In spite of his entitlement, his upbringing, his privilege (white or otherwise), Mafia Don has to cough up millions of dollars more ($83.3 million, to be exact) as punishment after losing his second defamation case against writer E. Jean Carroll.
It's his second loss in a defamation claim to Carroll, because he immediately defamed her after being made to pay $5 million when he lost his first defamation case against her. That was the sexual abuse and defamation case where U.S. District Court Judge Lewis Kaplan said, by any standard, Trump raped Carroll.
I'm wondering if it's just a matter of time before Trump, in an uncontrollable fit of rage, defames Carroll for a third time. I hope so. The $88.3 million total in damages so far represents nearly a quarter of the cash Trump says he has on hand. I hope so. Keep talking, Don.
What's remarkable about all of this is that Trump, a former president of the United States, is running for that office once again. The fact that he is within a hair's breadth of winning the Republican nomination is phenomenal to me: A judge has said that Trump is a rapist. Trump went through an unprecedented two impeachment hearings as president, and he is currently fighting 91 – count 'em, folks, 91 – criminal charges spread over four indictments. Some of those charges are for stealing top secret documents. Some of those charges are for election tampering. Some of those charges are for instigating an insurrection.
Losing just one of those charges could result in jail time. No wonder Trump is claiming that a president should have universal immunity, even for "crossing the line."
And yet, he is the darling of his Republican MAGAt base as well as a morally-corrupt Republican Party that keeps running to the rescue of a rapist.
As I sometimes do, I wonder how history will look back on all of this. Say, maybe 50 years from now.
If our democratic republic survives the Republican threat to take over our Constitutional government by fascist tactics this election cycle, I suppose scholars and historians will look back on this time as a curious anomaly where we narrowly avoided disaster.
I wonder if they'll wonder how a cult figure could generate such an intense and devoted following, completely devoid of facts and, well, even common sense. I guess it's easy to point to social media as a source of transmission for "alternate facts," but even Hitler generated a cult without the Internet, so it does go deeper than that.
It goes to the soul. It goes to the soul of the candidate, and it goes to the soul of in informed electorate to divine the truth from what they hear.
It goes to the heart of what is right.
I hope so.
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