President Donald Trump lost in court again on Friday. Not his administration, but Trump the private citizen, who was still fighting to overturn the May 2023 verdict where a jury found him liable for the sexual assault of writer E. Jean Carroll.
The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals declined to rehear a December 2024 decision from a three-judge panel that refused to overturn the verdict. After being handed that loss, Trump asked the full court to rehear the case. Now that they’ve said no, Trump is nearly 100% likely to take it to the Supreme Court.
To be clear, this isn’t the case where a jury awarded Carroll $83.3 million for Trump’s defamation of her, though he is appealing that one, too.
E. Jean Carroll attends the Time100 Gala, celebrating the 100 most influential people in the world, on April 25, 2024
Back to the case at hand, two of Trump’s 2nd Circuit Court appointees, Steven Menashi and Michael Park, did Trump a solid with a 37-page dissent against the denial of rehearing it. It was such a blatant, transparent attempt to bolster Trump that other members of the court, including those who sat on the original three-judge panel, issued separate opinions, pointing out that several of their reasons for dissent weren’t even issues Trump raised in the first place.
Menashi and Park noodled through a complaint about how it wasn’t fair that the lower court didn’t address “actual malice”—the higher standard required for public figures to prove defamation. But since that was never Trump’s argument at the lower court, it’s distinctly weird and out of pocket to slam a lower court for not considering it.
What it does do, however, is tee up Trump’s future trip to the Supreme Court.
Menashi and Park also engage in a lengthy and hilarious dissection of what the Access Hollywood tape could have meant, rather than what it actually says. Trump didn’t want the tape to be shown to the jury, saying that it wasn’t similar enough to Carroll’s allegations to be admissible.
Remember that tape? The one where Trump boasts that, “You know I'm automatically attracted to beautiful … I just start kissing them. It's like a magnet. Just kiss. I don't even wait. And when you're a star they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”
Menashi and Park’s dissent skips right over that last part to instead do some tortured speculation about how that statement somehow, maybe just meant that he already knew the woman he was boasting about, so there’s no evidence he touched her without consent.
Sure ...
Menashi and Park also have some nice dark mumblings about “the political organization behind the lawsuit,” leaning into Trump’s usual argument that the deep state is behind anything adverse to him, and he’s entitled to spin that wild conspiracy theory any time he feels like it.
Trump was always going to take this case to his safe space, the Supreme Court. But Menashi and Park’s efforts certainly help. It really is astonishing how much time the president of the United States can spend pursuing his own personal litigation and vendettas.
This is no longer really litigation on Trump’s part: It’s a war of attrition, a hope that he can grind his opponents down. And, of course, he can—he has access to nearly unlimited funds if he wants to keep hammering away.
He managed to get his own donors and the Republican National Committee to cover millions of his legal fees while he was out of office. Now that he’s back in office, he’s running crypto grifts, getting companies to pay millions to avoid lawsuits, and getting a luxury jumbo jet from Qatar, which will likely cost taxpayers around $1 billion.
Trump will never go broke, but it sure seems like the rest of us will.
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