Updated on May 9 at 4:46 p.m. ET

The perpetual circus and endless scandals that attend Donald Trump, whether in his personal life, business, or politics can obscure the utter strangeness of the circumstances of any one case. So pause to consider what happened today in a Manhattan courtroom: A jury, after fewer than three hours of deliberation, concluded that the former president sexually abused and defamed the writer E. Jean Carroll, though jurors also concluded her accusation of rape wasn’t proven. The jury awarded Carroll about $5 million in damages.

That result is astonishing. This is a former president of America, being found liable by a jury—of his peers—for defamation resulting from an act of sexual violence perpetrated nearly 30 years ago. The verdict is a sign of two competing truths about American society today: The country has become more willing to hold powerful men to account for their behavior and yet, at the same time, is still willing to give them power, again and again.

“Make no mistake, this entire bogus case is a political endeavor targeting President Trump because he is now an overwhelming front-runner to be once again elected President of the United States,” his campaign said in a statement. “President Trump will never stop fighting for the American people, no matter what the radical Democrats dream up next. This case will be appealed, and we will ultimately win.”

[Megan Garber: The most telling moments from the E. Jean Carroll–Donald Trump depositions]

The shock of the verdict is not because the allegation was particularly difficult to believe. On one side was Carroll, whose account of the incident was clear, consistent, and nauseating in its specificity. Carroll sued Trump for defamation after he brushed off the allegation by saying, “She’s not my type.”

On the other side was Trump. The former president faced a challenge in defending himself in the case. Much of Carroll’s account matched a modus operandi that at least 26 women who accused Trump of sexual assault have described. Carroll interviewed five of them for a series in The Atlantic in 2020. (Trump denies the allegations.) Trump himself described his approach in the infamous leaked recording from Access Hollywood in which he boasted about sexually assaulting women. “You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful—I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything,” he said. “Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.”

[‘I Moved On Her Very Heavily’: The E. Jean Carroll interviews]

Trump also didn’t bother to show up for the trial, claiming that he wanted to spare New Yorkers the traffic jams his presence would cause. Last week, while in Ireland, he said he would fly home to appear in court but, surprising no one, he didn’t. Trump’s absence might have reflected a recognition from the outset that he was likely to lose, and a desire to distance himself from the case. And although it’s impossible to determine how much his decision was a factor in the trial’s outcome, by failing to show up, he sent a message to the jury that he wasn’t invested in defending himself. His lawyers reinforced the message by declining to call any witnesses and instead trying to pick apart Carroll’s case during cross examination. (What kind of witness would Trump have called anyway? Finding an alibi witness for a moment 27 years ago would be tough, and who would be a convincing character witness?)

Carroll’s lawyers made Trump a presence in the courtroom anyway, playing excerpts from a deposition for the case to devastating effect. In one instance, going straight at Trump’s “not my type” defense, Carroll’s lawyer showed him a photograph of Carroll. Asked to identify her, he mistook Carroll for his ex-wife Marla Maples, whom Trump had to admit was his type.

More appalling was his discussion of the Access Hollywood tape. Trump, both in the past and in the deposition, wrote that off as “locker room” talk. But he couldn’t bring himself to repudiate or even distance himself from the comments, even now, nearly two decades later.

[David A. Graham: A guide to the potential indictments of Donald Trump]

“Well, historically, that’s true with stars,” he said.

“True with stars that they can grab women by the pussy?” Carroll’s attorney Roberta Kaplan asked.

“Well, that’s what—if you look over the last million years, I guess that’s been largely true,” Trump said. “Not always, but largely true. Unfortunately or fortunately.”

Unfortunately or fortunately.

[Megan Garber: The real meaning of Trump’s ‘She’s not my type’ defense]

“And you consider yourself to be a star?” Kaplan prodded.

“I think you can say that, yeah,” Trump replied smugly.

In citing the last million years as precedent, he seemed to believe he was still living in them. Trump is not the first man to be both president and a sexual assaulter, but he is the first to have a jury find so. The verdict against him shows that in at least one case, with one high-profile and unrepentant defendant, the old world in which powerful men could do anything they wanted to women has passed away. Things have changed a little in the past 1 million years—or at least in the past 30.

Former US president Donald Trump sexually abused magazine writer E. Jean Carroll and then defamed her by accusing her of making up the charge, according to jurors in a civil trial at the Manhattan federal courthouse. On May 9, the court ordered Trump to pay Carroll $5 million in damages.

Read more...

A jury has found Donald Trump liable for sexually abusing advice columnist E. Jean Carroll in 1996, awarding her $5 million in a judgment that could haunt the former president as he campaigns to regain the White House.

E Jean Carroll has accused ex-president of rape and defamation, but his lawyers say the claims are 'affront to justice'.

Donald Trump is the clear GOP front-runner for 2024. This isn’t news—he has dominated most polling since the day Joe Biden was sworn in. Despite leading the GOP to a historically bad midterm, being saddled with a dismal 25 percent approval rating, and becoming the first former president to be indicted, his prospects for winning the Republican nomination are only growing stronger.

Since the indictment, Republicans—including those running against him—have rallied to Trump’s defense. His fundraising has surged. And he’s racked up endorsements. Meanwhile, his Republican opposition is floundering. Nikki Haley is apparently double-counting her fundraising. Mike Pence is getting booed by party hard-liners. Asa Hutchinson, Tim Scott, and Vivek Ramaswamy toil in also-ran obscurity. Ron DeSantis is the only candidate within hailing distance of Trump, but his campaign is sputtering.

Over the course of hundreds of focus groups I’ve conducted, a large chunk of GOP voters have made clear that they would be content with a nominee other than Trump in 2024—preferably a “Trump without the baggage”–style candidate. They like that the former president is, in their words, a “fighter.” But after eight years of Trump tweets, taunts, and tantrums, they’re open to—in many cases eager for—new alternatives. So how is Trump on pace to run away with the nomination?

For a while, DeSantis looked like a plausible contender. In my focus groups, Republican voters admired the Florida governor’s “aggressiveness,” favorably citing his decision to ship migrants to Martha’s Vineyard. Others said they liked his approach to the pandemic and approvingly quoted his unofficial campaign slogan: “Florida is where woke goes to die.”

[From the May 2023 issue: How did America’s weirdest, most freedom-obsessed state fall for an authoritarian governor?]

But I’ve seen a marked change in recent weeks. Trump and his super PAC are trying to paint DeSantis as a deficit hawk hell-bent on slashing Medicare and Social Security. These kinds of attacks are aimed at tying DeSantis to the establishment in the eyes of voters—a view that’s starting to creep into the focus groups.

“As I started to learn more about Ron DeSantis and where he is on the political spectrum and how he’s voted in the past, now I’m not sure I’d vote for the man,” Sharon, a two-time Trump voter from Illinois, told me. Others called him “alienating” and said they “aren’t necessarily comfortable” with his policies.

Criticism of his culture-war crusade against Disney has come up as well. “Everything about that is why I’m not necessarily a big fan of him,” said Wesley, a Republican from Maryland. “I get the impression that he very much governs to the people on the internet more so than the people in his state.”

Colleen, a Republican from Georgia, called DeSantis’s war with Disney “a little goofy,” saying, “It’s Disney World! Leave it alone.” Informed about DeSantis’s suggestion to build a prison next to the theme park, Ruth—a Michigan Republican—exclaimed, “Why would you do that? That’s terrible.”

As the base sours on DeSantis, it’s coming home to Trump. When I convened a group of GOP voters the day after Trump’s indictment, their assessment was nearly unanimous: “It’s a complete distraction and it’s a waste of time.” “It’s being blown out of proportion.” “Just ridiculous and a terrible direction for us to go.”

We asked one group whether they had donated to Trump before the indictment. Only three out of nine had, but after the indictment, all nine said they would. None said another indictment or arrest would change their minds. And none thought Trump should drop out.

“As far as a mug shot goes, he’s going to market the hell out of that,” said Chris, a two-time Trump voter from Illinois, imagining a future arrest. “Every one of us is going to buy one of those shirts.” Most hands went up when I asked who would buy one.

In the most recent group, five out of seven participants said they would vote for Trump if the primary were held that day.

One of the peculiar pathologies of Republican-primary politics is that even Trump’s competition feels unable to criticize him. Case in point: After Trump was indicted, DeSantis called the move “un-American,” Pence called it “an outrage,” and Haley said it was “more about revenge than it is about justice.”

They are in a trap of their own making. For eight years, Republican leaders have defended Trump at every turn—from the Access Hollywood tape to “very fine people on both sides.” From the first impeachment to January 6 to the second impeachment.

They thought that by covering for Trump they were tapping into his power, but they were actually giving away their own—mortgaging themselves and their reputations to Trump’s lies and depravities. By defending him then, they have made it impossible to credibly accuse him of anything now.

[Read: The GOP’s “abusive relationship” with Trump]

This problem is compounded by the deep relationship that Trump has cultivated with Republican voters. He’s been a constant presence in their lives for eight years—or, for Apprentice fans, much longer. They defended him on Facebook and argued about him over Thanksgiving dinners. Millions of them have voted for him twice.

DeSantis, in contrast, became a national figure only about 18 months ago. Some Republicans like his anti-“woke” stunts, but the fracas with Disney shows that this will get him only so far. The shallowness of this attachment is allowing Trump to define DeSantis for a national audience before DeSantis has the chance to define himself.

“I don’t know enough about him. I would have to learn more to see where he stands on a lot of things,” Sandy, a North Dakota Republican, said of DeSantis in a recent focus group. Many others echoed this idea.

The Trump camp is gleefully filling that information vacuum. The former president has called DeSantis “a total flameout,” “highly overrated,” and “a really bad politician.” His super PAC is skewering DeSantis as a pudding-fingered entitlement-slasher and “just another career politician.” DeSantis’s response has been almost nonexistent.

Unless the Republican field coalesces around an alternative soon, Trump will almost certainly cruise to the nomination—just as he did in 2016. Today, Trump is in the pole position, and gaining. Fox and CNN lifted their shadow bans on him. And, thanks to the indictment, he’s back in his sweet spot of aggrieved victimhood.

Already, parts of the Republican establishment are resigning themselves to another Trump coronation. Although DeSantis was once their great hope, the plan now—once again—seems to be to sit back and pray that the Democrats take care of Trump for them.

Earlier this month, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan delivered a speech at the Brookings Institution that historically would have made for front-page material but barely registered in the world beyond wonkdom. His address was a muscular statement of ideological intent.

He argued that President Joe Biden’s agenda channeled a set of ideas Sullivan called the “new Washington consensus.” There was a bit of cheek in his use of that term. The Washington Consensus was a phrase that entered circulation at the very end of the 1980s, describing the emerging bipartisan faith in globalization, deregulation, and the wisdom of markets, suited to an era of optimistic triumphalism. But that era is ending. Or, as Sullivan put it, “The last few decades revealed cracks in those foundations.”

What Sullivan championed in the speech was something like the antithesis of that old paradigm. He said that ever-greater global interdependence is no longer desirable. One reason is China, which participates in global capitalism without fairly playing by its rules. Another is the realization, exposed by the pandemic-induced crisis in the intricate global supply chain, that the American economy is vulnerable to even small disruptions on the other side of the planet. That crisis was an indication that the world has gone too far in a libertarian direction and needs the sort of regulation and government investment that only a short while ago were highly unfashionable in the Washington policy sphere.

Although he didn’t justify his use of the term this way, he could get away with describing his views as representative of a new “consensus: Both Trump and Biden have positioned themselves as economic nationalists, self-consciously abandoning the precepts of the old order.

Franklin Foer: What Joe Biden knows about America

That’s not to describe the Trump and Biden versions of economic nationalism as equivalent.  Although Trump delivered vituperative speeches, inflected by xenophobia, about elites destroying American manufacturing, he didn’t really have any ideas about how to reverse course beyond jacking up tariffs. Biden’s national-security adviser, by contrast, put a big idea at the center of his speech. He extolled the virtues of industrial strategy: a new role for the state in directing the trajectory of the economy.

Industrial strategy begins with the premise that the national interest demands that certain industries flourish domestically. The United States can’t rely on, say, semiconductors produced in Taiwan when China could plausibly invade that island and abruptly cut off access to the chips that run every car, laptop, and weapon system. To bolster such essential sectors of the economy, industrial strategy uses public investment, in the form of tax credits and subsidies, to prod firms to produce goods that the public needs.

The Sullivan speech was not just a policy wish list but a statement of values, a rejection of the idea that efficiency is the most important end of economic policy. All growth is not good growth, he argued, if it leaves America’s supply chains vulnerable to foreign adversaries and impedes the prospects of the American worker. The goal of industrial strategy is a safer, more equitable pattern of growth that better serves the national interest.

Many highfalutin speeches by presidential appointees are wishful projections. What made Sullivan’s different is that he described policy already in motion—based on all initial indications succeeding beyond expectations.

Biden’s industrial strategy has emerged in a patchwork of legislation and regulation. First came the CHIPS bill, with its $52.7 billion in subsidies for the semiconductor industry. Then came the Inflation Reduction Act, which funds various tax credits intended to spur demand for electric vehicles and designed to rapidly grow the supply of alternative energies. All the while, Biden has left Trump-era tariffs on China in place.

Semiconductor plants are intimidatingly expensive projects even with abundant government largesse; new energy infrastructure requires time-consuming permits, a strong disincentive against investment in the sector. Despite those obstacles, however, the administration’s strategy is yielding nearly instant results. Last month, the Financial Times published a report titled “‘Transformational Change’; Biden’s Industrial Policy Begins to Bear Fruit.” The article showed that firms have gone on a building spree since the passage of the two bills, committing $204 billion in large-scale projects in both the clean-energy and semiconductor industries. That’s twice what firms in those sectors spent in 2021—and 20 times what they spent in 2019. In this same time period, companies have launched 75 large-scale manufacturing projects. The FT couldn’t be sure whether these projects could be attributed to the new tax credits. But the sudden avalanche of capital investment suggests causation.

Franklin Foer: How Joe Biden wins again

The Inflation Reduction Act was passed last August. Now there’s ample reason to believe that far more companies will avail themselves of the program than the accountants assumed. Where the Congressional Budget Office initially estimated that the IRA would fund nearly $390 billion worth of tax credits, it now anticipates that the government will spend $180 billion more than that.

High demand is creating a sense of panic about the expansiveness of the IRA. Joe Manchin regrets that the legislation, which he co-authored, doesn’t include any caps on the tax credits, which might have limited the sum the government will spend on clean energy. And he’s not the only hand-wringer. This week, The New York Times ran a piece headlined “Business Fervor Driving Up Costs.”

If the program does indeed result in far more spending than the initial estimate, that might not be healthy for government coffers. But it will be plausible evidence that the transition to clean energy is transpiring at an even faster clip than the Biden administration imagined. Because the IRA places no upper limit on tax credits, there won’t be a moment in the next 10 years when the government suddenly takes its foot off the accelerator. And by the end of the decade, that accelerator will be propelling electric vehicles.

Industrial strategy will fail to deliver on everything Sullivan promised—and, in some respects, may already have failed. The limits were visible in the United Auto Workers’ recent decision not to endorse Biden’s reelection. It was an understandable expression of self-interest. Much of the capital racing into the electric-vehicle business is destined for South Carolina and other states where firms don’t have to contend with nettlesome unions. The UAW is not wrong to fear that the new Washington consensus will replicate the sins of the old. The jobs may be green, but they will continue to be low paying and precarious.

Whatever the shortcomings of the policy, the conceptual change is real and significant. In a recent column, The New York Times’ Gail Collins distilled the prevailing wisdom about the 2024 race: “Donald Trump’s terrible and Joe Biden’s boring.” That widely shared description of Biden is an aesthetic judgment and strangely at odds with the substance of this presidency. The Biden administration is doing nothing less than rejecting the economic orthodoxy of the past 50 years and proposing a new theory of capitalism.

I argued recently that political fundamentals point to a strong Biden reelection in 2024: The economy is growing, employment is rising, and Republican culture-warring is alienating crucial groups of voters. But big trends can be punctuated by unexpected events—the X factors that bump history off its predicted course.

The 2016 election cycle was dominated by two important last-minute shocks: Donald Trump’s Access Hollywood recording and FBI Director James Comey’s announcement that he was reopening an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email practices. One proved damaging; one did not.

X factors don’t appear out of nowhere. WikiLeaks had dumped one load of Russian-hacked materials in summer 2016, as the presidential race warmed up; no surprise the group released another load in the fall, priming Comey’s announcement. For an audio clip to emerge offering evidence of Trump’s sexual misconduct was no great surprise either, even though the crude boasting in his own voice temporarily jolted senior Republican leaders such as Paul Ryan and Mike Pence.

[David Frum: The coming Biden blowout]

For 2024, too, we can discern the outline of possible X factors. Still, the idea of a thing is never the same as the thing itself, which cannot be fully understood until it materializes.

One potential factor is Joe Biden’s health. Only about a third of Americans feel confident that Biden is up to the physical and mental demands of the presidency, according to the most recent Washington Post/ABC poll.

This pervasive unease has already created a potential opportunity for Biden’s Republican opponent, whomever that may be. Instead of targeting the safe and familiar Biden, that opponent can direct fire at Biden’s running mate: less known, easier to define. If the running mate is Kamala Harris, the sitting vice president, then Biden’s opponent will almost certainly try to exploit popular anxieties over race, sex, and immigration (both of Harris’s parents were foreign-born). Has some panel of California Democrats proposed multimillion-dollar reparations payouts to Black Americans? ​Blame Harris! Disorder on the New York subway system? Blame Harris! A trans influencer on a big-brand beer can? Blame Harris! A surge of asylum seekers at the U.S. border? Harris, Harris, Harris!

Presidential-reelection campaigns are organized to promote and defend the record of the president, not the vice president. That can create a vulnerability. The 2008 John McCain operation collapsed amid internal bickering when Democrats identified the Arizona senator’s running mate, Sarah Palin, as a liability.

That running-mate weakness will come under even greater pressure if Biden suffers any negative health event between now and Election Day. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, age 81, was recently incapacitated for several weeks by an injury from a fall. The Senate Judiciary Committee is paralyzed because of the infirmity of Senator Dianne Feinstein, age 89. Democrats lost the chance to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg with another liberal because Ginsburg refused to retire. If Biden has to stop campaigning because of even a twisted ankle or a respiratory infection, never mind anything more serious, all of the doubts about his fitness—and Harris’s—will surge to the fore.

[Yair Rosenberg: The ice-cream theory of Joe Biden’s success]

Biden himself is not handling the age issue patiently or with good humor. Pressed by MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle last week, he responded with tight-lipped irritation: “I have acquired a hell of a lot of wisdom. I know more than the vast majority of people. I’m more experienced than anybody who has ever run for the office and I think I’ve proven myself to be honorable as well as also effective.”

If Democrats have their own concerns about Biden’s possible inability to serve a full second term, and the likelihood of a President Harris by default before 2028, they show no sign of doing anything about it. When Franklin D. Roosevelt sought a fourth term in 1944, leaders of his party first forced him to dump his serving vice president, the erratic Henry Wallace, and then vetoed Roosevelt’s preferred alternative, James Byrnes of South Carolina. Byrnes was a segregationist who had left the Roman Catholic Church, potentially alienating northern liberals and Catholics. Party leaders wanted Harry Truman instead—and imposed their wish on Roosevelt. Their determination proved well founded. Nine months later, Roosevelt was dead.

Truman went on to win reelection, in his own right and against expectation. But the Democratic party of today has no similar mechanism to replace a poorly polling running mate with a stronger one without triggering a protracted spasm of accusation and counter-accusation—of racism, sexism, and the rest of the intra-progressive lexicon of grievance.  

X factors apply not just to Biden. The Republican campaign faces problems of its own: Trump is not much younger than Biden. But the risks that most thickly crowd around the GOP’s leading candidate are legal, not medical. Trump has already been indicted by the Manhattan district attorney. What if he’s convicted in that case, or indicted in additional possible cases being pursued by the Department of Justice and a Georgia district attorney?

Trump’s indictments have, thus far, generated a rally effect among his co-partisans, widening his lead over Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to 30 points in the month after. Trump’s famous confidence that his supporters would follow him even if he shot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue seems vindicated.

[David Frum: Justice is coming for Donald Trump]

But the emphasis here is on thus far. More indictments may be coming. Trump is also engaged in a civil suit in which the underlying issue is an accusation that he raped one woman, backed by testimony that he sexually assaulted many more. As president, Trump could rely on some political cover because the sheer number of allegations of wrongdoing got jumbled together, confused people, and often canceled one another out. Whether accumulating indictments will now cancel out in the same way is not so clear—even less so if they turn into accumulating convictions, followed by sentences. It’s not inconceivable that Trump could be wearing an ankle bracelet when and if he delivers his acceptance address at the Republican National Convention.

If Trump receives a criminal conviction for sedition, conspiracy, or some other crime against American democracy, his most hard-core supporters might turn to extralegal or even violent forms of action, as happened on January 6, 2021. Such a repudiation of the rule of law could create an internal security challenge for the United States. At least some of the spate of mass shootings since 2021 can plausibly be interpreted as a subideological insurgency against legal authority. That’s another X factor to worry about, one protected by the way many conservatives have inscribed gun rights at the very center of their cultural identity.  

The immediate X factor is whether a convicted Trump can remain viable in presidential politics. The answer has to be no. Trump heads a coalition that includes a lot of people who do not like him very much. Multiple polls find that one-fifth to one-third of self-identified Republicans hold unfavorable opinions of Trump, depending on when and how the question is posed. In November 2021, Marquette found that 40 percent of Republicans wish that Trump would not run again. Quinnipiac reported in November 2022 that a quarter of Republicans regard Trump’s influence as negative for their party. In April 2023, NBC showed that a quarter of Republicans want a nominee who is not distracted by his personal legal troubles. In a May Washington Post/ABC poll, 22 percent of Republicans and Republican leaners said they would be “dissatisfied” if Trump were nominated in 2024.

[David Axelrod: Why neither party can escape Trump]

Trump won 45.9 percent of the vote in 2016 and 46.8 percent in 2020—about the same popular-vote share as Michael Dukakis won in 1988, and less than Al Gore’s in 2000, John Kerry’s in 2004, and Mitt Romney’s in 2012, all of whom were, of course, the losing candidate in their respective race. Trump does not start his third presidential contest with a large margin to spare. The American electoral system is tilted in favor of rural and conservative candidates—but not enough to save a presidential candidate who falls below Trump’s 2016 and 2020 levels of support.

X factors can be events entirely unrelated to the candidates. Perhaps congressional Republicans will mishandle their debt-ceiling gambit and plunge the U.S. economy into crisis and depression. Perhaps, if facing defeat in Ukraine, the Russians will act on their threat to use nuclear weapons. Perhaps the scheme of the former Trump strategist Steve Bannon to mount a spoiler campaign with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in 2024 will draw away more Democratic votes than Kanye West’s equivalent stunt did in 2020.

The X factors have to be weighed. But they have to be weighed against all of the other factors that point, at present, toward the conventional wisdom of Biden’s reelection.