Republicans Are Weak A.F. on Trump’s Sexual Assault Verdict

Republicans are never good at condemning Donald Trump, and it was no exception following the verdict in his sexual assault trial.

A New York jury unanimously found Trump liable for sexual abuse and battery against Carroll in the mid-1990s and for defaming her when she accused him of assault decades later. They recommended Carroll be awarded a total of $5 million in damages.

And Republicans’ reactions to the verdict have been weak at the very best.

Representative Mike Burgess, Tom Cole, and Thomas Massie all claimed ignorance. Burgess said he hadn’t seen the verdict yet, Cole said he didn’t “know anything about it,” and Massie said he had “been in a car” and so hadn’t seen the outcome.

Representative Jim Jordan, a staunch Trump ally, said he thought that all of the current lawsuits against the former president were “ridiculous.” But he also claimed to be unaware of the verdict. Since taking over the House Judiciary Committee, Jordan has proven far more obsessed with Hunter Biden’s laptop and attacking the people investigating Trump than the actual things Trump is accused of.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, another Trump loyalist, also said he hadn’t heard the verdict yet. “I’ve been in this meeting,” he said, referring to a meeting with President Joe Biden and other congressional leaders on the U.S. debt limit.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Senator John Kennedy had no comment on the verdict. Senator Mike Rounds managed a kind of rebuke by not even half-heartedly saying he probably wouldn’t support Trump in the 2024 presidential race.

Only former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson, who is also running for president, has had the guts to call Trump out thus far. “Over the course of my over 25 years of experience in the courtroom, I have seen firsthand how a cavalier and arrogant contempt for the rule of law can backfire,” he said in a statement. “The jury verdict should be treated with seriousness and is another example of the indefensible behavior of Donald Trump.”

Mary Trump’s tweet was about as short and to the point as it could be:

She tweeted it at 3:20 p.m. When I saw it a half an hour later, it had more than 10,000 likes.

That’s because everyone knew what Mary Trump was communicating, in just repeating Carroll’s name. She was saying thank you, bless you, we salute you.

Knowing what we now know about how the trial went, it’s easy to think this was a breeze. Carroll was a rock on the stand. Her corroborating witnesses were strong. Joe Tacopina, Trump’s attorney, came across about as badly as a lawyer who cares about his reputation could: as a bully defending an accused sexual abuser. Trump’s videotaped deposition, in which he literally confused Carroll with second wife, Marla, was embarrassing for him. Well, that part was embarrassing. The part where he said men have raped women for a million years, “fortunately or unfortunately,” was a little worse than that.

But this was no breeze. This took guts. It took tremendous courage to file this suit and see it through, eat all the shit that Trump’s lackeys would try to force-feed her, deal with whatever kinds of threats she faced—and most of all, to run the risk of losing. Because losing would have been awful, for her and for the country. But she knew the truth, and she was confident that she could convince a jury of the truth.

She thus becomes the first person in history to get the legal system to hold Donald Trump to account. She certainly beat Merrick Garland to the punch. E. Jean Carroll, Trump grossly said you weren’t his type. We say with admiration that you are definitely ours.

Donald Trump has been impeached twice, lost the popular vote twice, was the first ever criminally indicted president, faces numerous investigations into his efforts to overthrow democracy, and has now been found liable of sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll.

And minutes after the announcement of Trump’s latest conviction, Fox itself began advancing the question: What else should Trump face consequences for? The network emblazoned to its millions of viewers a recent Washington Post/ABC poll that suggests a majority of the country believes the former president and 2024 candidate should face criminal charges for his efforts to “illegally overturn the 2020 election.”

The choice by Fox has followed an already confused conservative response to Trump’s latest and severe misdeeds. Though there have been moves by conservatives to downplay or detract from the charges, there have been some relative expressions of a newfound willingness to criticize the former president.

Shortly after the verdict, Fox played the deposition clip of Trump mistaking E. Jean Carroll for his ex-wife. A guest on the show, former federal prosecutor Andy McCarthy, didn’t even bother trying to spin the incriminating clip.

“The context of this is that he said ‘she wasn’t his type,’” McCarthy said. “The last person you would want to confuse her with would be someone you married.” An uncomfortable pause ensued.

Perhaps it’s just a matter of playing niceties after forking over $787.5 million to Dominion in a lawsuit settlement; perhaps it’s a matter of the facts just being too incriminating not to acknowledge even somewhat. Either way, even Fox is beginning to admit the nature of Trump’s criminality—and that most of America sees him in that way too.

Former President Donald Trump has to pay $5 million for sexual abuse, battery, and defamation against E. Jean Carroll—and he’s livid.

A New York jury unanimously found him liable for sexual abuse and battery against Carroll in the mid-1990s, and for defaming her when she accused him of assault decades later. They recommended Carroll be awarded a total of $5 million in damages.

“I HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA WHO THIS WOMAN IS. THIS VERDICT IS A DISGRACE—A CONTINUATION OF THE GREATEST WITCH HUNT OF ALL TIME,” Trump said on Truth Social.

Carroll is not the only woman to accuse Trump of sexual assault: At least 26 others have done so, two of whom testified during the trial. But Carroll is the first to get justice.

Former President Donald Trump was found liable on Tuesday of sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll in the mid-1990s and of defaming her when she accused him of assault decades later.

Carroll is not the only woman to accuse Trump of sexual assault, but her case was the first to make it to a courtroom. Trump has vehemently denied all of the allegations, aiming particular vitriol at Carroll.

But on Tuesday, a jury in New York unanimously found Trump liable of sexual abuse and battery against Carroll and of defaming her, after deliberating for fewer than three hours. While they ruled that there isn’t a preponderance of evidence that Trump raped Carroll, they still recommended Carroll be awarded $2 million in damages for the sexual and physical abuse. They also recommended she be awarded an additional $3 million for defamation.

The decision wraps up a high-profile but remarkably speedy trial. Trump, who will not face jail time, declined to testify in the courtroom, although he repeatedly declared his innocence on social media. During the two-week trial, his lawyers sought to paint Carroll as a liar, an attention-seeker, and an implausible rape victim.

Carroll accused Trump in her 2019 memoir of raping her in the Manhattan Bergdorf Goodman department store in the mid-1990s. She has sued him twice for defamation: first in 2019, when he said she made up the rape allegation to promote her book, and again in November for posts he made about her on social media. Her lawsuit is civil, not criminal, because she waited too long to report the assault to police.

She remained steadfast throughout the trial, repeatedly affirming that Trump attacked her in the store and that she kept quiet because she was afraid of what he might do to her. There was clearly a good reason for those concerns: Trump attacked her character again and again to try to fight off the accusations.

The evidence that Carroll’s team introduced included Trump’s notorious Access Hollywood tape, in which he brags about groping women without their consent, and the video recording of Trump’s own deposition. At one point during his deposition, the former president reveals his true character: He doubles down on the Access Hollywood comments, confirming that “fortunately or unfortunately,” stars get away with assaulting women all the time.

Not this time.

Last year, Ithaca, New York, became the first town in the country where every Starbucks worker was unionized. Now, by the end of the month, Starbucks will have forcibly shut down all three of its unionized Ithaca locations.

The company announced its intention to close Ithaca’s two remaining stores (in a town in which a large chunk of the population is caffeinated college students) on Friday.

In a recent press release, the company said they “​​continue to open, close and evolve our stores as we assess, reposition and strengthen our store portfolio.” But given that all of Ithaca’s stores, all unionized, have been shut down within a year, the actions seem more than simply earnestly strategic.

Last June, Starbucks shut down a location near Cornell University, a handful of weeks after the location voted 19–1 to unionize. “The College Ave location may be the single most prime property in all of Upstate NY,” former Ithaca Mayor Svante Myrick wrote on Twitter. “Over 15,000 pedestrians cross it every day. There’s no way it isn’t profitable. This looks like union busting.”

Last week, emails were revealed to show that Starbucks higher-ups were actively concerned with bad press and the workers’ striking in the lead-up to their decision to shut down the campus location. Workers had complained of their hours being cut and stores being understaffed, seemingly in efforts to wear down the workers and consequently the stores themselves.

“The under-scheduling is genius on their part,” Stephanie Heslop, who worked at one of the two soon-to-be-closed locations, told Jacobin. “Customers and our pitiful paychecks punish us and Starbucks can claim that it’s about ‘business needs.’”

Such efforts to push out employees holds potential resonance, with another Starbucks store in Buffalo, New York—among the first locations to unionize—now filing to decertify from the union. Last April (the same month Ithaca’s campus location unionized), the Buffalo store voted 18–1 to unionize. Since then, it seems management has done whatever it could to turn back the clock.

“Almost every union leader at the store was fired or forced out because of the environment of intimidation and fear that Starbucks management created,” a spokesperson for Workers United told local TV outlet WGRZ. “In fact, the company is currently being prosecuted for the discriminatory treatment of workers at the Del-Chip store.”

It appears that if Starbucks can’t outright close locations down, it’s looking to simply wear out and replace the workers who unionized them. Such a notion is affirmed by the aforementioned emails, which reveal efforts from management to refuse time-off requests for student workers to go home for spring break and even double-schedule them, all in self-fulfilling anticipation of “expected turnover” for “10-14 partners in the next four weeks” (emphasis in the original email). That specific email was sent on March 4: four weeks before the store would hold its unionization vote.

With the closure of the college campus location, the two remaining locations in Ithaca logically would have only increased in foot traffic. Yet somehow, Starbucks purports that the closure of those two final locations—again, in a town whose population is significantly made up of students and faculty—is part of some ongoing detached-from-union-efforts business optimization scheme.

To be fair, Starbucks is not wholly dishonest in its logic of why it is forcibly closing stores. The closures are optimizing—just not for customer satisfaction, nor for basic worker protection and dignity, but simply for executive profits.

The revelations are not surprising. Just over a month ago, former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz accidentally admitted that nonunion stores received better benefits than unionized stores, and he couldn’t even say “no” to the question of whether he has threatened workers for unionizing.

Donald Trump is patiently waiting with bated breath like the rest of us to see if a jury will find him guilty of raping a woman in the mid-1990s and of defaming her when she accused him of assault decades later.

Yeah, right!

A jury began deliberating Tuesday on whether the former president raped and defamed writer E. Jean Carroll, and Trump is already lying about it.

“Waiting for a jury decision on a False Accusation where I … am not allowed to speak or defend myself,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. In reality, Trump refused to testify during the trial (despite an offer from the judge presiding over the case that he could do exactly that). Instead, he has repeatedly posted about it on social media, leading the judge presiding over the case to reprimand both Trump and his lawyer.

“I will therefore not speak until after the trial, but will appeal the Unconstitutional silencing of me, as a candidate, no matter the outcome!” Trump said, seemingly not seeing the irony of announcing his silence.

Carroll accused Trump in her 2019 memoir of raping her in the Manhattan Bergdorf Goodman department store in the mid-1990s. She has sued him twice for defamation: first in 2019, when he said she made up the rape allegation to promote her book, and again in November for posts he made about her on social media.

She is not the only woman to accuse him of sexual assault: At least 26 other women have done so, two of whom testified during the trial. But Carroll’s case is the first to make it to a courtroom.

On Sunday, a Louisiana man shot a 14-year-old girl in the back of the head as she played hide and seek with a few friends outside his home.

Detectives say that the children were playing hide and seek outside the home of David Doyle, who told detectives that he saw shadows outside his home and then grabbed his gun. When he came back outside, he apparently saw people running away from his property and began haphazardly shooting at them. It is not clear whether Doyle even asked who was there.

The girl has been receiving treatment for non-life-threatening injuries.

Local outlet KPLC-TV reports that the shooting happened on a dead-end road on which the only three homes are owned by Doyle, the victim’s family, and a relative of the victim’s family. The man has been charged with aggravated assault, battery, and illegal discharge of a firearm, and his bond has been set at $300,000.

The shooting of a 14-year-old girl playing hide and seek follows a string of similarly appalling cases, like 16-year-old Ralph Yarl being shot after accidentally ringing the wrong doorbell, or 20-year-old Kaylin Gillis being shot and killed after her friend accidentally turned into the wrong driveway, or two teenage cheerleaders being shot after one of them accidentally pulled on the wrong car door handle.

Louisiana is among the states with a so-called “stand your ground” law that can be used to justify the use of deadly force in the context of self-defense. Such laws, spread even further after the murder of Trayvon Martin in Florida in 2012, have been linked to an 11 percent rise in gun homicides in America.

Angry, radicalizing figures have fomented social distrust in this country. That has sparked increasingly vicious instances of violent crime, seen just days ago in the mass shooting carried out in Allen, Texas, by a neo-Nazi inspired by the likes of Libs of TikTok and Nick Fuentes. And codified law has affirmed this social distrust, encouraging people to internalize it and allowing it to metastasize into murderous instincts.

A Florida school district has banned a book about segregation after one parent complained, part of a disturbing trend of state schools blocking discussions of racial justice.

The Wakulla County school district decided in October to remove the graphic novel Little Rock Nine from its libraries after reviewing a complaint from a parent. The school that initially banned the book did not give more details on why the parent complained but said it had decided that even though the book is historically accurate, its subject matter is “difficult for elementary students to comprehend.”

Florida schools begin teaching about segregation in fourth grade, but the book—which is written at a third-grade level—has been deemed “above the understanding” of all elementary students.

Instead, it will only be allowed in middle and high school libraries because “some students in middle or high school might be at a third grade reading level and could gather knowledge from the material,” the school principal and librarian said.

This book ban is the latest instance to come to light of Florida restricting what can be taught or even read in schools, usually on topics involving race, gender, and sexuality. In March, an elementary school in Pinellas County banned the movie Ruby Bridges after one parent complained that she didn’t like how it depicted race relations in 1960s America. Earlier this year, Pinellas County school officials also banned high school students from reading The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison—again after just one parent complained.

Florida is increasingly restricting what can be taught in schools at all levels. Governor Ron DeSantis has declared war on “wokeism” and has promised to defund diversity, equity, and inclusion programs on college campuses. He has backed the Stop Woke Act, which restricts teaching about race in colleges, and announced plans to mandate Western civilization courses. His administration was also in close contact with the College Board as it gutted the A.P. African American Studies course.

But the book bans go a step further, as they aren’t even about changing the school curriculum but preventing students from reading the books at all. In public schools, one school district has banned 23 different books from school libraries. Teachers in other school districts have also been told to hide their classroom book collections until all the books have been vetted and approved. But the vetting process is opaque, and there is no policy clarifying how long a complaint review process should take. As a result, books and films are withheld from students for months on end.

“Why is it permissible to teach white scholars Black folks were enslaved but not permissible to teach them about African American contributions to America and the world and the struggles they encountered and continue to experience as citizens of the United States of America?” former St. Petersburg police chief Goliath Davis asked in an op-ed for The Weekly Challenger after Ruby Bridges was banned. “Black history, Native-American history and Hispanic history, though not always glamorous, are American history and cannot be denied.”

On Monday night, residents of New York City gathered in downtown Manhattan for a vigil and protest in honor of Jordan Neely, a homeless man choked to death by 24-year-old Daniel Penny on the city’s subway.

And of course, in a story already rife with injustice, the police had to make sure that their failings were front and center. Longtime photojournalist Stephanie Keith was among 11 people arrested at the protest.

At a press conference that night, New York Police Department Chiefs Jeffrey Maddrey and John Chell said those taken into custody had violated laws by using a loud microphone, blocking the street, or even because some apparently had “assaulted themselves.”

The police chiefs have not yet clarified what “assaulted themselves” exactly means.

Video shows Chell himself barking at his officers to “lock her up,” after Keith simply stepped into the sidewalk to take a photo.

In Keith’s case, Chell said at the conference, the photographer faces charges of disorderly conduct and interfering with three arrests. The New York Daily News reports that Keith was released and given a summons later in the night.

Keith’s own words, and video open for all of us to see, undermine the police’s account of what happened.

“I was trying to photograph what I thought was an arrest, but I never even got a chance to see since they grabbed me as soon as I tried to photograph,” she told the Daily News. “I said, ‘I’m press,’ and they said, ‘You’re not, you’re arrested.’”

It’s almost too perfect. Penny has yet to be charged for killing Neely—an incident documented clearly on video. The police instead questioned the murderer and released him back onto the streets with little ado. Meanwhile, also on video, one of the most powerful police officers in New York City ferociously commanded his subordinates to lock up a journalist who was simply documenting his officers responding with more force to protesters than to a murderer.

Indolent thinkers often call any number of things “Orwellian,” but if anything warrants the oft-used designation, it’s the lack of arrest of someone caught on film committing murder and the active arrest—also caught on film—of a photojournalist trying to record the police state violently repressing people who were protesting that injustice.