ROY COHN IS IN HELL, BUT HE'S STILL HURTING US

The Atlantic's David Graham states the obvious: that it would have been absurdly easy for Donald Trump to avoid the $83.3 million judgment against him in the second E. Jean Carroll civil trial.

Having lost the first case, all he really had to do was stop publicly assailing Carroll. He didn’t have to admit that he was wrong. He didn’t have to admit that he had sexually assaulted Carroll. He didn’t even have to admit that he had defamed her. He just had to stay quiet.

But this being Trump, he couldn’t do it. Even as the trial proceeded, and all signs suggested that Trump was in for a rough verdict, he kept at it. He attacked Carroll with dozens of missives on his social-media site. While campaigning in Iowa this month, he said she’d made up her story. He behaved no differently in court. [On Thursday], he testified for less than five minutes but still managed to call the accusation false, earning a rebuke from Judge Lewis Kaplan, who said Trump could not re-litigate the first defamation trial.

But does it matter?

... the question raised here is the same as the one raised by the several other cases against Trump. Is there any sanction so dire that it can keep Trump from lying?

... So far, Trump can’t stop saying things that get him into trouble and then deepen it. He is unable to stay out of the public eye, because he is running for president. And once he’s there, he appears psychologically unable to stop making the same bogus claims. Never before has it cost him so dearly.

But has it really cost him dearly? As Ben Protess and Maggie Haberman point out in The New York Times, Trump doesn't have to pay Carroll anytime soon.

... while he is waiting for an appellate court to rule, Mr. Trump need not cut Ms. Carroll a check....

Mr. Trump can pay the $83.3 million to the court, which will hold the money while the appeal is pending. This is what he did last year when a jury ordered him to pay Ms. Carroll $5.5 million in a related case.

Or, Mr. Trump can try to secure a bond, which will save him from having to pay the full amount up front.

A bond might require him to pay a deposit and offer collateral, and would come with interest and fees. It would also require Mr. Trump to find a financial institution willing to lend him a large sum of money at a time when he is in significant legal jeopardy.

But he'll find a way, won't he? And in all likelihood, he'll remain the presumptive Republican presidential nominee -- he might actually do better in upcoming primaries because Republican voters will believe he's being persecuted.

(We'll see if his general-election poll numbers go down. When I write gloomy posts about the election, I'm regularly told that we haven't seen the impact of Trump's trials on public opinion. So let's watch what happens in the next couple of weeks. This is the first time a Trump trial has been the biggest news story in the country. Will it change his general-election polling at all?)

In this case, Trump was willing to risk a massive verdict against him because what's important to him is to be the kind of person his mentor, Roy Cohn, told him he should be: someone who's always on offense, who never apologizes and never admits error.

The world seems full of people like this nowadays, assholes who suffer setbacks and just keep going, clearly unchastened. Alex Jones owes far more money to plaintiffs than Trump, yet he continues to broadcast, nearly three years after his losses in court; his victims are still trying to get some money out of him, so far without success. Or consider Andrew Tate, who just keeps posting hateful, misogynistic videos and tweets despite his 2022 arrest on charges of human trafficking and rape. And, of course, there's Elon Musk. He's not in legal trouble for his botched purchase of Twitter, but he's lost quite a bit of money, yet he's not at all chastened -- he defiantly platforms the racists, fascists, and conspiratorialists who share his vilest political opinion, and his site also platforms predatory AI porn creators.

On the rare occasions when it appears that we have these people cornered, they leverage news of their legal or financial troubles to garner sympathy from their fan bases. And then they just keep doing what they always did.

It's exhausting. It sends the message that the system doesn't have the power to protect us from them, and that they actually gain strength from our attempts to rein them in. These people are never truly ruined, no matter how reprehensible their misdeeds are. For what he did to the Sandy Hook families, Alex Jones should be so poor he's on public assistance and living out of his broken-down car. Trump and Tate should be broke and in prison. Musk shouldn't still be the second-richest person in the world.

But they just keep coming.