I’ve always been sympathetic to E. Jean Carroll’s wanting to hold Trump accountable for what -- I don’t doubt -- he did to her.
But compared to Trump’s assault on American democracy throughout his presidency, what Trump did with women — before he was President, when he was just a creep in the “private sector” — has seemed a secondary matter.
Keeping my eyes on the Prize, what’s been important to me about the Rule of Law taking Trump down is that Trump be stripped of his power to inflict fundamental damage on the nation.
But now I’m seeing how this Rape Trial can play an important role in doing just that.
The reports of Ms. Carroll’s testimony show her to be a most impressive witness. She seems to have been about as powerful and credible a witness as one could hope to script it. The reports show a sympathetic and entirely believable white middle-class woman presenting a picture of Trump to the nation that conveys dramatically what a monster Donald Trump is.
It’s true, anyone should be able to see Trump’s monstrousness displayed in all his other crimes: his attempted coup, his treatment of Mike Pence, his extorting Ukraine, his jeopardizing American national security with documents he stole and would not give back, and a whole variety of other words and deeds that should suffice to drive any decent American to want Trump as far as possible from power.
But those other actions occur at an abstract level. One needs to make the mental bridge between political actions in a civilized society to the gut recognition of the evil man they reveal. Those other expressions of Trump’s monstrousness don’t register directly on the most fundamental and primitive level of our human moral consciousness.
But it’s different when we see a man inflict such wounds on a sympathetic woman that she apparently permanently lost her capacity to have a romantic relationship. When we see that, Trump’s monstrousness registers on that kind of basic, moral, human understanding that long precedes things like constitutional political orders.
That’s why this case now looks to me not only as a place where a particular woman will — it seems likely — get the good justice she seeks, but also as a drama that it will help turn even more of the American people against this terrible man.
This trial looks, in other words, like a valuable part of the overall strategy to sweep off our national stage this terrible man who has done so much damage to the nation, and threatens to do much more.
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