Anybody Losing Sleep Over The Donald’s Upcoming Trial? Maybe The Perp
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| Luca Schenardi |
Sometimes I lie awake at night wondering whether Donald Trump is afraid. Said the writer. But I, the publisher don't lay awake for anything to do with this Lawbreaker. But I know jail is something he never experienced even though he has been close but saved by money and connection. That, he is nervous about. That includes an alleged raping of a 13-year-old girl back half a century ago. The Daily News, I believe was the main paper reporting it. He got out of that one, the family of the girl seemed to have made money and that was that. Now that we know his connections to the Child molester of the century, even though the title goes to a father who molested his stepdaughter, sentenced to 100 years. Compare the justice to Trump and his Billionaire friend Famous American paedophile Jeffrey Epstein it seems there was no justice in any of these cases. Epstein who was not sentenced to jail his first time in Dade Country Florida. He Paid a small fine. Let's lose sleep for the victims, not the perps.
The New York Times
Does he think he’ll go to jail? Lose his fortune? Does he sleep easier after ranting in ALL CAPS on Truth Social?
Surely I’m not the only one losing sleep over the threat this man poses to the country. But lately, as I perversely scroll through the news on my phone, I’ve had a comforting thought: Mr. Trump is probably obsessing, too.
His Truth Social account indicated as much last week. Mr. Trump posted a picture of a statement by Stormy Daniels, the erotic film star and a central figure in his hush money trial that is set to begin on Monday. In the statement, dated 2018, Ms. Daniels denies that the two ever had an affair (a statement she has since recanted). Mr. Trump, in his Truth Social post, writes: “LOOK WHAT WAS JUST FOUND! WILL THE FAKE NEWS REPORT IT?” (To be clear, Mr. Trump, the 2018 statement was widely reported at the time.)
Mr. Trump may be running for president of the United States, but it’s not American voters who are on his mind. Watching and listening to him for years now, reading him on social media and, more recently, observing his behavior in the face of criminal charges and civil lawsuits, I come away with the surreal yet frankly inspiring conclusion that this very powerful man has become consumed with the “nasty” women who are at long last holding him to account.
Letitia James. Fani Willis. E. Jean Carroll, and her lawyer Roberta Kaplan. And, of course, Stormy Daniels. The five women who are living rent-free in Mr. Trump’s mind these days.
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If my middle-of-the-night Truth Social tours are any guide, Mr. Trump wakes up not infrequently to the thought of Ms. James, the attorney general of New York, and calling her names like “Peekaboo.” He seems to think about her, and the civil fraud case she brought against him, during the day, too — sometimes driven to post about her “big, nasty and ugly mouth,” or draft campaign emails about her “filthy hands,” which he seems to think are furiously casting a spell in the “witch hunt” against him.
Then there is Ms. Daniels, who says she is “absolutely ready” to testify against Mr. Trump — a scenario his lawyers had been desperately trying to avoid, seemingly worried about her embarrassing their client on the stand. (Mr. Trump has denied the affair and the charges.) She is also the subject of a sympathetic new documentary, “Stormy,” in which she describes the toll that the whole ordeal has taken on her, and details odd superstitions that Mr. Trump apparently has about his hair.
Ms. Willis, of course, is leading the Georgia election interference case against Mr. Trump, who is still trying to get her removed from the case. Ms. Carroll won an $83.3 million defamation case against him and is threatening to sue again, and Ms. Kaplan has a long history of going head-to-head with the former president (and winning).
Women. I suspect he never thought they would be the ones to corner him, making the case about his craven and possibly criminal behavior. Mr. Trump has long treated women as objects, targets, supplicants; everyone knows the “Access Hollywood” recording, but he has demeaned and degraded them for years, as Megan Twohey and Michael Barbaro documented in The Times in 2016. He seems to mostly associate women with sex — they are “driving me crazy,” he said of all the “beautiful women” at a recent event at Mar-a-Lago — or with spite (see how he treated Nikki Haley, Megyn Kelly, Hillary Clinton and others). He will woo them, he will grab them, he will scorn them, he will mix them up, he will call them names. But he never took them as much of a threat, until now.
I’ve never gotten the sense that Joe Biden or Adam Schiff or Jeb Bush or another man ever got in Mr. Trump’s head the way Ms. Daniels, Ms. Carroll, Ms. James, and the other women do. It’s not that men aren’t on his hit list: Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, is up there, as are the two male judges in Mr. Trump’s criminal and civil cases in Manhattan, one of which he recently sued, in yet another (failed) effort to delay his trial.
But it’s the women whose behavior — call it bravery and moxie, as I do, or impertinence and temerity, as Mr. Trump might — gets him spinning like a top, as when the judgment in Ms. James’s case against him threatened Mr. Trump’s real estate assets — or in his words, “my ‘babies.’”
Imagine being called to account by people — by gender, I’d argue — that you consider beneath you.
There is a certain karmic justice here. After Mr. Trump talked about grabbing women in the “Access Hollywood” tape, women talked about grabbing him back by defeating him at the ballot box in 2016. They didn’t. Maybe what we are seeing now is the grab-back moment, albeit more of a slow and steady pinch. After years of demonizing women who refuse to do his bidding, he is getting a measure of comeuppance at their hands.
Exhibit A for how much these women are in Mr. Trump’s head is the level of vitriol he spews at them. Some of it is comical, like a preschooler grasping for insults. Some is more sinister: Mrs. Clinton and Kamala Harris as “nasty”; and Nancy Pelosi as “crazy” and “very sick.”
And the women journalists who will question him during the news conferences during the hush money trial and on the campaign trail? He goes for the jugular in ways far more vicious, and public, than he does with their white, male colleagues. Ms. Twohey: a “disgusting human being.” Yamiche Alcindor, now of NBC News: “threatening.” During a press briefing back in 2018, he accosted Abby Phillip, of CNN, by stating to the crowd that she asks “a lot of stupid questions,” a comment that drew condemnation from the National Association of Black Journalists.
And on and on: Ms. Daniels is “horseface,” while Ms. Carroll is a “wackjob” who is “not my type.” (To her lawyer, Ms. Kaplan — also “wouldn’t be a choice of mine,” he made sure to note during his deposition in that case — he once reportedly sneered: “See you next Tuesday,” a euphemism for a gendered insult.) Ms. James, meanwhile, he repeatedly refers to as “Peekaboo,” a word that rhymes with a slur for Black Americans or a preschool-age term for hide and seek, depending on whom you ask.
But each of these terms, as juvenile as they sound, can tell us something about the man behind them — and just how much he views these women as a threat, just how much they get to him. Let’s not forget: There is a particular kind of woman that Mr. Trump can stomach, and it typically doesn’t include an aging spinster, Black women who challenge him, a Jewish New York lesbian or a sex worker who has nicknamed him “Tiny.” If his by-the-minute posts on Truth Social shouting “ELECTION INTERFERENCE!” and “WITCH HUNT” are any indication, these women get to him.
On some level, it feels as if Mr. Trump’s tortured relationships with these women loom even larger now that the women who used to surround him are nowhere to be found: Melania, who won’t say whether she will campaign with him; Ivanka, who seems to have put politics in the rearview; and no Hope Hicks-like character at the hostess stand.
Whether any of it matters is the subject of another late-night spiral. But at least this week, I’m feeling the slightest bit more rested, with thoughts of Stormy Daniels on my mind.
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