Trump’s palpable lie
As the saying goes, we’ve already established what Donald Trump is, we’re just haggling over the price. In the case before the nine jurors in the E Jean Carroll civil trial, the thing we’ve established is that Donald Trump is a rapist. That isn’t merely a matter of opinion, it isn’t an element of a campaign ad, it isn’t a slur based on a vague allegation, it’s a judicial fact. Donald John Trump is a rapist. You may not like it, the same way a man falling from a thirty storey building doesn’t like the law of gravity, but it’s still a fact.
The price for Trump’s being a rapist is yet to be decided [Update: $83.3 million]. But there is little doubt that the nine jurors in Judge Lewis Kaplan’s US District court will hit Trump, who’s already been hit with a five million dollar judgement from his previous trial before Kaplan, will have to pay many more millions of dollars. Before the judicial system is done with him, from Letitia James’s New York civil fraud trial to Judge Kaplan’s court, Donald Trump could be running out of those millions very soon.
But one significant yet underplayed moment in Kaplan’s court seems to have gone unnoticed in the midst of the furious storm of scandal that continuously swirls around the orange-faced fool. Before he took the stand on Thursday, Donald Trump turned to his inept lawyer Alina Habba and blurted out, “I don’t know who the woman [Carroll] is. I never met this woman.” That, as it turns out, is a provable, palpable lie.
A photograph from 1987 shows Donald Trump speaking to Carroll and her former husband John Johnson. We know for a certainty that Trump has seen this photograph because, when he was shown it, he famously mistook Carroll for his former wife Marla Maples.
So when Trump says “I never met this woman” he already knew for a fact that he had. He might have pulled it off (barely) had he instead insisted that he didn’t REMEMBER meeting Carroll. But that’s not how it happened.
When Trump blurted out that he’d never met Carroll, he established once again and for the record that he is a compulsive liar. We know he knows he’s met her. That’s an established fact beyond any doubt. Trump’s hasty and ham-fisted attempt to negate Carroll’s claim against him and the court-established fact that he’s a rapist culminated in that impulsive lie. It’s the kind of lie that someone who tells thirty thousand lies in the course of his misbegotten president might tell: offhand, ill-considered, thoughtless. But it’s out there, and he can’t take it back.
I only point this out because there are still people who insist, however absurdly, that Donald Trump never lies. This short but significant vignette should shut them up. Of course, what they actually mean when they say Trump never lies is that Trump enunciates their bigotries for them. But they can’t say that out loud. So here’s a little gotcha, tailor-made just for them.
By the way, never before in the history of the presidency has any president been deemed a rapist by a conclusion reached in a court of law. Let him forever therefore be known as the rapist Trump. And very soon he will also be known as convicted criminals and rapist Trump.
But for now it should be enough to remember that Donald Trump is a rapist. That isn’t an opinion, it’s a fact. One of the most loathsome crimes in the annals of human infamy is his — and it’s his forever. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.