A quick public service announcement: You did not, in fact, take crazy pills this week.
It’s just the news cycle.
On Wednesday, a federal judge confirmed that a jury ruled that the former President of the United States was a rapist.
Earlier this year, Donald Trump requested a new trial or reduced damages after a jury found him liable for sexual abuse and defamation of writer E. Jean Carroll, and awarded her $5 million. Trump’s legal team argued that since the jury did not find him liable for raping Carroll, the verdict was “grossly excessive.” But U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan slapped down that argument.
The GOP scarcely blinks, but none of this was inevitable.
“The finding that Carroll failed to prove that she was ‘raped’ within the meaning of the New York Penal Law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape,’” Kaplan wrote. The judge explained that New York’s legal definition of the term is “far narrower” than the word “rape” is understood in “common modern parlance.”
“Indeed,” he added, “as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.”
Kaplan's ruling was unambiguous and blunt. “Mr. Trump’s attempt to minimize the sexual abuse finding as perhaps resting on nothing more than groping of Ms. Carroll’s breasts through her clothing is frivolous,” he wrote. “The proof convincingly established, and the jury implicitly found, that Mr. Trump deliberately and forcibly penetrated Ms. Carroll’s vagina with his fingers, causing immediate pain and long lasting emotional and psychological harm.”
Lest you glossed over that, the judge declared there was “ample, arguably overwhelming evidence” that Trump is a rapist by the word’s most common definitions, and even “some federal and state criminal statutes.” This wasn’t “locker room talk,” this was an actual sexual assault committed by one of the most powerful men in America.
Yet Kaplan’s opinion wasn’t nearly the top news story of the day. It was merely another data point of our deeply deranged political moment. Despite that ruling, Donald J. Trump remains the clear front-runner for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination.
Even though he faces multiple felony charges and a third (and perhaps) fourth indictment, Trump’s hold on this party is as strong as ever.
At this point, after seven years of Trump’s destructive march through truth, decency and the soul of the GOP, we’ve been numbed by the seemingly endless parade of lies, insults, threats and contempt for the rule of law.
But we still have a moral obligation to be shocked, don’t we?
It feels as if we have fallen down a bizarre rabbit hole of insanity.
The GOP scarcely blinks, but none of this was inevitable. Imagine someone transported to this moment from 2015 (or even from Jan. 7, 2021). Imagine explaining to a “normal” Republican what happened to their party.
Even a few years ago a charge of rape would have disqualified a politician at any level. (Even using terms like “legitimate rape” was enough to wreck political careers.) All but the most rabid of tribal partisans would have been shocked at the prospect of running under the banner of a leader facing felony indictments for conspiracy and fraud. It would have been unthinkable to embrace a presidential candidate who spent his nights bleating out deranged ALL-CAPS rants.
But here we are, and it feels as if we have fallen down a bizarre rabbit hole of insanity.
In Congress, Republicans not only rally around their disgraced leader but have made obstructing justice a central plank in their agenda. After two years of gaslighting their supporters about what really happened on Jan. 6, 2021, Republican leaders are closing ranks against any legal accountability for the man who incited the insurrection. Not even the former vice president, whose life was threatened by rioters chanting “Hang Mike Pence,” believes that Trump should face any legal consequences.
Instead, the party has turned its wrath on the watchdogs: Republicans who wanted to lock up Hillary Clinton over her emails now want to defund the FBI and gut the Justice Department for enforcing the laws that Trump flouted.
And on the same day Kaplan issued his opinion, the Washington Post reported: “Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) on Wednesday showed what appeared to be sexually explicit images of Hunter Biden, President Biden’s son, during a hearing of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee.”
Observers were rightly shocked at Greene’s attempt to score a political point. “Nothing is beneath Ms. Greene,” Hunter Biden’s attorney, Abbe Lowell, declared. But, of course, there will be no consequences, because there are no longer standards for a party that used to insist that “character counts” and still claims that it wants to protect children from any hint of sexuality.
In the era of Trump, however, all of that is subordinated to the prime directives of triggering liberals, defending the Orange Victim and feeding the hungry, hungry hippos of outrage.
If the polls are to be believed, Republican voters support this. Even as outrage mounts upon outrage; crime upon, crime; indictment upon indictment, Trump’s lead grows.
A rational political party might think that it is unwise to place its fate in the hands of a narcissist and rapist. But we are not living in rational times, are we?
