The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Monday, April 1, 2024

Notably: When journalists or anyone else writes or speaks of Donald Trump raping E. Jean Carroll, it’s not hyperbole. It’s not an ideological reach. It’s fact, the sort of fact that of its own disqualifying of his role in politics or business, and that is the more astounding for being essentially ignored. Another pass. The fact of it was underscored not by assumptions at large by Trump’s enemies, but legally, in a legal opinion, by a judge who felt it necessary to make the fact as precise as possible. The judge did so in the aftermath of the verdict that found Trump liable for raping and defaming Carroll, when Trump’s lawyers tried to parse the wording and say that, well, sexual abuse is not rape. Digital penetration (what she endured) is not rape. “Sexual battery” is not rape. All ridiculous claim. Anyone who’s so much as gleaned the occasional sex proceedings in Flagler County court (or their summaries in these pages) would know that men are serving long prison sentences from here who have merely abused children over their clothes, while anything involving unwanted or unlawful contact with genital areas, not necessarily penetration, is considered rape. Obviously child sex crimes are treated more severely, but definitions remain. The judge’s clarification: “The jury’s unanimous verdict in Carroll II was almost entirely in favor of Ms. Carroll. The only point on which Ms. Carroll did not prevail was whether she had proved that Mr. Trump had “raped” her within the narrow, technical meaning of a particular section of the New York Penal Law – a section that provides that the label “rape” as used in criminal prosecutions in New York applies only to vaginal penetration by a penis. Forcible, unconsented-to penetration of the vagina or of other bodily orifices by fingers, other body parts, or other articles or materials is not called “rape” under the New York Penal Law. It instead is labeled “sexual abuse.” […] The finding that Ms. Carroll failed to prove that she was “raped” within the meaning of the New York Penal Law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump “raped” her as many people commonly understand the word “rape.” Indeed, as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that
Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.”

—P.T.

 

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For the mean fawning, the servile flatteries, the deceitful correspondences, the base ingratitude to old benefactors, and the slavish compliances with new friends, and all the other arts and treacheries, which are necessary to be put in practice, in order to rise in such courts, or indeed to become heads of parties even in free governments, make it almost impossible for a truly great or virtuous man to attain to those stations. A good man will choose to live in an innocent obscurity, and enjoy the internal satisfaction resulting from a just sense of his own merit, and virtue, rather than aim at greatness, by a long series of unworthy arts, and ignoble actions; whilst the ambitious, the cruel, the rapacious, the false, the proud, the treacherous part of mankind, will be ever thrusting themselves forward, and endeavouring to sparkle in courts, as well as in the eyes of the unthinking crowd; and, to make themselves necessary, will be continually either flattering or distressing princes.

–From john Trenchard in Cato’s Letters, Jan. 28, 1720.

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