William Roper: “So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!”

Sir Thomas More: “Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?”

William Roper: “Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!”

Sir Thomas More: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!”
― Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons: A Play in Two Acts

In the formerly civilized New York City, at the formerly venerable U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, yet another defilement of Lady Justice has taken place against Donald Trump. A jury, seated anonymously, as in mob trials, by a completely biased judge, terrified about what their peers might say or do unless they went along, awarded a total of $83.3 million to a woman by the name of E. Jean Carroll. It was an effort to publicly humiliate the front runner for President of the United States after the American people once again embraced him overwhelmingly in the New Hampshire presidential primary. It is part of an orchestrated plan of lawfare meant not just to imprison the person the people want to be their President, but also to bankrupt him and deny him the financial resources necessary to secure the presidency.

As the Article III Project’s Mike Davis points out, if judges continue to refuse to get backbones and refuse to turn back these repeated injustices, the courts themselves will lose all legitimacy:

“Another Democrat plaintiff, with more Democrat-funded attorneys, another Democrat judge, and another Democrat jury in another Democrat hellhole just awarded a legally flawed and an unconstitutionally punitive award against Trump. No sane person on the planet actually believes Jean Carroll, who named her cat Vagina and fantasized about rape being sexy. Nor would any sane person believe her reputation is worth anywhere close to $6—let alone $65 million. This is part of the Democrats’ lawfare and election interference against Trump. Democrats know they can’t beat Trump on November 5, 2024. So, they just want to impeach him twice, throw him in prison for life, bankrupt him, illegally gag him, and simply take him off the ballot. Unless judges want the courts to lose all legitimacy, this must stop.”

Carroll’s lawsuits have been bankrolled by Reid Hoffman, the same Silicon Valley mogul who bankrolled most of Nikki Haley’s campaign. As Davis points out, the criminal lawfare campaign now being conducted against Trump is creating a constitutional crisis and a crisis of legitimacy for the government itself.

The damages award punishes Trump for continuing to insist he never met E. Jean Carroll, let alone that he raped her or sexually assaulted her decades ago in a dressing room at the ritzy Manhattan Bergdorf Goodman department store. In the first chapter of this novel, before a New York jury and the same biased judge, the jury found that Trump did not rape Ms. Carroll as she claimed but that some sort of sexual encounter took place and awarded her $5 million in damages. That case followed the Me-Too movement’s Survivors Act law being passed in New York. It allowed decades old civil claims like Carroll’s to proceed long after the expiration of the statute of limitations.

Prior to that law being passed, Ms. Carroll had sued Trump for defamation in 2019 when he denied her claim that he had raped her and made various comments addressing her lack of credibility. That is the case which was tried over the last few weeks. Judge Lewis Kaplan ruled that Trump could not contest anything about Carroll’s claims in the case, that the previous jury verdict had to be taken as fact even though it is on appeal. The only thing to be decided by the jury was the amount of damages to be awarded because Trump continued to proclaim his innocence. The substance of the damages claim was the claim by Carroll that Trump’s continued assertion of innocence had caused his supporters to send death threats to her.

Both cases were an exercise in the Theater of the Absurd. Ms. Carroll never filed a police report, did not call out to anyone about the alleged physical assault, claims that somehow the already famous Donald Trump got her alone in a store where commission-rewarded sales people cling to and shadow their wealthy potential buyers, and where cameras guard against shoplifting of expensive merchandise.  She does not know what day or year this happened, only that it was in the mid-1990s, stated on national television that she thought rape was sexy, appeared on the cover of  New York Magazine in the dress which she says she wore on the day of the incident, said dress only coming into being years later, named her cat Vagina, called her then black husband an ape, and painted all the trees around her country house blue.  In my opinion, these facts and others establish that Ms. Carroll is lying and more than justify the description of her as a wack job. But Judge Kaplan prevented most of these facts from ever reaching either jury. In the first trial, he ruled that Trump could not offer DNA to disprove Carroll’s rape claims while disparaging Trump’s lawyers in front of the jurors.

This chapter of the novel found Judge Kaplan demanding to preview everything Trump might say in his testimony and severely circumscribing it so that he could not elaborate his claim of innocence, again repeatedly abusing Trump’s lawyers in front of the jury, and allowing Ms. Carroll to proceed with her claim of multiple death threats despite her admission that she had deleted them from her computer.  This made effective cross-examination of her death threat claims virtually impossible. He barred Trump’s expert witnesses from testifying at all, while praising the testimony of Carroll’s expert witness that she needed at least $7 million to reestablish her reputation. Never mind that Carroll avidly sought the media adoration which resulted in widespread publications of her ludicrous claims against the President of the United States and the public’s negative views of her.

Trump derangement syndrome is epidemic in both Manhattan and Washington, D.C. and is especially virulent among judges and lawyers. Those lawyers who have stood by Trump and argued as they normally would in any legal case have found themselves in bar proceedings threatening their licenses or in criminal proceedings threatening them with jail. Those who have been infected, delusionally claim that Trump is a new Hitler and that any act against him or his supporters, however criminal, is justified even if they are acts which themselves replicate the actual Hitler’s worst depravities. They claim they are protecting democracy while decimating its foundations and imposing an incipient dictatorship in their jihad against Trump. These brainwashed fools, made mad by their illness, do not realize that those who have shot them up with this disease will come for them next. The goal here is nothing less than the destruction of the United States.