E. Jean Carroll exits courthouse
Donald Trump did not have long to celebrate his resounding win in the Iowa caucuses. Less than 24 hours after presenting a victory speech in Des Moines, Trump was facing legal troubles and intense criticism on at least three fronts:
(1) Trump was back in a New York courtroom on Tuesday for the second phase of the sexual abuse/defamation case involving writer E. Jean Carroll. In that proceeding, the judge continued to refer to Trump as a "rapist," while Carroll is seeking at least $10 million in damages. It doesn't sound like much fun to sit through that.
(2) Trump received word that several lawyers are bailing out, no longer interested in representing him.
(3) Critics decried Trump's victory speech as dripping with discredited racist and eugenic ideas, the kind that led to Adolph Hitler's "Final Solution," which resulted in the murder of 6 million Jews.
What exactly is happening on these fronts? For one, Trump clearly is not in Iowa anymore, and his victory there seems long ago and far away. Let's take a closer look at these matters:
The E. Jean Carroll Case: She alleges Trump sexually abused and defamed her, while the judge has found that Trump is a "rapist." The GOP frontrunner is under fire --
Carroll is seeking $10 million in damages, so Trump is at threat of taking a blow to his wallet. How did Trump get in this mess? The New Republic (TNR) provides details under a headline that probably is meant to be shocking, ironic and a tad cheeky: "Rapist Republican front-Runner Heads Straight to Court After Iowa Win." Writes Torri Otten:
Trump is on trial for comments he made in 2019, when he said Carroll accused him of raping her just to promote her memoir. Presiding Judge Lewis Kaplan has already determined the former president is liable for defamation, so the trial is primarily to set damages.
Trump did not appear at his first trial against Carroll in May. But this time around, he is in the courtroom and may even testify—although that will have to wait until January 22, the day before the New Hampshire primary. (Trump isn’t required to attend, and he certainly isn’t required to testify.)
Judge Lewis Kaplan has also ruled that Trump can’t argue he didn’t rape Carroll. Although Trump was found liable for sexual abuse, Kaplan has repeatedly stated that Trump “‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.’”
In other words, a federal judge has recognized that Trump is a rapist.
In May, a jury unanimously found Trump liable for sexual abuse and battery against Carroll in the mid-1990s and for defaming her in 2022 while denying the assault. He was ordered to pay her $5 million in damages.
Kaplan ruled in September that since Trump has already been found liable for sexual abuse, his 2019 comments are by default defamatory. Carroll is now seeking at least $10 million in damages.
Lawyers race for the exits on Trump. Why?
The New Republic (TNR) looks for answers under the headline "Donald Trump May Have Won Iowa -- but He Just Lost a Slew of Lawyers." Writes Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling:
Despite his overwhelming popularity at the Iowa caucuses, Donald Trump can’t seem to keep a grip on his legal representation.
On Monday, one of the GOP front-runner’s star attorneys, Joe Tacopina, filed a declaration to withdraw his firm from two of Trump’s upcoming legal battles: his hush-money criminal trial in Manhattan and the E. Jean Carroll defamation case, which Trump has been desperately trying to appeal since being found liable for sexual abuse and defamation.
“I respectfully submit this Declaration in support of [law firm Tacopina Seigel and DeOreo’s] motion, made pursuant to Local Civil Rule 27.1, to withdraw as counsel (including TSD attorneys Joseph Tacopina, Chad D. Seigel and Matthew G. DeOreo) for Trump, with such other and further relief as the Court deems just and proper,” Tacopina wrote in the legal filing, effectively pulling three of Trump’s attorneys in one fell swoop.
t’s not clear why Tacopina decided to withdraw, though the decision comes during a year of extreme legal uncertainty for Trump, who is on the line for 91 criminal charges in four separate legal cases—34 of which stem from the hush-money case, in which Trump is accused of using his former fixer Michael Cohen to sweep an affair with porn actress Stormy Daniels under the rug ahead of the 2016 presidential election. That trial is set to begin in late March.
Trump has denied any wrongdoing in the cases against him.
“A lawyer might attempt to withdraw as counsel of record for a client in a pending case for a number of reasons,” former federal prosecutor Michael McAuliffe told Newsweek
“The attorney-client relationship might have suffered a fundamental breach of confidence, running in either or both directions. A strong-willed client who thinks he or she is more of a lawyer than the actual lawyer can create an untenable scenario for that lawyer to continue representing the client’s interests,” McAuliffe said, adding that there’s a chance the court may require Tacopina to identify a legal or factual basis to withdraw from representing the former president.
Critics assail Trump's use of racist and eugenic ideas in Iowa victory speech. What did he say, and how did he say it:
In an opinion piece at CNN, author Paul Moses says Trump headed down the same dangerous rhetorical path that Adolph Hitler once trod. Writes Moses:
Last month, former President Donald Trump said immigrants arriving in the United States were “poisoning the blood of our country” — prompting the Biden administration to draw a comparison to Adolf Hitler, who used the phrase “blood poisoning” in his manifesto, Mein Kampf. But Trump’s comments also bring to mind the eugenics movement — and the influence it had on American life in in the early 1900s.
In researching two books on Italian immigrants . . . I came to see how powerfully the junk science of eugenics influenced the way society viewed people such as my mother’s parents, who were immigrants from southern Italy.
In the process, I found news coverage, as well as the remarks of judges, academics, politicians and other public officials, echoing the racist notion that southern Italians were inherently inferior in the immigration debate in the early 20th century.
This nativist, pseudo-science rhetoric contributed to the failure of many people to see the dignity, decency and determination of impoverished newcomers and focus only on the negatives of mass migration.
Trump, in stoking support for his anti-immigration agenda, has brought that now thoroughly discredited racist thinking to play in the 21st century. In his victory speech after the Iowa caucuses on Monday night, the eugenicist slur that immigrants from some countries were innately inferior reverberated anew in his remarks. He went beyond his standard denunciation that the “invasion of millions and millions of people” at the southern border is filled with criminals, also claiming that “they’re coming from mental institutions and insane asylums. They’re being emptied out into our country.”
Trump's language, whether he knows it or not, comes straight out of the early 1900s, Moses writes:
In the emerging field of academic sociology, influential professors such as Edward Alsworth Ross advocated overt racism. . . .
Ross coined the enduring term “race suicide” in 1901 when he delivered the annual address — “The Causes of Race Superiority” — to the American Academy of Political and Social Science, which gathered in Philadelphia. With that term, Ross gave name to the idea that a “higher race … eliminates itself” because it has “failed to ward off” the infiltration of an “inferior race.”
In 1914, the same year Ross became president of the American Sociological Association, he expanded on “race suicide” in his book The Old World in the New. Immigrants, he warned, would act on Americans’ standards for cleanliness, morality and education “like a slow poison.” A nation that relies on immigration to maintain its population “deserves the extinction that surely awaits it,” he wrote.
Ross promoted the bogus theory that rated entire nationalities by the supposed shapes of their skulls. Observing Italian immigrants debarking, he wrote that they “show a distressing frequency of low foreheads, open mouths, weak chins, poor features, skew faces, small or knobby crania, and backless heads.” He warned about they could “mingle their heredity with ours” and perpetuated the idea that southern Italians were inherently unintelligent and violence-prone: “That the Mediterranean peoples are morally below the races of northern Europe is as certain as any social fact. . . . ”
By portraying millions of migrants as intrinsically inferior, popular anti-immigration writers such as Ross — and Madison Grant, whose 1916 book. The Passing of the Great Race, was a favorite of Hitler’s — helped to set the stage for the Immigration Act of 1924, which established quotas and put a chokehold on migration from southern and Eastern Europe.
But Ross came to regret the implications of his ideas about supposedly superior and inferior races, writing shortly after World War II that “we never imagined the theory being made a hinge for German aggression to turn on.” That’s what the phony claims of eugenics led to — Hitler’s “Final Solution,” which resulted in the murder of 6 million Jews. It’s certainly worth having vigorous debates about immigration laws, but those who’ve been indifferent to or even supportive of Trump’s increasingly clear turn toward racist, eugenic ideas should confront what they’ve enabled.
