INEWS
Just minutes after a jury ordered Donald Trump to pay more than $80m (£63m) to a woman he had been previously been found to have sexually abused, he posted on social media.
“Absolutely ridiculous! I fully disagree with both verdicts, and will be appealing this whole Biden Directed Witch Hunt focused on me and the Republican Party,” he wrote on Truth Social.
It was Friday evening and a jury had just ordered the former president to pay an additional $83.3m to E Jean Carroll, a writer who accused him of sexually assaulting her in a New York department store three decades earlier. In May 2013, a court found him guilty of sexually abusing her and she sued him a second time, this time for libel, for damaging her reputation by denying the attack.
As Trump, 77, fumed and raved, Carroll, 80, issued her own statement. “This is a great victory for every woman who stands up when she’s been knocked down,” she said. “And a huge defeat for every bully who has tried to keep a woman down.”
Trump, who earlier in the week stormed to a second primary victory, beating Nikki Haley in New Hampshire by 11 points and all but cementing his position as the Republican nominee, is now using the libel ruling to raise funds for his re-election campaign.
Similarly, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are using the near-certainty Trump will be their opponent in November to raise money themselves.
They are very much focused on women, reminding them that in 2022 the Supreme Court, its conservative majority secured by Trump’s appointment of three specially selected justices, had overturned Roe v Wade, which had guaranteed the right to a legal abortion.
“The former president hand-picked three Supreme Court justices because he intended for them to overturn Roe,” Harris said at a campaign rally in Wisconsin. “He intended for them to take your freedoms, and it is a decision he brags about”
Who will come out on top – Trump and his claims about “a witch hunt” or Biden and Harris pointing out to women that today they have less freedom about their reproductive choices than their mothers had?
In the short term, Trump may get his way. For all of Haley’s stated determination to remain in the race, it is incredibly hard to see her winning the nomination.
Yes, Trump faces 91 criminal charges and may be showing signs of cognitive decline, but his historic wins in Iowa and New Hampshire showed he retains an iron grip on the base of the party, a rallying that has been helped by the succession of charges against him.
However, in the general election in November, it may be very different. We know from the midterm results of November 2022 when Democrats, against the odds, hung onto the Senate and only barely lost the House, the scrapping of Roe saw a surge of voters show up to vote.
