Liable for sexual assault, yes – but Trump’s political career is far from over
It is the worst of times and the best of times for Donald Trump. On Tuesday, he suffered another legal defeat. A federal jury found him liable for the sexual abuse, forcible touching, and defamation of E Jean Carroll. She was awarded $5m in damages.
The 45th president, however, escaped liability for rape. He also leads Joe Biden in their latest hypothetical match-up, while Ron DeSantis fades in the rearview mirror.
The midterms in November 2022 ended with an underwhelming GOP performance, DeSantis emerging triumphant in his reelection bid, and Trump licking his wounds. Not any more. He’s back.
The public judges Biden to be less than sharp, and his stewardship of the economy similarly lacking. Record low unemployment has failed to dissipate the stings of inflation, high interest rates and an underperforming stock market. Retirement accounts have taken a hit. Food prices are high. Folks are angry.
Meanwhile, Hunter Biden, the first son, faces the prospect of indictment on tax and gun charges. Biden professes that the boy has done nothing wrong, but even if he escapes prosecution, the sins of the son will likely be visited upon the father. It feels incestuous.
Given this tableau, the impact of the
Trump sexual assault outcome is likely to be muted, which is not to say that this latest loss won’t bring fallout.
In the run-up to the verdict, the court released a deposition video that showed Trump unable to identify Carroll in a photograph. Instead, he confused her with Marla Maples, his second wife. In that moment, he put the lie to his non-denial-denial that Carroll wasn’t his “type”.
The potential for fall debate drama over Trump’s brain fog is high. Remember when he bragged about his performance in a cognitive test (“Person, woman, man, camera, TV”)? His mental acuity, too, is now likely to become a
campaign issue. Turnabout is fair play. Biden isn’t the only one with issues.
Still, Trump has already survived the infamous Access Hollywood tape. “When you are a star, they let you do it … You can do anything,” he cackled back in the day.
“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK,” Trump mused seven years ago. He was definitely on to something.
For many Republicans, Trump is their Caesar, a cultural avatar and warrior who possesses license to flout and
scary and threatening, even when Black is simply in distress and in need of a meal.
This is not to mention the fact that Neely was both homeless and suffering mentally, both experiences society has found a way to cast as dangerous and evil.
White violence has long been institutionalized as an antidote to the societal “nuisance” of unhoused, mentally ill and poor Black people. But it’s not just police who murder vulnerable Black people in broad daylight in plain view of bystanders who do nothing to help. Being Black and somewhat “disruptive” in public is a death sentence that even everyday citizens feel empowered to hand out.
Horrifying as it is, none of this is new – regular white people have always deputized themselves as agents of the state. From the KKK to the killers of Trayvon Martin and Ahmaud Arbery, white men continue to view themselves as an extension of the agencies that were built to protect them and their property. And today, the bonds of that sinister marriage have been strengthened by the combined forces of lax gun laws, a rise in governmentsanctioned white supremacy, manufactured white fear and government disinvestment in vulnerable populations.
And make no mistake, the convenience here flows both ways. Just as white society needs racist police forces and governments to uphold, protect and further its violence, so does a racist government need willing individuals to help maintain its status quo.
Whether it’s a Black man pleading for help on the subway, or a teenager who accidentally rang the wrong doorbell looking to pick up his little brothers, the willingness to deploy the deadliest force possible on Black people is a feature, and not a bug of America’s political ethos. And it’s a feature that is readily available once any white person cries foul.
Daniel Penny, the white 24-year-old former US marine who held Neely in a deadly chokehold for several minutes while he flailed around and struggled to get free, said he “never intended to harm” Neely and “could not have foreseen his untimely death”.
In a statement shared through his lawyers, he also called Neely’s death an “awful tragedy” and called for “a new commitment by our elected officials to address the mental health crisis on our streets and subways”.
Penny – and his online supporters by proxy – have centered themselves as the “real” victims in this, casting Neely’s death as an unfortunate result of them needfully enforcing their right to feel “safe” in a public space.
If there’s one thing all sides of this can agree on, it’s that this story is about mental health and homelessness – but it’s also really about vigilantism and the consequences of being a Black person in a public space.
Black people deserve safety too, no matter what their situation is. So how do you stay safe when you’re Black in America? Right now, it seems no one has the answer to this question and many don’t seem to care. But the longer we wait to figure it out, the longer we leave the door open for more of this violence.
Tayo Bero is a freelance writer
it’s difficult or impossible for them to conduct the family research that memoirists should normally be able to do. The ex-JW may be afraid of further rupturing tenuous relationships with practicing family members that still talk to them, some of whom break the rules to do so. Ten minutes into my first session with a cult-recovery educator, we discovered our shared JW past. “Don’t you realize how lucky you are that your mother still talks to you?” he told me, clearly telegraphing the pain in his own life.
To further complicate memoir writing, as ex-JW activists including Mark O’Donnell have pointed out, the Watch
Tower (the group that controls Witness life) regularly deletes older publications from its online libraries, so former members often cannot access the materials they were indoctrinated with. Part of the difficulty of writing about a group that gaslights people so expertly is that you start to question your memories of what happened, and that’s exactly what they want: for you to think it was your fault. After all, you’re the one who left Jehovah.
So, I did what any memoirist would do: I opened some old boxes in my closet. I unearthed the No Blood card I once carried around, the one instructing first responders to let me die rather than give me a transfusion. I found an old diary in which I parroted
Watch Tower gobbledygook almost verbatim – evidence of a time when I wasn’t allowed to think for myself. I dug into what Julietta Singh calls “the ghost archive”, and in so doing found the material I needed to tell the story.
•••
The revelation, for me, was understanding that readers will consider my book mostly through the prism of their own ghost archives. One day, while I was recording my audiobook, Rémy Sealey, the sound engineer and an electronic musician known as Klatu, told me that as a former Falun Gong practitioner he could relate to so much of my experience – the us-versus-them mentality, the group’s belief that it was immune to criticism, and the recruiting techniques. “I once went on a date with a woman who invited me to an ‘activity’, which turned out to be at a Kingdom Hall,” referring to the Witnesses’ local centers of worship. “What I never told her is that I went on the date hoping to convert her.”
There’s much commonality between different evangelical churches and closed religious communities, and ex-members need to create dialogue with one another so they can pick up the pieces. Regardless of affiliation, we all need better tools to spot the red flags of coercive control that can manifest at work, at play, and in our relationships. As always, this requires a vigilance for language.
The work of reversing the effects of my childhood indoctrination is ongoing. Last year, I went back to university to restart undergraduate studies, which I had abandoned long ago. Now that there’s no religious apocalypse to get in my way, I do my homework with an eagerness that would’ve nauseated a 20-year-old me.
Now, when I compliment a man at the bowling alley, I no longer hear Armageddon in the clatter of pins, in the rumors reaching God’s ears.
Daniel Allen Cox is the author of the memoir-in-essays I Felt the End Before It Came, out now
didn’t have school fees to pay? Could he have passed on The War With Grandpa had one of his kids not needed to get a car serviced? Might he have spared us
Salvage Station, a film that came and went last year without a single person noticing, if he didn’t have so many nappies to buy?
This might not be the case, of course. For all we know, De Niro fell head over heels in love with the quality of the Dirty Grandpa script. However, this – especially when coupled with his new side-career making bread adverts for the UK market – doesn’t immediately seem to be the case. Still, even if his prolific baby-making abilities are to blame for his dodgy career choices of late, it might all still pay off. After all, his forthcoming projects include Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon and the Netflix thriller Zero Day, both of which have the potential to be very good indeed. Which just goes to prove that, if you ever want to experience a professional upswing, just go and have a dizzying number of children.