Okay, we know there are far more substantive things going on. But we join the multitudes celebrating Schadenfreude Friday, when the lying, raping, bullying “love child of a Hapsburg inbred and a necrotic squash” got “beaten like a drum” by an 80-year-old woman who steadfastly insisted the rule of law applies even to clowns in orange makeup who claim it doesn’t. Hence, the sidewalk troll outside Trump Hotel: “Ha ha ha ha ha. Keep talking loser,” with smiley face. No wonder God made Trump smell.
Thus did a New York jury of nine ordinary Americans – seven men, two women – spend just three hours Friday deciding the Bad Orange Guy (BOG) must pay advice columnist E. Jean Carroll a whopping $83.3 million, almost ten times what Carroll’s legal team had sought, for defaming her as a “whack job” and “fraud” after Carroll successfully charged that Trump raped her in 1996. The award breaks down to $7.3 million in emotional damages, $11 million in reputational damages and $65 million in punitive damages; it comes after a May trial in which Trump was already found liable for both sexually assaulting and defaming Carroll, and ordered to pay her an additional $10 million. All that, of course, is without the 91 criminal charges he faces over hush money payments, stealing classified information and election subversion, along with multiple civil suits over his fraudulent business practices and legal battles to remove him from the ballot for inciting an insurrection. He was prescient: So much winning!
Such was the trial’s mob-boss tenor that jurors had been stealthily delivered each day to a garage beneath the courthouse; after the verdict, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan reportedly advised them to “never disclose” they’d served on this jury. As usual, though, experts argued Trump had only shot himself in the foot with sloppy theatrics – loud-mouth objections to testimony, abruptly storming out of court, and otherwise “playing for that 13th juror, the people at home, the politics” – that merely “annoyed” the jury. Said one lawyer, “At some point, you have to be contrite, you have to accept responsibility.” Umm. Not. “Absolutely ridiculous!” the perp rage-tweeted on “this whole Biden-directed witch hunt,” though Biden was neither among the jurors nor in any way involved. “They have taken away all First Amendment rights. THIS IS NOT AMERICA!” Facts owe, retorted George Conway: “America is about the rule of law…You have no right to maliciously defame anyone, let alone a woman you raped. In America, we call this justice.”
Trump’s slapdash attorney Alina Habba also furiously raved. Acyn: “Habba not happy.” She insisted defending “President” Trump was “the proudest (sic) thing I could ever do,” decried a “violation of our justice system,” claimed the trial is about Trump “leading in the polls” though Carroll sued him in 2019 when he was in office. “I haven’t spoken before because I respect my ethics (sic),” she whined, trashing the judge, the witnesses, having “sat on” (sic) trial after trial for months,” the state: “Now you see what you get in New York.” On CNN, Jake Tapper cut her off air with, “You’re getting an idea (why) Trump’s attorney is perceived as effective as she is – which is not particularly effective.” Other similarly unmoored MAGA-ites fumed: MTG: “So unbelievably outrageous!” Matt Gaetz: “A fantastical, false allegation.” Trump doc Ronny Jackson, fresh from handing out White House drugs “like Skittles”: “First they come for Trump, then they come for ALL OF US! (if we had $83 million). VOTE FOR TRUMP LIKE YOUR LIFE DEPENDS ON IT!!”
In more lucid parts of America, it was gleefully noted, “Schadenfreude was in ample supply.” The victory of a tenacious survivor of sexual assault who persevered through a torrent of abuse and “kicked a bully in the balls” prompted praise, pride, admiration and some serious mean-girl trolling of “the orange skidmark.” As in: “At this rate, Melania is going to have to marry E. Jean Carroll to get any of Donald’s money,” “Trump’s gonna need to sell more hats,” and many edicts that “Trump Is A Loser.” Most vitally, said Carroll attorney Roberta Kaplan, it was “a good day for our system of justice.” A veteran trial lawyer who’s “been in a lot of courtrooms in my time,” Kaplan said she’d “never seen a party be so openly contemptuous of the authority of the court (and) and the legitimacy of our justice system as Donald Trump.” This trial, she said, was both vindication and repudiation: “It showed the rule of law applies to everyone.Even if you don’t think the rule of law applies to you, it applies to you. And it applied today to Donald Trump.”
It also confirmed to the virtuoso “bored historians” at History Falls Apart that BOG is such an irredeemable loser, “In the beginning, Trump already smelled.” Along with inspired snark on Peter Doocy getting owned more than Alsace-Lorraine, Steve Bannon freaking when he only gets one shirt in prison, and Rudy Giuliani’s historic stalemate at Four Seasons Landscaping, they crafted a dizzying “So God Made Trump” to honor a gentleman slumlord bewildered by water who became “the most powerful racist six-year-old in the solar system.” To wit: “God said I need someone to get up before dawn call Fox and Friends hypnotize Brian Kilmeade beg for money bang a porn star get someone killed pay off a porn star wait until noon to stumble into work wearing a Big Mac like an alien face-sucker so God gave us Trump…a philanderer who can turn shit to gold and gold to shit who talks like a 3rd grader cheats like a fornicator dresses like a head waiter wears golf cleats to church and steals government staples,” hair “transected like the lattice crust of the world’s rankest pork pie, but the bald patch in the center of the garden you shall not touch, for it is holy to the lord.” So yeah: Keep talking loser.
Trolling the defendant outside Trump International HotelPhoto from multiple social media accounts
Defendant trails toilet paper on his dubious rise to the top.Getty Images
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This post was originally published on Common Dreams.