...and What He Always Will Be

 

     Sometimes you've just got to call a pig a pig. And sometimes you can afford some risky speculation.

     We can do that in the civil rape case of E. Jean Carroll and Donald Trump. Yes, speculation in legal matters is always risky. Look what happened with OJ 28 years ago.

     But OJ Simpson's murder trial in 1995 was criminal, not civil (He would subsequently lose the civil trial). A criminal trial requires 100% of certitude and OJ's "dream team" threw just enough dust in the eyes of the jurors to force one of the worst travesties of justice in American history. A civil trial requires a mere preponderance of evidence. 51% vs 100%.

      However, with the revelations that have come out during Trump's civil rape trial, legal experts and laymen alike can comfortably predict the outcome after both sides make their closing arguments on Monday. The only question is how long it'll take the jury to reach a guilty verdict and officially make Trump a convicted rapist.

     Weeks ago. we'd read the transcripts of Trump's deposition last year but it was only just a couple of days ago when we were treated to the video of that deposition conducted by Carroll's attorney, Roberta Kaplan (No relation to presiding Judge Lewis Kaplan). The transcripts, as mere static words, were stomach-turning enough but they became even more despicable when matched with Trump's jiggling, orange face.

     It was a train wreck of a deposition that went so poorly for Trump that his attorney, Alina Habba, committed a serious breach of decorum by coaching Trump.

     That was in response to the photo above when Kaplan showed it to Trump. It was in turn in response to Trump saying that Carroll wasn't his "type", which is a damning statement in and of itself, essentially implying that Trump rapes those who are his type. But for some reason, Roberta Kaplan showed him that old picture of himself, his wife Ivana, Carroll and Carroll's ex husband, John Johnson. Then she asked him if he recognized the blonde on the left.

     Trump said of the woman who supposedly wasn't his type that it was his wife, Marla Maples, despite his then wife Ivana being in the foreground in profile, just inches from his right side, which would make Maples' presence in the photograph a virtual impossibility. But not only did he forget who his wife was at that time in his life, he mistook Carroll for his second wife, who supposedly was his type.

     That was when Habba breached legal decorum and corrected Trump, telling him the woman on the left was, in fact, E. Jean Carroll, making her, by logical extension, someone who was his type.

     But while that was damning in itself, it was what Trump said elsewhere in the deposition that must have made the jurors watching it do face palms. Number one, he doubled down on his 2005 comments to Billy Bush when he bragged about being able to grope women by their genitals because "when you're a star. they let you do it." Roberta Kaplan recited his own words from the Access Hollywood tape and asked him what his thoughts were on it now.

     Typically, his thoughts on the matter of rape and sexual assault hadn't evolved one bit and he said that "historically", it's been that way for "a million years" (?) and that it was "unfortunately or fortunately true". And when she asked him if he thought of himself a star, he pretended to think about it and churlishly said, "I think you can say that. Yeah."

     Then, believe it or not, he outdid himself by telling Kaplan that she wasn't his type, either, which was completely inappropriate (It ought to be mentioned that Kaplan is a portly 57 year-old woman who's in a same sex marriage).

     Now, it doesn't take a legal scholar to see that in that deposition, Trump torched his own non-existent legal defense before the trial even started. As the months unfolded, Trump has not had a hand in his own defense except to snipe at Carroll from his perch on Truth Social. The defense has called no witnesses and Trump's own expert witness decided to take a pass. In fact, Trump's lead attorney on this case, Joe Tacopina, had already told Judge Kaplan in a sidebar that the defense plans to rest on Monday after closing arguments. In effect, Trump's so-called defense was one in name only.

     One other thing Tacopina said to Judge Kaplan was that Trump would not be present to testify on his own behalf. By this time, however, Trump had already told the Irish media during a golf game that he was flying back to New York to "confront" Carroll over her allegations and the judge made that known to Tacopina who still insisted that his client wouldn't crash his own rape trial.

     Again, I'm no legal expert but I don't think I need to be one to see that Trump and his lawyers are phoning it in, knowing this is a civil trial that will involve no prison time. But it's hard to imagine how being a convicted rapist would work to Trump's advantage on the campaign trail.

     But his deposition and conduct on social media shows, as the Lincoln Project said in their video, this is who he is and always has been.

     And always will be.