For the past two weeks, in a lower Manhattan courtroom, journalist E. Jean Carroll has made a simple case: A quarter of a century ago, she says, Donald Trump raped her. The account he gave to the room was the same as it has been since he first revealed this story, in an excerpt from his memory what was published in New York magazine, in 2019. Carroll had a chance encounter with Trump at Bergdorf Goodman, she said, and, flirtatious, she and Trump moved around the store, grabbed a lace dress and went into a locker room together without a key. Maybe the bodysuit should be tried, he suggested. Maybe he should give it a try, he suggested. Then, according to Carroll, Trump pulled down her pantyhose, pushed her against the wall and raped her. Within days, Carroll told two friends about the attack: writer Lisa Birnbach and television host Carol Martin. Both testified this week, with Martin acknowledging that he had initially advised Carroll not to go public, saying, “I volunteered that I wouldn’t have to do anything because it was Donald Trump and he had a lot of lawyers and he was just going to do it. bury her”.
Now Carroll also has a prominent lawyer: Roberta Kaplan, who represented Edie Windsor in the Supreme Court case that struck down the Defense of Marriage Act. In order to establish a pattern of behavior, Kaplan this week called two more witnesses who said they had been sexually assaulted by the former president. A stockbroker named Jessica Leeds said Trump groped her on a flight in the late 1970s — when he wasn’t famous — and sent her running first class to train. Natasha Stoynoff, a writer for People magazine, alleged that while on assignment to interview Donald and Melania Trump at Mar-a-Lago in 2005, Donald Trump had closed a door, the had trapped in a room with him and kissed him by force. her before being interrupted by a butler. From the beginning, Carroll’s story was missing some details that Kaplan would have liked: There is no physical evidence — no sales receipt, no security camera footage — that she and Trump were ever together at Bergdorf. , or even that she had been there at all. And Carroll could only place the time of the alleged assault in late 1995 or early 1996. Trump has denied all of this. But the presence of Leeds and Stoynoff on the witness stand was a reminder of how often Trump has been accused of sexual assault and misconduct (by more than two dozen women, over a span of several decades) and what what a huge conspiracy, or coincidence, it would be if they all made it up.
A basic uncertainty has clouded the court proceedings this week. Does this story represent a political cataclysm or nothing at all? If you’re just describing the situation neutrally, as a news anchor might—a civil lawsuit in which a magazine writer has accused the former president of the United States of rape is going to a jury trial next week—no doubt sounds like a cover. material And yet, it simply hasn’t been. The trial didn’t make the front page of the Times last week, losing out to the latest economic news, the war in Sudan, warnings about artificial intelligence, the ongoing effort for New York’s trash can, and the tsunami in press surrounding the murder. of a person without accommodation in the metro. Even the courtroom, at the weekend, was almost half full. If you had been in lower Manhattan and had an interest, you could have entered.
I suspect there are two reasons why the trial hasn’t made bigger news. First, its details aren’t really news. As with many of the former president’s other investigations (in New York, for allegedly falsifying business records related to hush money paid to Stormy Daniels; in Georgia, for allegedly trying to get election officials to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election). ; in Washington, DC, for allegedly refusing to return classified documents and for his actions surrounding the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot), the basic story has mostly been told in the press, though never before ‘has presented to a court. . Perhaps more significantly, Trump has faced two impeachments and countless allegations of wrongdoing. He encouraged an insurrection. And yet his approval rating and political standing are largely unchanged. (According to FiveThirtyEight’s moving averagesforty-five percent of Americans view him favorably, and fifty-one percent unfavorably.) Sometimes it seems that the Trump superpower must have been accused of so many transgressions that no one can change the perception that the public has of him.
But that might underestimate how much even a small amount of handling could matter. The margins in American politics are tiny right now. Trump first won the presidency, and then lost it, due to the swings of tens of thousands of voters in some critical states. Earlier this year, Ron DeSantis briefly threatened Trump’s position as the Republican standard-bearer because of Trump’s insistence on re-litigating the 2020 election and his promotion of inferior Republican candidates willing to do the same. DeSantis then took some extreme social-conservative positions, and Trump mocked him. In each case, events happened, minds changed. The story of Trump’s rise has never been just about stalwarts supporting him no matter what. His final coalitions have always depended on those willing to make excuses for him—Republican politicians and operatives, and swing voters—and his elections have oscillated between what they will respect and what they won’t.
Jury trials are unsavory affairs for most politicians: In Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu is acquiescing to a far-right takeover of his country’s government in order to overhaul the country’s judicial system amid the his own corruption trial, and Trump himself appears to be taking his legal due. serious problems As his indictment in the Stormy Daniels case neared, the former president turned his attention to stage management. (Would there be a walk for a criminal? A cop photo?) While his media profile is still wide, it doesn’t currently have the same ability it had in 2016 and during his presidency to move a story that he didn’t like doing or doing or saying something wild. Trump has been saying a lot of weird things lately, including that, if re-elected, he plans to make homelessness illegal and force homeless people out of inner cities into “high-end tent camps ” in the suburbs. But the media has largely ignored them. In a video statement played at the trial this week, Trump said: “He’s accusing me of rape, of raping her, the worst thing you can do, the worst charge.”
If the Carroll case is a first glimpse of how Trump plans to fight the upcoming trials, then his team is off to a rough start. Trump wavered on basic strategy; told Sky News he would likely fly to New York to testify, but on the same day his courtroom lawyer, Joe Tacopina, said he would not mount a defense, essentially counting on the jury to find that Carroll had not fulfilled his load test (The judge in the case, perhaps hinting that he might not be so wise, told Tacopina that he would consider any change of plan until Sunday.)
But what the Carroll case has begun to suggest is that the gravity of these charges can be difficult to manage or strategize against: rape, voter fraud, sedition. When accusations of this magnitude move from the realm of political announcements to detailed accounts on the witness stand, they can be harder to ignore. One way to read the politics surrounding Trump right now is that, with partisan loyalties so entrenched, nothing matters. But another interpretation is more convincing: with such tight margins, everything does. ♦
