ANDREW NEIL: Donald Trump being labelled a sexual abuser won’t bother his base… But the soccer moms who will decide the next election will be repulsed
- READ MORE: Ex-President is cleared of rape but ordered to pay her $5m
Only when Donald Trump was indicted in New York at the end of March on charges related to paying hush money to porn star Stormy Daniels did his campaign for the U.S. presidency, until then languishing, take off.
Just how much it was turbocharged by a case that was heard a full six weeks before the one that made headlines this week was starkly revealed in a bombshell poll last weekend.
It was conducted for ABC News and The Washington Post, not exactly hotbeds of pro-Trump sentiment. The survey nonetheless gave Trump a solid two-to-one lead (43 per cent to 20 per cent) over his main challenger, Ron DeSantis, in the battle for the Republican nomination.
The Florida governor’s bid to be the Republican candidate in next year’s presidential election has been in the doldrums since Trump was indicted and increasingly looks as if it might never recover.
The more we see of DeSantis on the national stage, the more it appears he can’t hack it in the big time. Yet no other Trump challenger for the nomination is even close to double digits.
Only when Donald Trump was indicted in New York at the end of March on charges related to paying hush money to porn star Stormy Daniels did his campaign for the U.S. presidency, until then languishing, take off
The survey nonetheless gave Trump a solid two-to-one lead (43 per cent to 20 per cent) over his main challenger, Ron DeSantis, in the battle for the Republican nomination
Even more significant, in a match-up with President Biden for the White House, Trump was comfortably ahead with 49 per cent to 42 per cent for the President, whose approval rating has slumped to a lowest-ever 36 per cent. The poll, said one Democratic TV pundit, was ‘brutal for Biden’.
It was conducted, of course, before Tuesday’s verdict in another New York court. This time a jury concluded that Trump had sexually assaulted a journalist called E. Jean Carroll almost 30 years ago in the changing rooms of a New York department store.
He was ordered to pay her $5 million (£4 million) for the attack and his subsequent defamatory remarks about her. Whether this will put more rocket boosters under Trump is less clear.
The earlier Stormy Daniels indictment was drafted by a Left-wing district attorney called Alvin Bragg, who has admitted he’s been out to get Trump for years. The prosecution was so premeditated, it was part of Bragg’s election pitch.
Even some anti-Trumpers thought the charges weak and convoluted, the prosecutor unimpressive. The Trump base saw it as much worse than that.
His most enthusiastic supporters claimed it was a politically motivated show trial. The Trump base was energised and rushed to his defence, derailing DeSantis. Even the Republican establishment was forced to rally round a man they hoped they’d seen the back of.
There was a palpable, perhaps unstoppable, surge for Trump among Republicans, as the weekend poll confirmed. But now, just maybe, things have changed.
The political consequences of Trump running as a candidate despite the sexual assault finding are not as clear-cut. True, he was found innocent of rape, Carroll’s most serious accusation. But sexual assault is hardly a minor misdemeanour, as the $5 million award illustrates. (It was a civil case, so jail time was never on the cards.)
The conservative Wall Street Journal perhaps summed up the politics of it all best. The verdict should make a difference in how voters perceive Trump, it argued, but — it added depressingly — American politics is now so ‘debased and polarised’ that it probably won’t.
My sense is that it will further galvanise the Republican base for Trump, consolidating his status as clear frontrunner for the party’s nomination. But it could seriously undermine his ability to appeal beyond that, come the general election. He has enough of a grip on the party faithful to become the Republican candidate. But that base alone is not enough to propel him back to the White House.
There is certainly enough that is unusual, even strange, about the verdict to convince those minded to believe that Trump has been the victim of yet another political stitch-up by a New York court system that is wholly hostile to him.
He was ordered to pay her $5 million (£4 million) for the attack and his subsequent defamatory remarks about her. Whether this will put more rocket boosters under Trump is less clear
The jury in this case found he had not committed rape but had defamed Carroll because he had robustly denied raping her. Go figure, as they say on that side of the Atlantic.
It is not clear on what basis the jury could distinguish between rape and sexual assault, since there were no witnesses to the encounter. The judge stopped Trump’s lawyers from introducing into court matters they thought important but was more indulgent with Carroll’s lawyers, who were even allowed to play the infamous ‘Access Hollywood’ tape, first revealed during the 2016 presidential campaign, in which Trump boasts that ‘you can do anything’ to a woman if you’re a ‘star’, even ‘grab ’em’ by the genitals.
Disgusting as Trump’s sentiments are, many might conclude that this tape has nothing to do with the Carroll case and might just be the bravado of a blowhard anyway. Other women who claim to have been attacked by Trump were also allowed to testify, even though their claims have never been properly tested.
Trump, of course, made things worse for himself. He refused to testify at the trial but in a video deposition he doubled down on the Access Hollywood tape, saying ‘stars’ had behaved in the way he had depicted them for ‘a million years, unfortunately’ — then adding, incredibly, ‘or fortunately’.
He went on to say that he should be regarded as a ‘star’ and restated his claim that he couldn’t have attacked Carroll because she was ‘not his type’, before telling her lawyer, for no good purpose, that she wasn’t his type either. After all that, some kind of punitive verdict was almost inevitable.
Of course, in a civil trial the bar is lower than in criminal cases. The jury only had to decide whether the ‘preponderance of the evidence’ was with Carroll, rather than that her evidence was ‘beyond reasonable doubt’. If this had been a criminal case, a guilty verdict would have been unlikely. Indeed, it probably would not have come to court.
These legal niceties will not matter much to a crucial demographic in U.S. elections: middle-class suburban women often referred to in America as ‘soccer moms’. These are affluent working women, often college-educated, who still find the time to take their children to football practice. They deserted Trump in 2020 and nothing in the Carroll case is likely to endear him to them again. Indeed, they are likely to be even more repulsed than before.
So the Democrats should be favourites to hold the White House. Except that Biden has made it clear he wants to run again. This has caused despair among top party managers but they have no idea how to stop him.
Republicans will make his age — he would start a second term at 82 — a major campaign issue, helped by the fact that his much younger vice-president, Kamala Harris, is widely regarded as worse than useless, even by loyal Democrats.
On Tuesday, the day of the Carroll verdict, I dined with two leading U.S. political strategists: one Democrat, one Republican. Both were in despair.
The Republican said his party could never return to sanity until it could purge itself of Trump — and that didn’t look like happening any time soon.
The Democrat wondered aloud if Biden could make it through a gruelling campaign. Even when faced with softball questions last weekend from a sympathetic TV interviewer (the only kind allowed near him), he stumbled, meandered and, at times, descended into incoherence.
The strategist’s hope was that a series of polls showing he was going to lose would embolden his party’s equivalent of the Tories’ ‘men in grey suits’ to march into the Oval Office to tell Biden the game was up. But he wasn’t holding his breath.
‘So are you telling me that the most likely prospect for 2024 is a Biden-Trump replay?’ I asked. ‘Is that really the best you can do?’ Yes, they both replied, glumly.
They were so miserable about their country’s politics that, to try to cheer them up, I picked up the bill for dinner. I failed.
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