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Two stories that broke this week - one much talked-about, one not so much - have something to teach us about Donald Trump’s relationship to scandal.
The talked-about story is that Trump was ordered by a court to pay columnist E. Jean Carroll a whopping $83.3m in damages for defamation, following an earlier civil trial in which a jury concluded that Trump raped Carroll in the 1990s.1 So yes, the frontrunner to be the GOP’s candidate for president has been found in a civil trial to be a rapist, hardly surprising given that he was taped admitting to committing acts of sexual assault in 2005.
It could seem hopelessly naive at this point to ask why being found by a court to be a rapist doesn’t just destroy Trump’s candidacy, so I won’t ask that question. The answers are, by now, I think, known by everyone: because his supporters don’t care that he’s a rapist, because pro-Trump media ignores or downplays scandals like this; because people have become inured to Trump being surrounded by constant scandal and so discount any specific one; and because his supporters will dismiss the outcome as part of some vague “persecution” of the former president.
For all of these reasons and more, this case won’t make any difference to Trump’s chances in the primary. But I think there’s an argument to be made that this might be the one court case this year that really harms Trump in the general election.
Unlike the other cases Trump faces this year, this one is fairly unambiguous: Trump raped someone, then defamed the person he raped, and now he has been ordered to pay tens of millions of dollars in damages. It’s also the case that is most difficult to fit into some sort of narrative of political persecution. Carroll is not a political actor and there are no political stakes in the case. It’s simply about a powerful man who sexually assaulted a comparatively-powerless woman and then attempted to bully his way out of the consequences. He’s still doing it now by attacking her publicly. Carroll is receiving daily rape and death threats from Trump’s supporters which, we can only imagine, have ruined her life.
It goes without saying that nobody should support a rapist becoming president. It’s certainly not the case that only women should or would care about Trump raping someone, but women are likely to be particularly open to reconsidering their support for Trump based on reporting about this case. And Trump has often struggled with women voters, losing them by something in the range of 12-15% against Biden. His response to this - such as his famous appeal to the “suburban housewives of America” in 2020 - has not usually shown much political tact or skill. Shaving a few percentage points off of Trump’s support among women could be the difference between success and defeat for Biden.
A second story this week ought to also have a large impact, but likely won’t. This is the release of an Inspector General report into the running of the White House Medical Unit when Trump was president. The IG report found that the Medical Unit was basically a rogue operation, flouting laws left, right and center in order to deliver whatever medical services someone in the White House wanted. The unit didn’t keep track of prescription drugs or even check that it was dispensing them to someone eligible, and this attitude extended even to controlled substances like fentanyl and ketamine.
Connoisseurs of Trump scandal will not be surprised by this, because the behavior of White House doctors generated headlines even when he was president. His personal physician, Ronny Jackson, was known as the “Candyman” for dispensing pills without asking too many questions, and also for being drunk on duty. Trump rewarded this conduct by trying to have him made head of the Veterans Administration (which would mean running the largest hospital system in the United States), and when that gambit failed Jackson retired from government service and became - what else? - a Republican congressman.
The White House Medical Unit scandal is more run-of-the-mill than Trump being a rapist, but it’s still extraordinary, especially when the nation is in the grip of an opioid epidemic fuelled by dodgy prescription practices. If it happened under any other president the fallout would be immense. Imagine the reaction of the right if Barack Obama, the nation’s first African-American president, had a personal doctor known as the “Candyman” for handing out narcotics.
But one of Trump’s survival mechanisms is to generate so many scandals that no particular one of them sticks. Compared to some of his greatest hits - like stealing classified military plans and keeping them in his bathroom or leading an insurrection - the mismanagement of the medical unit doesn’t look particularly important. But that’s just an indication of how low he bought the office he once held and now aspires to hold again.