Donald Trump: Sometimes, a life of immorality and callous disregard for others comes back to harm you
Timothy P. Carney
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We do not live in a just world. Sometimes crime pays. The book of Job shows us that the righteous sometimes suffer for their righteousness.
American politics, in particular, seems to reward the worst among us. The 2016 presidential election pitted Hillary Clinton — famous for her thirst for power, self-dealing, and disdain for anyone standing in her way — against Donald Trump, whose narcissism and infidelity had made him a celebrity decades before.
JURY ORDERS TRUMP TO PAY $5M IN DAMAGES TO CARROLL FOR BATTERY AND DEFAMATION
Yet Hillary’s perfidy was rewarded with hundreds of millions of dollars, a U.S. Senate seat, the State Department, and unending adulation by much of the news media. Donald Trump’s wretched way of life won him billions, the presidency, and loyal support from most of the Republican electorate.
Today’s sexual abuse and defamation verdicts in Trump’s civil trial might be the first time he’s paid any serious price for living his life with total disregard for morality or for other people.
A New York jury in a civil case found Trump responsible for sexual assault and defamation of E. Jean Carroll, who had claimed Trump raped her.
Trump denied all the charges. Maybe Trump’s telling the truth. Maybe he never met Carroll. The standard of proof in this civil trial was merely the “preponderance of evidence,” not the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard in criminal trials.
False rape accusations happen. A billionaire politician like Trump is a prime target for such false accusations.
Despite all of that, Trump never deserved the benefit of the doubt here, because he lived his life in a way that earned him nothing by scorn and distrust. Trump left two wives, and by all accounts cheated on all three of his wives. He bragged about sexually assaulting women, because “when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.” Also, he has always smeared and personally attacked everyone who ever challenged him. None of those facts prove that he sexually assaulted or defamed Carroll, but they all make it very easy to believe.
When asked in the deposition for this case, “At least in your first marriage, you were seeing women outside of your marriage while you were married, correct?” Trump paused and said, “I don’t know.”
For starters, that should be an easy question for any man to answer. “Seeing women outside of your marriage while you were married” is the sort of thing that ought to weigh heavily on one’s conscience. Most likely, Trump was simply lying under oath here, as he had publicly bragged about his affair with Marla Maples. (“I don’t think I was public about it,” Trump said three times in his deposition.)
In fact, back in 1994, Trump talked to ABC Primetime Live about the time his wife Ivana confronted his mistress Marla. If the two hadn’t met that day, Trump said, “it’s possible that maybe it would still be going on. … My life was so great in so many ways. … Even the concept: Beautiful girlfriend, beautiful wife, beautiful wife — life was just a bowl of cherries.”
That’s a man bragging about marital infidelity. That’s a man who doesn’t respect women or marriage and who doesn’t believe he is bound by morality. Why would anyone ever trust such a man?
And would it be shocking if such a man sexually assaulted a woman?
When confronted with Carroll’s accusation in 2019, Trump’s primary defense was, “she’s not my type.” In 2022 he reiterated in a press release, “This woman is not my type!” In his 2022 deposition, he defended that statement: “The only difference between me and other people is I’m honest. She’s not my type.”
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For starters, he apparently isn’t honest, seeing how minutes earlier he had said he didn’t know if he ever cheated on his wives — something he had spent years bragging about. But also, he’s admitting that he has a “type” he would try to grope in a store and that he believes other men would admit as much were they as honest as he.
In his own words, Trump shows himself to be depraved. If the jury is wrong and he’s totally innocent in this case, Trump nevertheless made his own bed by living a life of depravity.