that’s what Hamilton Nolan wrote in his latest Substack column about how some Americans are blind to their own sins. Read more.
- Ready to give your imagination an adrenaline boost? Take a look at Post contributor Daniel Pink’s new series, “Why Not?”
- A mouse moved into a car. The owner, wildlife photographer Benjamin Olson, let it stay there and shared a photo essay with us. You must see these pictures.
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E. Jean Carroll seems to have gotten under Donald Trump’s skin like no one else before her. Her civil lawsuits against the former president for sexually abusing her in the 1990s and for defaming her in his venomous denials resulted in not one but two judgments in her favor, including a ruling Friday that Trump must pay her $83.3 million.
That’s a lot of money, even if his legal appeals lower it in the end. So I had to ask my Post Opinions colleague Ruth Marcus for her thoughts on all of it: Has Trump finally been corralled?
Alexi McCammond: Maybe people are just over the Donald Trump legal drama, but I’m surprised E. Jean Carroll isn’t being more heralded as a feminist icon/Trump slayer.
Ruth Marcus: Actually, it feels to me like it’s getting quite a bit of attention — maybe even more than it should. To the extent it’s not getting that much attention, I suspect that’s because the underlying question — did he sexually assault her? — was already decided. The jury was told to assume that was correct, so it’s not as if another jury has found against Trump as a sexual predator. That was predetermined.
Alexi: Hm. I don’t know if I’m with you on the ruling getting more attention than it should. Do you think it doesn’t matter all that much in the end?
Ruth: I think it very much matters that he is held to account — criminally or, in this case, civilly — for his outrageous conduct, and clearly his conduct with Carroll was appalling to the point of rape, as Judge Lewis A. Kaplan said. If anything, we have gotten past that too quickly.
Alexi: Honestly, it feels like there’s little respect for the rule of law these days, and so people are kinda like “meh” after something like this happens. I mean, it’s a big freaking deal that the former president was confirmed in civil court to be a sexual abuser and a liar.
Ruth: I do think there is a very interesting question about whether any amount of damages can deter Trump from repeating his defamatory comments. Our legal system presumes rational actors are deterred from bad conduct by the fear of consequences, either punitive (such as imprisonment) or monetary (including punitive damages). But Trump doesn’t seem to have been deterred — at all. And I wonder whether he is even capable of restraining himself. His conduct in court was not the conduct of a person who was behaving in accordance with his own best interests.
Alexi: Right, that’s the big question. He is so unpredictable and undisciplined. I would imagine he’ll lash out again. If he’s not capable of restraining himself, do you think there’s a world in which we should, I don’t know, amend our libel laws? Do we need to increase the punishments because Trump is this way?
Ruth: Unlike Trump, I am pretty much a defender of libel laws as they now stand. Remember that Trump is the one who talked about loosening up the libel laws to make it easier for public figures to recover damages from media outlets. That is a terrifying thought. His irrationality can’t drive the standards for the rest of the saner world. It’s just that the law is often an imperfect tool. But he is going to have to pay here — and pay some substantial sum. So that is justice, even if he can’t contain himself. And kudos to Carroll for saying she wants to put the money to good use.
Alexi: Also thank God for New York’s Adult Survivors Act from 2022, which just recently expired. Every state needs that, in my opinion. Does he have a lifetime to pay? Or a certain amount of time in which he has to cough up the money?
Ruth: Eventually — that is, after appeal — a judge will order him to pay up, whatever the amount ends up being. And I believe he needs to put up a bond for a certain amount in order to appeal. None of this is going to be painless for him. And remember, there’s a significant sum that is going to come due in the Trump Organization civil fraud trial. And this money he can’t take from his campaign coffers.
Alexi: That’s right — he’s basically going to be exiled from New York after that trial. I don’t know if Trump feels pain, but I know what you mean.
Ruth: Well, we know he feels anger. And he feels angry that he is being held to account and angry that it hurts him where it matters, which is his pocketbook.
Alexi: So true. He cares about money and winning. And he lost both to E. Jean Carroll.
Ruth: From the start at the Bergdorf Goodman department store, this was all about the freedom to do as he wishes. To stick his fingers in a woman’s private parts. Remember, we’ve gone from “locker room talk” to convincing accounts of sexual assault to a jury determination of sexual abuse. So it is hard to comprehend the “boys will be boys” or other forms of discounting. But some people crave a strong man, and I guess they think this goes with the territory. Ugh and alas.
Much of the focus from the latest Carroll lawsuit has rightly been on the eye-popping $83.3 million in damages that Trump must pay, but there are bigger lessons to learn from the episode.
The first is how much Trump is disrupting our legal system. As Dahlia Lithwick wrote for Slate, Trump was “quite literally using the courtroom to reenact the behavior for which he is on the hook, threatening and abusing the plaintiff. ... The ability to replicate the very conduct you are denying having done is a magnificent way to show that you own the law.”
Similarly, as University of Utah law professor RonNell Andersen Jones wrote for the New York Times: “What we are seeing, for the first time, is a lack of surety that the foundations upon which our libel doctrine is built remain intact. ... Libel law assumes that we wish to share a single, objective reality. ... We have entered an era in which the incentives to serve up lies for politics or profit are so strong that libel damage awards and settlements may not meaningfully change behaviors.”
If it doesn’t change Trump’s behavior, then it should change that of voters. How can the Republican Party — or large swaths of the country, for that matter — support someone who dismissed accusations of rape by saying the alleged victim is not his “type”?
It’s not even clear that Trump understood what he was on trial for this time. As lawyer George Conway said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe”: “This damage verdict is not just a verdict about defamation. I think it’s a verdict about [Trump’s] incredibly distorted state of mind.” Lithwick picked up on a similar vibe: “Perhaps the only question that Trump answered in a way that suggested he even understood what this second trial was about was whether he had ever ‘instructed anyone to hurt Ms. Carroll.’ ‘No,’ Trump answered. ‘I just wanted to defend myself and my family and, frankly, the presidency.’”
Another lesson, as Jessica Bennett captures for the New York Times, has to do with how we should view accusers. For Carroll, who is 80 years old, this case was not about money but preserving her dignity. We live in “a culture that most certainly doesn’t look kindly on women her age,” Bennett wrote, so for Carroll to insist that she has value “was ballsy enough to be almost Trumpian.”
Carroll’s fight against one of the country’s most powerful men should give women a glimpse of a more hopeful and empowered future. She grew up in a generation in which women didn’t dare speak up about any type of harassment or abuse from men. In fact, as writer Molly Jong-Fast noted for MSNBC, women like Carroll “have seen some of their biggest victories of our society reversed by Trump.” That makes her courtroom triumph all the more satisfying.
After a user on the subreddit r/moderatepolitics shared an article about how some Democrats are questioning whether it’s a good idea for President Biden to debate Trump ahead of the election, another redditor, MrPrezident0, responded: “The 2020 debates showed that Biden was a very capable debater despite all of the rhetoric about him being senile. If nothing else, it would be helpful to use the debates as a checkup to see how mentally capable each of them are despite both of their advanced ages.”
What do you think? Do you want Biden-Trump debates? How many, and when? Reply to this email and let me know! I’ll plan to share some of your responses in a future newsletter.
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