Former president Donald Trump is near a crucial juncture of the 2024 campaign. Mail ballots are due to go out soon, his only scheduled debate with Vice President Kamala Harris is happening in four days and Trump is trying to reverse the momentum Harris has generated in her six-plus weeks as a presidential candidate.
With that as the backdrop, Trump decided to spend nearly an hour Friday rehashing old grievances, offering a laundry list of false and debunked claims, criticizing his lawyers and going into great and seemingly ill-advised detail about the sexual assault allegations and verdicts against him.
Trump even acknowledged he was advised not to say some of what he said, either because it raised the possibility of yet more legal jeopardy or because it was obviously counterproductive politically.
Trump’s ability to go off-message and rant in ways that make his advisers — and, potentially, voters — squirm is unmatched. But even against that backdrop, this was on another level.
The impetus for the media event at Trump Tower was Trump’s appeal of the E. Jean Carroll sexual assault and defamation civil verdict, which was argued Friday morning. (This is the $5 million verdict against Trump — compared to the later $83.3 million case in another Carroll defamation suit.)
Trump began by repeating many claims he has made before, including that he doesn’t know Carroll and never met her, despite a photo showing the two of them meeting at one point. He said she made up the story of his assaulting her. The claims closely resembled the ones that were found to be defamatory in both of his cases. Carroll could seemingly sue again, an option her lawyer has reserved in the past when Trump kept saying such things. Her lawyer raised the prospect again Friday.
But Trump actually took things a step further.
At one point, he suggested that the 1987 photo of him and Carroll showing them, in fact, meeting “could have been AI-generated.” (This is the photo in which Trump in a deposition mistook Carroll for his ex-wife Marla Maples.) This is as nonsensical as Trump’s claim that recent images of Harris’s crowd size were faked. The photo first circulated in 2019, when Carroll brought her allegations forward.
At another point, Trump echoed his previous claims about another woman who accused him of sexual misconduct, suggesting that she wouldn’t have been desirable enough — a theme he returned to repeatedly throughout the appearance.
“I know you’re going to say it’s a terrible thing to say, but it couldn’t have happened,” Trump said of the other woman, Jessica Leeds, before adding that “she would not have been the chosen one. She would not have been the chosen one.”
The “chosen one” being the one he would choose to assault? Even the most generous interpretation of his bizarre comment makes it hard to conclude otherwise.
Trump has previously suggested he wasn’t attracted to the women who have accused him. But here he was casting assaulting women as something of a selection process.
Trump dwelled on that point, too, despite indicating that a lawyer had told him, “Please don’t say that I would not want to be involved with her.” He said at another point that his “people” told him not to say that, before saying it: “I would not want to be involved with her.”
Indeed, Trump at multiple points criticized his legal teams.
He said the same lawyer basically tried to convince him to stay away from courtrooms, but suggested that hadn’t panned out well.
“He said, ‘Sir, you don’t have to show up. I’ve got this. You shouldn’t do it. It’s beneath you. It’s beneath the office of the president,’” Trump said. “I understood what he meant by that. And so I didn’t show up, and I was found guilty of something that I didn’t do with a woman that I have never seen, touched, or in any way was involved with, nor would I want to be.”
But Trump also took time to criticize the legal team that was still standing with him — quite literally, given that they flanked him at the news conference.
He said the cases have been rigged but also seemed to hold his lawyers responsible for the verdicts. (Trump has recently been found guilty of criminal financial fraud, and liable in civil court for sexual assault, defamation and more financial fraud.)
“I have all this legal talent, but legal talent cannot overcome rigged judges; they can’t overcome a 4 percent Republican area,” Trump said. “And I’m disappointed in my legal talent; I’ll be honest with you.”
He went on to complain at length that his legal team that morning hadn’t broached a dress in the case that he compared to Monica Lewinsky’s dress, referring to the garment that held DNA evidence of former president Bill Clinton’s sexual encounter with Lewinsky.
“Today at the trial, they didn’t mention the dress,” Trump said, citing the judge’s rejection of a proposed deal to determine whether Trump’s DNA was on a dress Carroll had worn (Trump’s side proposed the deal after initially rejecting Carroll’s request for Trump’s DNA). “So the Monica Lewinsky-type dress was a big part of the trial. Big, big part of the trial. I said, ‘Why didn’t you mention that?’”
Conversely, Trump hailed U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon, who repeatedly ruled in Trump’s favor in his criminal classified documents case in Florida, and cast her as the antithesis of these other judges. He even suggested the Justice Department should look at prosecuting people who criticize Cannon.
“I think it should be illegal. That’s what the DOJ should look into,” Trump said. “The legality of these people taking a brilliant judge and demeaning her, and taking other people that are fair and solid and demeaning them.”
Needless to say, if criticizing judges were actually a prosecutable offense, Trump could be in significantly more legal trouble.
Perhaps most shocking about Trump’s performance was the decision to go into great detail about issues like the dress in multiple sexual-assault allegations. He spoke about how supposedly implausible the women’s stories were, given the circumstances in each case. In the instance of Leeds, who had testified at the Carroll trial that Trump had groped her while sitting next to her on a plane, he argued that an airplane armrest would have gotten in the way. He also went after another woman, despite not being able to summon her name.
He did so even as these matters have generally faded from public view and didn’t seem to hurt Trump politically that much in real time. But Trump decided to make a show out of it.
If nothing else, it reminded a whole lot of people that Trump has been found liable for what the judge in the case said amounted to rape. And for a lot of voters just tuning in to the 2024 campaign, it could well introduce them to a story they might not be aware of.
You could perhaps understand why a Trump adviser or lawyer would tell him to sit these things out.