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      Why Trump’s ‘vile’ attacks against Carroll after verdict could be ‘chilling for survivors’

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      After a New York jury found Donald Trump liable for sexually abusing advice columnist E Jean Carroll, sexual violence advocacy groups and experts are having mixed responses to the verdict, particularly in light of Trump’s public attacks against the decision and Carroll, and as top Republicans have rushed to his defense.Despite the verdict and the jury awarding about $5m in compensatory and punitive damages to Carroll, Trump and a handful of Republican lawmakers have remained defiant: a move which sexual violence experts have condemned as risking re-traumatizing survivors.But at the same time they have hailed Carroll’s victory as holding to account one of the most powerful men in the world. As Carroll launched her suit in the wake of the #MeToo movement, the trial has been seen as a validation – not just of her own quest for justice – but of a broader search for accountability for those who have been sexually abused.The symbolism of the jury’s decision was powerful and could be inspirational for others take take action.“This case highlights the importance of opening retrospective windows for survivors to come forward… It elevates how difficult it is to heal and attempt to pursue justice… Sexual violence is a deep trauma that takes time to heal and opening a retrospective window is reflective of that fact,” Tamika Payne, the acting director of the New York State Coalition Against Sexual Assault, told the Guardian.“These windows are just the first step in addressing a realistic timeframe for survivors to come forward,” she added, making a point to note that New York’s recent Adult Survivors Act, which opened a one-year window for survivors whose statute of limitations has expired to file a civil lawsuit, expires in November.Laura Palumbo, a spokesperson for the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, echoed similar sentiments.“We hope [this case] can bring hope to survivors that it is possible for the truth to be heard even years after the assault has happened… Common challenges that we see survivors have…[include]…the way that trauma impacts the brain and how it can affect the level of detail and information they are able to recall about the assault,” Palumbo explained.“It is really impactful to see that a survivor’s story and experience was heard and believed in this way,” she continued.Similarly, America’s largest nonprofit anti-sexual assault organization, the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network said: “We thank E Jean Carroll, who will inspire survivors to come forward to tell their stories and face perpetrators. This case demonstrates that all perpetrators, no matter how powerful, can and will be held accountable.”Anne Coughlin, a law professor at the University of Virginia specializing in criminal law, rape and feminist jurisprudence, hailed the verdict as a victory but also noted the chilling effect that Trump’s response may have on survivors.“One can construe the verdict as a triumph for the rule of law – after a public trial, a jury found one of the most powerful men in the world responsible for sexual assault – and as a vindication of the right of women to be free from forced sex. The verdict sends the message that, contrary to Trump’s remarks on the Access Hollywood tape, celebrity men cannot ‘do anything’ to women,” Coughlin told the Guardian.“But the run-up to the trial, the trial itself, and the aftermath are going to be chilling for survivors… [Carroll] is not the garden-variety survivor…in terms of the amount of support, clout and credibility that she was able to bring to the trial,” she said.“Trump’s intransigence after the verdict, his vile comments about Carroll at the CNN Town Hall, and his supporters’ gleeful rejection of the significance of the verdict – all of these things may send a message to survivors about how costly it is for them to speak up and seek justice,” added Coughlin.Following the verdict, Trump lashed out on his social media platform Truth Social, writing: “I have absolutely no idea who this woman is. This verdict is a disgrace – a continuation of the greatest witch hunt of all time!”Meanwhile, a handful of Republican lawmakers have thrown their support behind Trump.Senator Bill Hagerty of Tennessee condemned the verdict as the latest act in the “legal circus” surrounding Trump, telling Fox News: “I think we’ve seen president Trump under attack since before he became president… This has been going on for years. He’s been amazing in his ability to weather these sorts of attacks and the American public has been amazing in their support through it.”Florida senator Marco Rubio said: “That jury’s a joke, the whole case is a joke,” while Oklahoma senator Markwayne Mullin said that he believes it is “very difficult” for Trump to get a fair trial “in any of these liberal states”, Politico reports.Others appeared to dismiss the gravity of the case, with former vice-president Mike Pence saying:, “It’s just one more story focusing on my former running mate that I know is a great fascination to members of the national media, but I just don’t think it’s where the American people are focused.”Sexual advocacy groups have condemned Trump’s denials and his Republican defense, calling them dangerous and belittling to survivors.“To say sexual violence is a horrific crime and we need all these resources, but then for there not to be a similar outrage when the response is how it is, is gaslighting,” Payne told the Guardian.“Any form of sexual violence is the most intrusive, traumatizing violation that a person can experience and to politicize it diminishes the trauma that it is. And is one of the reasons that so many survivors choose not to report, not to seek civil remedies. Their response directly contributes to the stigma and silence that survivors endure,” she said.Similarly, Palumbo criticized the politicization of Carroll’s trial and explained the silencing effect it may have on others.“Even if there are a lot of focal supporters of them or a decision is in their favor, they can face a lot of public criticism, threats of harm…and that has such a silencing effect for other survivors.“When a survivor’s story and experience is politicized in this way, our society takes away their voice and their power,” said Palumbo.“It is very retraumatizing for survivors of sexual assault to hear other survivors be discredited… We as a society have to think about how we are responding to those survivors in public and private ways,” she said.On Thursday, Carroll’s lawyers said that she may sue Trump for a third time after his “disgusting, vile, foul” comments about her on CNN. Meanwhile, Trump’s lawyers have filed an appeal against the $5m judgment awarded to Carroll.With the legal battle between Carroll and Trump showing no signs of winding down anytime soon, Coughlin remains concerned about the efficacy of the law in protecting survivors.In response to a question about what further legal steps should be taken in the case, Coughlin told the Guardian:“This question assumes that law is the institution that can bring about the cultural changes necessary to protect women against sexual violence. Law cannot do that work alone, no way. To be sure, survivors must continue to report and bring cases, and, where appropriate, prosecutors must pursue criminal charges vigorously. But the whole point of the #MeToo movement is that the law has failed and is continuing to fail survivors. And the reactions to the verdict in the Carroll case show that we still have a ways to go.” More

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      How Donald Trump was found liable for sexual abuse – podcast

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      On Tuesday, a jury in New York found that the former US president Donald Trump sexually abused magazine writer E Jean Carroll in the 1990s and then defamed her by branding her a liar.
      On Wednesday, Trump made the same baseless claims about Carroll that led to him losing the case – this time, live on CNN to millions of viewers.
      This week, Jonathan Freedland talks to Guardian US columnist Margaret Sullivan about the fallout from the E Jean Carroll case. The pair discuss how the media should cover a 2024 presidential candidate who has been impeached twice, indicted by a federal court, and who is now legally defined as a sexual predator

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know More

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      CNN’s Trump debacle suggests TV media set to repeat mistakes of 2016

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      Donald Trump and CNN were in rare agreement: the former president’s hour of free prime-time television on Wednesday evening, dressed up as a “town hall” with Republican voters, was a triumph.“America was served very well by what we did last night,” CNN’s chief executive, Chris Licht, told skeptical members of his own staff at the network’s daily news conference the following morning.“You do not have to like the former president’s answers, but you can’t say that we didn’t get them.”As it happens, quite a lot of people said that not only did CNN fail to get answers but it was repeating the terrible mistake of 2016 when it treated Trump as an entertainer not a hostile politician by giving him hours of airtime to spout freely because he was good for ratings, and therefore profits.One of CNN’s own reporters, Oliver Darcy, was less enthused than his boss.“It’s hard to see how America was served by the spectacle of lies that aired on CNN Wednesday evening,” he said in his daily newsletter, Reliable Sources.Darcy then listed all that was wrong. The same old “professional lie machine” that is Trump ignoring the question, talking over the moderator, unleashing “a firehose of disinformation upon the country”.“And CNN aired it all. On and on it went. It felt like 2016 all over again,” he wrote.More than a few Republicans shared that view. Matthew Dowd, former chief strategist for the George W Bush’s 2004 presidential campaign, condemned the news network.“CNN was completely unprepared to hold Trump accountable. CNN has done a complete disservice to our democracy,” he wrote. “CNN, you failed journalism and our country.”The New York Times said Trump’s advisers were delighted: “They can’t believe he is getting an hour on CNN with an audience that cheers his every line and laughs at his every joke.”Which raises the question of how television, in particular, should cover Trump as the next election comes into focus. It’s a question even Fox News, which has fallen out with the former president, is now grappling with.Ted Koppel, former anchor of ABC News’s Nightline, asked what the alternative is to television time for a leading contender for a return to the White House.“So no more live political events, because politicians can be nasty? Because politicians can tell lies?” he told the New York Times. “I’m not sure that news organisations should necessarily be in the business of making ideological judgments. Is he a legitimate object of news attention? You bet.”Bob Schieffer, the former CBS news anchor who moderated presidential debates, took much the same position.“We’re in the business of telling people who’s running for what and what they stand for,” he said.But many Americans wondered if it had to be in front of a supportive, jeering audience that evidently included a fair number of his “Make America great again” supporters with little to restrain his torrent of lies, distractions and evasions.Mark Lukasiewicz, former vice-president at NBC News, said of the programme that the mistake was to do it live: “Proving again: Live lying works. A friendly Maga crowd consistently laughs, claps at Trump’s punch lines – including re sex assault and January 6 – and the moderator cannot begin to keep up with the AR-15 pace of lies.”Even Fox News recorded its most recent interviews with Trump.Writing in the Washington Post, Perry Bacon said CNN’s mistake was to say, in the words of its political director, David Chalian, that is it going to “treat Trump like any other presidential candidate”.“CNN should, of course, treat Trump differently from other candidates. His record of anti-democratic behavior makes him a much more dangerous potential president than other candidates,” wrote Bacon.“In 2016, the media not only played down Trump’s chances of winning, but also suggested Trump would not pursue the outlandish and far-right ideas that he was running on if he won. This attitude was summed up by an Atlantic article titled ‘Taking Trump Seriously, Not Literally’. This perspective was entirely wrongheaded.”Part of the problem is that few journalists in the US, striving for ill-defined objectivity and almost invariably deferential to present and former presidents, are a match for a man who views the established norms of interviewing and discussion as a provocation. As Kaitlan Collins proved, as she tried, and failed, to contain Trump, even as he called her a “nasty woman” on her own air.Bacon is not alone in worrying that Trump will continue to exploit CNN’s desperation to win back at least some of the Maga voters it lost when the former president led chants of “CNN sucks” at his rallies.That’s certainly how Trump saw it, writing on his Truth Social site shortly before the programme that CNN was “rightfully desperate to get those fantastic (TRUMP!) ratings once again.“Could be the beginning of a New & Vibrant CNN, with no more Fake News, or it could turn into a disaster for all, including me. Let’s see what happens?” he added.As it turned out, what was good for CNN and Trump was viewed by a large part of the rest of America as another disaster in the making. More

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      Trump rages after sexual abuse verdict but legal woes have only just begun

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      If the outcome of Donald Trump’s sexual assault trial wasn’t a foregone conclusion, his response to a jury finding he attacked the writer E Jean Carroll was all too predictable.The former president lashed out at the judge as biased and the jurors as “from an anti-Trump area”, meaning liberal New York, after they believed Carroll’s account of the millionaire businessman attacking her in a department store changing room in the mid-1990s. The jury ordered him to pay $5m in damages for “sexual abuse” and for defaming Carroll by accusing her of “a made-up SCAM” for political ends.Trump has taken a similar tack against the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, after pleading not guilty last month to 34 criminal charges over the payment of hush money to the porn star Stormy Daniels before the 2016 presidential election. Trump called Bragg, who is Black, an “animal” and a psychopath, and characterised the prosecution as purely political.All of this goes down well in sections of America.An audience of Republican voters at a CNN town hall with Trump on Wednesday laughed when he described his assault of Carroll as “playing hanky-panky in a dressing room” and called her a “whack job”.But in the coming months it’s going to get a lot harder for the former, and possibly future, American president to spin his legal problems as political persecution by Democratic elitists. Investigations against him are mounting, and even more troubled legal waters lie ahead for Trump – and some of his acolytes.Indictments in conservative Georgia are coming down the line and many of the key witnesses against Trump will be his fellow Republicans, including some who helped him try to rig the 2020 election.Similarly, investigations by a justice department special counsel into Trump’s actions leading up to the 6 January 2021 storming of the Capitol, and the stashing of classified documents at his Florida mansion, are being built on the accounts of aides and political associates who are potential witnesses against him.Norman Eisen, a former White House special counsel for ethics and government reform, said that as a result Trump’s legal troubles have only just begun.“He’s running into a buzzsaw and it’s called the rule of law. So he can go on and rant and rave up to a point but the legal authorities are in the process of holding him accountable,” he said.Leading the way is a prosecutor in Atlanta who is stacking up witnesses against the former president, almost all of them Republicans, over his attempt to rig the 2020 presidential election result in Georgia. They include some who tried to help Trump steal the vote but who have been persuaded to give evidence against him to save their own necks.The Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, has spent more than two years investigating the “multi-state, coordinated plan by the Trump campaign to influence the results”.Willis convened a special grand jury that sat for eight months and heard evidence from 75 witnesses before it recommended charges against more than a dozen people. The grand jury forewoman, Emily Kohrs, strongly hinted to the New York Times in February that Trump was on the list.Asked if the jurors recommended prosecuting the former president, Kohrs said: “You’re not going to be shocked. It’s not rocket science.”“It is not going to be some giant plot twist,” she added. “You probably have a fair idea of what may be in there. I’m trying very hard to say that delicately.”Willis had been expected to charge Trump and others this month, but indictments are not now likely before mid-July as prosecutors put together immunity deals to lure the former president’s Republican co-conspirators to testify against him and his top aides. Kohrs said prosecutors offered one witness immunity from prosecution in return for cooperation right in front of the grand jury.Then there are the Republicans who do not have to be coerced to tell the truth in court.Willis’s investigation initially focused on a tape recording of Trump pressuring Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to “find” nearly 12,000 votes to cancel out Biden’s win in a state that, at the time, looked as if it might decide the outcome of the entire presidential election.Trump has called the Georgia official an “enemy of the people” because he wouldn’t commit electoral fraud. But a jury might find Raffensperger all the more credible because not only is he a Republican, but he voted for Trump.The Georgia secretary of state spoke to the special grand jury for several hours, including about a call he recorded from Trump at the beginning of January 2021 pressuring him to manipulate the vote. While he has not commented publicly on his testimony, Raffensperger wrote a book, Integrity Counts, in which he details Trump threatening him.Other witnesses are more reluctant but may be all the more credible for that reason, including Georgia’s governor, Brian Kemp, who also came under pressure from Trump and his allies to overturn the election result. One of those on the phone to Kemp was Mark Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff, who was also summoned to answer the grand jury’s questions.Willis expanded the investigation as more evidence emerged of Trump and his allies attempting to manipulate the results, including the appointment of a sham slate of 16 electors to replace the state’s legitimate members of the electoral college who do the formal business of selecting the president. The fake electors included the chair of the Georgia Republican party, David Shafer, and Republican members of the state legislature who have been warned that they are at risk of prosecution.Earlier this month it was revealed that at least eight of the fake electors have done a deal to give evidence in return from immunity from prosecution, although Shafer is not included.Eisen said the immunity deals are a sign that charges are in the offing.“We know that multiple fake electors have received immunity. That is another indication of trouble for Donald Trump because those deals are extended by prosecutors typically when they are preparing to bring a case, and they believe they have a case to bring,” he said.“So it’s a sign of prosecutorial seriousness. And it’s a sign that the district attorney can mount an effective case because these immunised fake electors can serve as tour guides for the jury into the plot, which we know ran all the way up to the Oval Office.”Ronald Carlson, a leading Georgia trial lawyer and professor at the University of Georgia’s law school, said prosecutors do not offer immunity lightly and any deal signals that witnesses will provide significant testimony against Trump and his team.“This is very, very much a straw in the wind. Immunity almost always comes with a requirement that the immunised witness provide testimony in a future criminal trial,” he said.“I think the electors will be very descriptive on how they were called together, what they did during their meeting, and then the end result, which was certifying a result for Trump.“Willis’s investigation also probed a seven-hour hearing at the Georgia state senate a month after the election orchestrated by Rudolph Giuliani, the former New York mayor and Trump’s personal lawyer and adviser.In what Georgia Public Broadcasting called “a series of fantastical claims and statements from various and sundry people touted as experts”, Giuliani led the way in falsely claiming that the state’s voting machines were rigged, thousands of votes were illegally cast, and suitcases of fake ballots were used to tilt the count in favour of Biden.Giuliani also urged the Georgia legislature to create the slate of fake electors, providing a direct link between what prosecutors are expected to portray as a criminal attempt to steal the election and Trump. At the same time, Giuliani led a blitz of legal challenges to the election result in courts across the country, all of which failed.Kohrs said that when Giuliani appeared before the grand jury he invoked attorney-client privilege to avoid answering many questions.Another Trump lawyer, John Eastman, was called as a witness to a plan to pressure the then vice-president, Mike Pence, to block the declaration of Biden’s win by Congress. The grand jury also called Sidney Powell, a Trump lawyer and conspiracy theorist who pushed false allegations that voting machines were rigged for which Fox News paid nearly $800m to settle a defamation suit.Several witnesses tried to avoid testifying. Senator Lindsey Graham went all the way to the US supreme court in a failed attempt to avoid appearing. Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, who attended meetings about invoking martial law and seizing voting machines, had to be ordered by a Florida judge to answer the grand jury’s questions.Carlson said that a parade of Republican witnesses, reluctant or willing, could prove very damaging to Trump.“As a prosecutor, if you can call witnesses who were close to the crown, so to speak, that impresses the jury,” he said.“What happens very, very frequently, especially in a mob case, is they’ll give immunity to one of the lower-echelon people to testify against the big boss. He doesn’t want to do it, but he’s got immunity and if he continues to resist, he can be held in contempt of court. Whether they want to do it willingly, or whether they are forced to do it under a grant of immunity, Willis is building a case that has a host of witnesses.”Eisen said the Georgia case is likely to be all the stronger for being largely built around the evidence of other Republicans.“The fact that his overtures were rejected by staunch Republican officials, Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state, Brian Kemp, the governor, makes a difference. Just the sheer weight of the evidence of election interference in Georgia is material. The Georgia case is a very powerful one, the most powerful we’ve seen to date,” he said.Meanwhile, the special counsel appointed by the US justice department, Jack Smith, is conducting two criminal investigations involving Trump that again draw in Republicans whose testimony could be condemn the former president.The New York Times reported earlier this month that investigators probing Trump’s mishandling of classified documents have won the cooperation of someone who worked for him at his Mar-a-Lago mansion in Florida.Like Willis, the justice department is using subpoenas to force grand jury testimony from those who witnessed Trump’s actions including whether he had classified documents moved in order to hide them once it because known they were illegally stored in Florida.Again, Trump’s team has dismissed the investigation as a “politically motivated witch-hunt” aimed at keeping him from returning to the White House. But the former president didn’t help himself at the CNN town hall when he undercut his own lawyers by claiming that he had “every right” to take the documents from the White House.“I didn’t make a secret of it,” he said.So will Trump be a convicted criminal by the time of the presidential election in November 2024?“That is entirely possible,” said Eisen. “It’s also possible that with court delays and appeals, he may not face incarceration until after the next election. But what matters is that the charges are being brought. And that cues the issue up for the jury of the American people in the primaries and then in the general election.” More

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      As Trump’s lies and scandals deepen, the GOP responds as usual – with silence

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      One day he was found liable for sexual abuse and defamation. The next he was on prime-time television pushing election lies, defending his own coup attempt and refusing to back Ukraine.To his millions of critics, it was another week that proved Donald Trump is unfit for office and dangerous to democracy. But to the top leaders of Trump’s Republican party, it was another week to keep heads down and say nothing.Kevin McCarthy, the speaker of the House of Representatives; Mitch McConnell, the minority leader in the Senate; leading state governors and even most of Trump’s potential rivals for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024 have made a habit of siding with him or remaining silent as each scandal comes and goes.Critics say their complicity underlines how comprehensively Trump took over the Republican party and shaped it in his own image. Even though McConnell and others privately loathe Trump and wish him gone, they dare not alienate his fervent support base. Rick Wilson, a former Republican consultant and co-founder of the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group, sums it up in one word: fear.“They are afraid of the mob, they’re afraid of the horde, they’re afraid of the anger and the craziness and the rage and the threats that come any time a Republican elected official really stands up and opposes Donald Trump,” Wilson said.He added: “None of the major elected officials – McConnell, McCarthy, the big state governors – are going to come out and say what they believe and know: that he is a monstrous figure and he is a dangerous figure.”Trump ran against the Republican establishment in 2016, exciting a grassroots army of supporters and eventually bending the party to his will. His victory over Democrat Hillary Clinton in the presidential election and pursuit of an agenda that fit many Republican priorities, from sweeping tax cuts to rightwing supreme court justices, persuaded many in leadership to overlook his chaotic style.But relations with McConnell soured over time, culminating in the 6 January 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol, for which he said Trump was “practically and morally responsible”. The former president has branded McConnell an “old crow” and repeatedly hurled racist insults at his Taiwanese-born wife, former transportation secretary Elaine Chao.Even so, despite their mutual animosity, the minority leader made clear this week that he will support Trump if he is the Republican nominee in 2024. Asked about the former president’s improving poll numbers, McConnell told CNN: “I’m going to support the nominee of our party for president, no matter who that may be.”Meanwhile Steve Daines, chair of the Senate Republicans’ campaign arm, has endorsed Trump for president in what many see as an attempt to curry favour with him and curb his meddling in next year’s Senate elections. Trump’s backing of extremists in last year’s midterms cost McConnell control of the Senate – an outcome that he is eager to avoid repeating.Wilson, author of Everything Trump Touches Dies, commented: “He can say, ‘See, Mr Trump, I’m loyal to you. I love you. I’m a good person. You should listen to me. Please, please, please don’t tell Tudor Dixon she should run again or don’t tell Kari Lake she should run again.’ These are very transactional and tactical approaches but nonetheless they are approaches that these people are willing to do to survive in a war with Trump.”He added: “There is no Republican party. It’s just Trump. It is only about his desires and his political power, his political goals. If you told the average Republican elected official, you have to cut off your arm to get an endorsement from Trump, they’re going to ask you for a saw and some Band-Aids.”McCarthy, for his part, also seemed shaken by the events of January 6, but later that month he visited Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in Florida, signalling that all was forgiven. When McCarthy was elected speaker earlier this year after a gruelling series of votes, he paid tribute to Trump for working the phones to help him secure victory.Since then he has swatted aside every legal controversy, including last month when, as Trump became the first former president to face criminal charges, McCarthy tweeted that the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, had “weaponized our sacred system of justice against President Donald Trump”.This week, in a civil case, a New York jury determined that Trump sexually abused and defamed the writer E Jean Carroll, awarding her $5m in damages (Trump is appealing the verdict). That alone would be enough to sink most political careers but McCarthy repeatedly dodged the issue when asked to comment by reporters on Capitol Hill.Other Republicans went further in expressing their fealty to Trump. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida told reporters: “That jury’s a joke. The whole case is a joke.” Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina added: “When it comes to Donald Trump, the New York legal system is off the rails.” Former vice-president Mike Pence told NBC News: “I would tell you, in my four and a half years serving alongside the president, I never heard or witnessed behaviour of that nature.”The following day, Trump gave an unhinged, falsehood-filled performance in a town hall event broadcast live on the CNN network. He vowed to pardon “a large portion” of the January 6 rioters, suggested that Republicans should let the government default on its debts and refused to call Vladimir Putin a war criminal over the killing of Ukrainian civilians.Strikingly, many in the audience in Manchester, New Hampshire, burst into applause and egged Trump on. When he made fun of Carroll they laughed. It was a glimpse of the “Make America great again” base that keeps party leaders awake at night.Donna Brazile, a former chairperson of the Democratic National Committee, said: “The voters stand by Donald Trump and as long as he has a grip on the Republican party and its voters, the leaders cannot step out ahead of where the voters are.“People should not condemn these voters, these voters who need to be educated, listened to and respected. After all, over 70 million Americans supported Donald Trump in the last election. That’s nothing to sneeze at. That’s voters who know what he stands for, know what he represents and still they’re with him.”She added: “As long as they’re sticking with Trump, I do believe that the leaders of the Republican party will also stand by Trump. Regardless of what they say behind his back, they’ll stick with Trump.”Even in the Trump era, the Republican party is not a monolith. The sexual abuse verdict prompted criticism from senators including John Cornyn, Mitt Romney, Mike Rounds and John Thune. In an interview with Punchbowl News, Bill Cassidy asked: “What if it was your sister? How could it not create concern?”After the chaotic CNN town hall, Chris Christie, a former governor of New Jersey, described Trump as “Putin’s puppet” and there was condemnation from Chris Sununu, the governor of New Hampshire, and Asa Hutchinson, a former governor of Arkansas running for president. But these are exceptions that prove the rule. Other confirmed or likely primary candidates steered clear in what is now a familiar pattern.After all, the Trump era is littered with the political corpses of Republicans who tried to oppose him only to suffer online abuse, public heckling, death threats or retribution at the ballot box. Senators Bob Corker, Jeff Flake and Ben Sasse and Representatives Justin Amash, Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger are among those who quit or were purged. They left behind a party that increasingly resembles Trump.Kurt Bardella, a Democratic strategist, said: “They have refused to divorce themselves from someone that they know is both a political loser for them and who represents things that are completely destructive to our democracy. After everything that we have seen, after everything that the Republican party itself has endured in terms of its underperforming in multiple election cycles, the only reason why they haven’t divorced themselves from Donald Trump is because they don’t want to.” More

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      There is a clear and present danger of a new Trump presidency. Democrats must act now to prevent it | Jonathan Freedland

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      We may come to remember this period as the interlude: the inter-Trump years. After the sigh of relief heard around the world when Donald Trump was defeated in November 2020, a grim realisation should be dawning: the threat of a Trump return to the White House is growing.His first task is to win the Republican party’s presidential nomination, but that hurdle is shrinking daily. Trump’s grip on his party remains firm, with none of his putative rivals coming close. Of course, the first round of primary voting is months away and much could change, but the shape of the race is already clear – and Trump is dominant. Witness the reaction to an event that would once have been terminal for any politician: this week’s civil court verdict that he had sexually abused the magazine writer E Jean Carroll in a New York department store in the 1990s, and then defamed her by branding her a liar.That “makes me want to vote for him twice”, said Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama of the jury’s decision, articulating the view held by many millions of Republicans that this judgment – and any other legal finding against the former president – proves only that the elites are out to get him.There was a similar Republican response in March when Trump was indicted, also in New York, over hush money paid to the former porn star Stormy Daniels. That saw his approval numbers among Republicans – the self-proclaimed party of family values – go up. For the believers, the indictment merely vindicated Trump’s claim that he is the martyred victim of a liberal deep state. The pattern is clear: what should kill him only makes him stronger.It means Democrats and those who wish to see Trump finished need to let go of the hope that the courts will dispatch him once and for all. There are multiple other cases pending, perhaps the most serious relating to his pressure on election officials in Georgia to “find” the votes that would overturn Joe Biden’s victory in that state. But on the current evidence, a slew of guilty verdicts would barely dent his standing with his own party. As Trump intuited back in 2016, he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and Republicans would still vote for him.It helps that his most obvious challenger, the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, is growing smaller in the spotlight. He is tetchy and struggles to connect: this week tape surfaced of advisers urging him before a TV debate to write the word “likable” at the top of his notes – just as a reminder. DeSantis’s failure to go after Trump directly makes him look like a coward. Above all, DeSantis is pursuing a flawed strategy. He is offering Trumpism without Trump. The trouble is, too many Republican primary voters like Trump, while DeSantis’s brand of Trumpism is a hard sell to the wider electorate who will vote in November 2024.Plenty of Democrats concede that Trump is likely to win his party’s nomination. Indeed, many want him to win, so sure are they that he will lose to Biden in a rematch of 2020. And he may. But that contest will be far too close for comfort, at least in the electoral college that decides the outcome. In 2020, just 44,000 votes in three states stood between a Biden victory and an electoral college tie. Now the polls look much worse for him.This week a Washington Post/ABC survey not only showed the president six points behind Trump, it also found 63% of Americans believe Biden, who would be 86 at the end of a second term, lacks the mental sharpness to serve effectively, up from 43% in 2020. Put simply, it was a photo finish last time and Trump’s prospects are better now than then.What would a Trump restoration entail? He himself has promised “retribution”, and those who served under him warn that a returned Trump would be less chaotic, more focused, than he was first time around. His appearance at a CNN town hall event this week provided several clues. On policy, Ukraine should get ready to be abandoned, while the world should brace for a US prepared to default on its debts. Americans will once again be deluged with a torrent of lies, delivered so fast that by the time you’ve challenged one, there will have been four more. (That is one reason why the CNN broadcast was horribly misconceived: it failed to learn a key lesson of 2016, when the US media made itself a tool of misinformation.)Trump also called Carroll a “whack job” and dismissed the sexual abuse verdict because it had been delivered in a liberal state under a judge appointed by Bill Clinton. This too has become a pattern, casting the justice system as merely another theatre in the partisan culture wars. Not content with destroying Republicans’ faith in electoral democracy in order to divert attention from the fact he lost an election, Trump is now doing the same to his followers’ trust in the law, this time to distract from the fact that he is a sexual predator.A second-term Trump would set about finishing what he started, breaking any institution that might stand in his way, whether that be the ballot box or the courts. As Senator Mitt Romney, a rare Republican voice of dissent, put it after the CNN show: “You see what you’re going to get, which is a presidency untethered to the truth and untethered to the constitutional order.”None of this is certain, but all of it is possible. Democrats need to snap out of the complacency brought by victory in 2020 and work as if they are in a race against the devil and lagging behind – because they are. They need to address the Biden age issue fast: several party veterans urge the president to get out more, recommending the kind of closeup encounters with the public at which he thrives. They need to sell their achievements, not least a strong record on jobs. And they have to sound the alarm every day, warning of the danger Trump poses. Because it is clear and it is present.
      Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
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      How should the media cover sexual predator Trump? – podcast

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      On Tuesday, a jury in New York found that the former president Donald Trump sexually abused magazine writer E Jean Carroll in the 1990s and then defamed her by branding her a liar.
      On Wednesday, Trump made the same baseless claims about Carroll that led to him losing the case – this time, live on CNN to millions of viewers.
      This week, Jonathan Freedland talks to Guardian US columnist Margaret Sullivan about the fallout from the E Jean Carroll case. The pair discuss how the media should cover a 2024 presidential candidate who has been impeached twice, indicted by a federal court, and who is now legally defined as a sexual predator

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      CNN head defends Trump’s lie-strewn town hall: ‘America was served very well’

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      CNN bosses have defended their decision to host a primetime town hall with Donald Trump, after triggering widespread outrage by allowing the former president to spout lies and disinformation on subjects from sexual assault to his attempt to overturn the 2020 election.Addressing staff anger over the decision to host the New Hampshire event, the CNN chief executive, Chris Licht, saluted what he called a “masterful performance” by Kaitlan Collins, the anchor who attempted to cope with Trump’s lies and abusive comments in front of a raucous Republican audience.On an internal call, Licht reportedly told staffers: “You do not have to like the former president’s answers, but you can’t say that we didn’t get them.“Kaitlan pressed him again and again and made news … Made a lot of news, [and] that is our job.”Before the town hall, CNN said it was hosting Trump because he is the clear frontrunner for the Republican nomination to face Joe Biden in the presidential election next year.After the event, in a Thursday statement, the network said it had acted “to get answers and hold the powerful to account”.But CNN saw widespread criticism for hosting the twice-impeached former president, who is under investigation for a litany of alleged crimes and civil offenses.Trump has pleaded not guilty to 34 criminal charges over a hush-money payment to the porn star Stormy Daniels. This week, he was found civilly liable for sexually assaulting and defaming the writer E Jean Carroll.He also faces state and federal investigations for election subversion, federal scrutiny of his retention of classified information and a multimillion-dollar civil suit over his business affairs.Licht took over at CNN last year and has faced criticism for pursuing changes in staffing and tone. His comments on Thursday were reported by Brian Stelter, a media commentator and anchor who Licht pushed out of the network.Licht reportedly said: “While we all may have been uncomfortable hearing people clapping, that was also an important part of the story.”At St Anselm’s College in Manchester, members of an audience of Republican voters clapped when Trump denied assaulting Carroll and mocked her as a “whack job”, a day after he was found liable for assaulting and defaming her and was ordered to pay her around $5m.When Trump denied taking three hours to tell supporters who attacked the Capitol on January 6 to to go home, audience members applauded.When Trump called Collins “nasty” and said she did not know what she was talking about, audience members laughed.Licht reportedly told staffers the audience in New Hampshire, the state which will host the first Republican primary, represented “a large swath of America”, a reality US media missed in 2016, when Trump shocked Hillary Clinton to become president.According to Stelter, Licht also said covering Trump would “continue to be messy and tricky, but it’s our job”, adding: “America was served very well by what we did last night.”Stelter said: “Many CNN employees strongly disagree.”One employee, the reporter Oliver Darcy, began the Reliable Sources newsletter he inherited from Stelter with stern words for his own network.“It’s hard to see how America was served by the spectacle of lies that aired on CNN Wednesday evening,” Darcy wrote.Calling Collins “as tough and knowledgable of an interviewer as they come”, Darcy pointed to how she “fact-checked Trump throughout the 70-minute town hall” … repeating “that there was no evidence for the lies he was disseminating on stage.“… Yet … Trump frequently ignored or spoke over Collins as he unleashed a firehose of disinformation upon the country, which a sizable swath of [Republicans] continue to believe.”Reed Galen, a Republican operative turned co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, pointed to CNN’s retreat from the adversarial stance it maintained throughout Trump’s presidency.He said: “Is anyone surprised by what we saw? If you are, you weren’t watching the last eight years. Thanks again to CNN, who helped get us into this in 2016, and is now helping us get deeper into this in 2023.”Galen also said Collins “probably tried the best she could, given the circumstances”.But the anchor was not universally praised, critics pointing for example to her failure to correct or challenge Trump’s comments on abortion, including claiming Democrats support abortion at nine months and killing babies after they are born.The Democratic House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries of New York, told MSNBC his party’s “position on reproductive freedom is very clear. We support a woman’s freedom to make her own reproductive decisions. And it’s unfortunate that [Trump] was allowed to repeat those lies repeatedly without it being questioned, including by anyone in the audience, which was very disturbing.”In a statement on Thursday, a CNN spokesperson said: “Kaitlan Collins exemplified what it means to be a world-class journalist.“She asked tough, fair and revealing questions. And she followed up and fact-checked President Trump in real time to arm voters with crucial information about his positions as he enters the 2024 election as the Republican frontrunner.“That is CNN’s role and responsibility: to get answers and hold the powerful to account.”Not all observers said CNN was wrong. Jon Ralston, chief executive of the Nevada Independent, said on Twitter: “I still believe CNN should have put Trump on, and Kaitlan Collins did her best.“But for every interview, you have to have a strategy. She didn’t, and that’s why it was a farce. You have to be willing to ignore the audience … and interrupt him and call out every lie.”Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a leading progressive congresswoman from New York, called the decision to host Trump “profoundly irresponsible”.Referring to Carroll, she told MSNBC: “What we saw tonight was a series of extremely irresponsible decisions that put a sexual abuse victim at risk … in front of a national audience and I could not have disagreed with it more. It was shameful.” More