Donald Trump has been found liable for sexual abuse. Will it change anything?

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Donald Trump has been found liable for sexual battery against journalist E. Jean Carroll. After a civil trial that lasted two weeks and under three hours of deliberation, the jury found Trump not liable for rape but liable for sexual abuse and defamation. They ordered Trump to pay Carroll $5 million in damages.

In New York state, sexual battery is any sexual act committed without the consent of one party, while rape is sexual intercourse committed under duress. The slightly ambiguous verdict is an odd fit for the case of E. Jean Carroll-Trump, who has been in a perplexing position from the start. In a sense, it is very important. This is the first time that a former US president has been accused of rape in a court of law. The other shoe has finally dropped after a long wait that began in October 2016 with the arrival of the Access Hollywood tape, in which Trump can be heard bragging about grabbing the vaginas of women who don’t consent, because when you a star, they let you do it. .

This trial speaks directly to one of the issues that made Trump such a vexing presidential candidate to begin with: He is not only inexperienced, incompetent, and bigoted, but he is likely an unrepentant sexual predator. As Trump claimed victory over the woman widely expected to become America’s first female president, despite the Access Hollywood tape and despite accusations of sexual misconduct coming from at least 26 women, the irony is vicious and hurtful. Carrolls presented a possible remedy. In this sense, this case is important.

In another sense, next to Trumps other legal problems and alleged crimes, the Carroll case may seem a little pale. This does not affect any of the damage done by Trump during his tenure. This has nothing to do with Trump’s blatant corruption, his lies, the malicious mess he made starting the Covid pandemic. It has nothing to do with the violence of the Capitol riots on Jan. 6 or any of Trump’s other public attempts to overturn the results of an election. As a civil case, the Carroll trial doesn’t even carry the threat of potential jail time brought by New York’s Al Capone-like swing against Trump for financial crimes. Now, while Trump has been found guilty of sexual assault, the verdict stops short of actually tarring him with the word rapist.

There is an open question as to how this test will affect Trumps chances in the upcoming 2024 presidential campaign. Before Trumps norm-breaking and successful 2016 campaign, this question would not have been open: The mere fact of the trial, regardless of the verdict, would have made most presidential aspirants unelectable.

Trumps perversely intense connection with his base, however, has survived many scandals. For Trump believers, will anything consistent with the sexual battery conviction be enough to move the numbers?

One possible reading of Trump’s absence from the trial is that he thinks not. While Trump publicly threatened to show up in New York to face it, apparently referring to the trial, he never showed up in the courtroom. (During jury deliberations, Trump falsely claimed he was barred from speaking in his own defense, which he was not.) Trump’s attorney, Joseph Tacopina, initially planned to call a psychiatrist to the stand. as an expert witness for the defense, concluded by calling no witnesses for the defense at all, leaving Carrolls argument essentially unanswered.

I’m here because Donald Trump raped me, Carroll said at the start of his stark three-day testimony. He went on to describe in graphic detail his encounter with Trump in a dressing room at Bergdorf Goodman in the early 1990s.

Carrolls time on the witness stand gave way to testimony from friends, who confirmed that he told them about the encounter shortly after it happened; from a psychiatric expert witness, who said Carrolls’ decision not to scream during the assault and not press charges afterward was common among rape victims; and from two other women who say Trump attacked them in similar ways.

Perhaps most damning, the Carrolls’ team showed the jury excerpts from the Trumps’ deposition. There, he can be heard seemingly doubling down on his embarrassing comments on the Access Hollywood tape, saying, Historically, thats true, with stars. Well whats what if you look over the last million years, I guess thats been mostly true, not always, but mostly true, unfortunately or fortunately.

Jurors were also shown a clip of Trump saying that Jessica Leeds, who has accused Trump of groping her, would not have been my first choice. (He has made similar claims about most of the women who have accused him of sexual assault, including Carroll.) You’re not going to be an option to me, either, Trump informed the lawyer. Carrolls said in a clip from his deposition. I hope you are not insulted.

Meanwhile, Tacopina confined his argument to cross-examinations, where he tried to make the most of the fact that most of the plaintiff’s witnesses shared a well-documented dislike of Trump. What they want is for you to hate him enough to ignore the facts, Tacopina told the jury in his closing statement. He also suggested that notorious Trump hater George Conway was secretly overseeing the lawsuit, and argued that Carrolls testimony was so hard to believe that it didn’t need a counter case, saying, He didn’t tear up his story. He tore up his story.

We don’t know why Trump and Tacopina openly refused to make their own case in Trump’s defense. It’s possible, however, that Trump decided he didn’t need a lawsuit. If he loses, he is in no danger of going to jail. He can wait to pay damages while the case is tied up in appeals. As for politics, at this time, after the Access Hollywood tapes, after 26 women have already accused him of sexual misconduct, how much would a little thing like being held legally responsible for to rape?

Now, in a hair-splitting victory, he was found not liable for rape, but only for sexual battery. What are the pitfalls for such a bulletproof figure as Trump?

Recently, however, an unexpected tremor has struck another seemingly immortal giant of the right-wing media ecosystem, possibly indicating that such a verdict is something that could hurt Trump.

In April, Fox News fired Tucker Carlson, one of the network’s biggest stars, apparently over concerns that a text from Carlson might become public. In the text, Carlson described watching a video of some Trump supporters attacking someone he identified as an Antifa kid.

Jumping on such a man is clearly disrespectful. Its not how white men fight, Carlson said in the text.

As far as anyone can tell, that’s the line that got Carlson fired: the plain racism of the sentence, Not how white men fight back.

For many, the line Fox drew between that racist text and all the other racist things Carlson said live on air was confusing. It’s certainly a terrible sentiment (and an untrue one), but is it worse than the mainstreaming of the well-replaced conspiracy theory developed by white supremacists? writes Vox’s Zack Beauchamp, summarizing the popular consensus on the left. Is it more offensive than saying immigrants make America poorer, and dirtier, and more divided? Is it more racist than downplaying the killings of unarmed Black men by police, or accusing Tennessee state Rep. Justin Pearson (who is Black) putting on a fake sharecropper accent?

The text wasn’t significantly more racist than the rest of what Carlson regularly said on his show, but it did make an important point. As Beauchamp lays out, the text removes the fig leaf that allows Carlsons fans to comfortably lie to themselves that he and Carlson aren’t actually racist.

A key part of Tucker Carlson’s message is that he, and his audience, are colorblind: that they stand for the ideals of Martin Luther King Jr. against liberals who want to polarize America along racial lines for their own nefarious purposes, writes Beauchamp . The sentence That’s not how white men fight makes it harder for Carlson to keep pretending he’s colorblind.

It’s possible that by finding Trump legally liable for sexual battery, the jury gave him his own version of the secret Tucker Carlson text. They have removed the last piece of plausible deniability that Donald Trump is not a sexual predator.

I doubt this verdict matters to hardcore Trumpists. They can say that the trial is settled; that the swamp has it in for Trump; that everyone knows the New York courts are a joke; and yet, it is not true rape. They will remain loyal to the end, the same way Carlson’s diehard fans hang on his every word on Twitter.

However, there are people who voted for Trump in 2016, for whom this verdict may matter. People who tell themselves that this is all hearsay, that nothing has been proven in court, that all Trump accusers are just lying for attention and fame, that the Access Hollywood tape is just locker talk room. People telling pollsters that while they support Trump, they have some concerns about the rape case. Those concerns are now justified.

We know that America is a country capable of electing a president who is likely to commit sexual assault. Election Day 2024 is a long way off, and a lot can happen between now and then. But come Election Day, it will finally be known whether America is a country capable of electing a president who has been found liable for sexual abuse in a court of law.

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