Former president Donald Trump is near a crucial juncture of the 2024 campaign. Mail ballots are due to go out soon, his only scheduled debate with Vice President Kamala Harris is happening in four days and Trump is trying to reverse the momentum Harris has generated in her six-plus weeks as a presidential candidate.<\/p>\n
With that as the backdrop, Trump decided to spend nearly an hour Friday rehashing old grievances, offering a laundry list of false and debunked claims, criticizing his lawyers and going into great and seemingly ill-advised detail about the sexual assault allegations and verdicts against him.<\/p>\n
Trump even acknowledged he was advised not to say some of what he said, either because it raised the possibility of yet more legal jeopardy or because it was obviously counterproductive politically.<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s ability to go off-message and rant in ways that make his advisers \u2014 and, potentially, voters \u2014 squirm is unmatched. But even against that backdrop, this was on another level.<\/p>\n
The impetus for the media event at Trump Tower was Trump\u2019s appeal of the E. Jean Carroll sexual assault and defamation civil verdict, which was argued Friday morning. (This is the $5 million verdict against Trump \u2014 compared to the later $83.3 million case in another Carroll defamation suit.)<\/p>\n
Trump began by repeating many claims he has made before, including that he doesn\u2019t know Carroll and never met her, despite a photo showing the two of them meeting at one point. He said she made up the story of his assaulting her. The claims closely resembled the ones that were found to be defamatory in both of his cases. Carroll could seemingly sue again, an option her lawyer has reserved in the past when Trump kept saying such things. Her lawyer raised the prospect again Friday.<\/p>\n
But Trump actually took things a step further.<\/p>\n
At one point, he suggested that the 1987 photo of him and Carroll showing them, in fact, meeting \u201ccould have been AI-generated.\u201d (This is the photo in which Trump in a deposition mistook Carroll for his ex-wife Marla Maples.) This is as nonsensical as Trump\u2019s claim that recent images of Harris\u2019s crowd size were faked. The photo first circulated in 2019, when Carroll brought her allegations forward.<\/p>\n
At another point, Trump echoed his previous claims about another woman who accused him of sexual misconduct, suggesting that she wouldn\u2019t have been desirable enough \u2014 a theme he returned to repeatedly throughout the appearance.<\/p>\n
\u201cI know you\u2019re going to say it\u2019s a terrible thing to say, but it couldn\u2019t have happened,\u201d Trump said of the other woman, Jessica Leeds, before adding that \u201cshe would not have been the chosen one. She would not have been the chosen one.\u201d<\/p>\n
The \u201cchosen one\u201d being the one he would choose to assault? Even the most generous interpretation of his bizarre comment makes it hard to conclude otherwise.<\/p>\n
Trump has previously suggested he wasn\u2019t attracted to the women who have accused him. But here he was casting assaulting women as something of a selection process.<\/p>\n
Trump dwelled on that point, too, despite indicating that a lawyer had told him, \u201cPlease don\u2019t say that I would not want to be involved with her.\u201d He said at another point that his \u201cpeople\u201d told him not to say that, before saying it: \u201cI would not want to be involved with her.\u201d<\/p>\n
Indeed, Trump at multiple points criticized his legal teams.<\/p>\n
He said the same lawyer basically tried to convince him to stay away from courtrooms, but suggested that hadn\u2019t panned out well.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe said, \u2018Sir, you don\u2019t have to show up. I\u2019ve got this. You shouldn\u2019t do it. It\u2019s beneath you. It\u2019s beneath the office of the president,\u2019\u201d Trump said. \u201cI understood what he meant by that. And so I didn\u2019t show up, and I was found guilty of something that I didn\u2019t do with a woman that I have never seen, touched, or in any way was involved with, nor would I want to be.\u201d<\/p>\n
But Trump also took time to criticize the legal team that was still standing with him \u2014 quite literally, given that they flanked him at the news conference.<\/p>\n
He said the cases have been rigged but also seemed to hold his lawyers responsible for the verdicts. (Trump has recently been found guilty of criminal financial fraud, and liable in civil court for sexual assault, defamation and more financial fraud.)<\/p>\n
\u201cI have all this legal talent, but legal talent cannot overcome rigged judges; they can\u2019t overcome a 4 percent Republican area,\u201d Trump said. \u201cAnd I\u2019m disappointed in my legal talent; I\u2019ll be honest with you.\u201d<\/p>\n
He went on to complain at length that his legal team that morning hadn\u2019t broached a dress in the case that he compared to Monica Lewinsky\u2019s dress, referring to the garment that held DNA evidence of former president Bill Clinton\u2019s sexual encounter with Lewinsky.<\/p>\n
\u201cToday at the trial, they didn\u2019t mention the dress,\u201d Trump said, citing the judge\u2019s rejection of a proposed deal to determine whether Trump\u2019s DNA was on a dress Carroll had worn (Trump\u2019s side proposed the deal after initially rejecting Carroll\u2019s request for Trump\u2019s DNA). \u201cSo the Monica Lewinsky-type dress was a big part of the trial. Big, big part of the trial. I said, \u2018Why didn\u2019t you mention that?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Conversely, Trump hailed U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon, who repeatedly ruled in Trump\u2019s favor in his criminal classified documents case in Florida, and cast her as the antithesis of these other judges. He even suggested the Justice Department should look at prosecuting people who criticize Cannon.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think it should be illegal. That\u2019s what the DOJ should look into,\u201d Trump said. \u201cThe legality of these people taking a brilliant judge and demeaning her, and taking other people that are fair and solid and demeaning them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Needless to say, if criticizing judges were actually a prosecutable offense, Trump could be in significantly more legal trouble.<\/p>\n
Perhaps most shocking about Trump\u2019s performance was the decision to go into great detail about issues like the dress in multiple sexual-assault allegations. He spoke about how supposedly implausible the women\u2019s stories were, given the circumstances in each case. In the instance of Leeds, who had testified at the Carroll trial that Trump had groped her while sitting next to her on a plane, he argued that an airplane armrest would have gotten in the way. He also went after another woman, despite not being able to summon her name.<\/p>\n
He did so even as these matters have generally faded from public view and didn\u2019t seem to hurt Trump politically that much in real time. But Trump decided to make a show out of it.<\/p>\n
If nothing else, it reminded a whole lot of people that Trump has been found liable for what the judge in the case said amounted to rape. And for a lot of voters just tuning in to the 2024 campaign, it could well introduce them to a story they might not be aware of.<\/p>\n
You could perhaps understand why a Trump adviser or lawyer would tell him to sit these things out.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Former president Donald Trump is near a crucial juncture of the 2024 campaign. Mail ballots are due to go out soon, his only scheduled debate with Vice President Kamala Harris is happening in four days and Trump is trying to reverse the momentum Harris has generated in her six-plus weeks as a presidential candidate. With […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":9132,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9131","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9131","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9131"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9131\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9132"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}