What do Democrats offer instead?
Donald “91 Counts” Trump will appeal the judgment, of course. It’s what he does as surely as “grab them.” He’ll appeal the $83.3 million judgment a Manhattan jury on Friday awarded E. Jean Carroll in her defamation case (The Guardian):
Carroll will receive $18.3m in compensatory damages and $65m in punitive retribution. The former president is paying Carroll compensatory damages of $18.3m – $11m to fund a reputational repair campaign. The $7.3m is for the emotional harm caused by Trump’s 2019 public statements. Carroll and her legal team were beaming as they left court in a black SUV. They did not answer questions immediately after court let out.
Moments after the decision was announced, Trump decried it as “absolutely ridiculous” on Truth Social, and said he would be filing an appeal.
Naturally.
Carroll’s attorney, Roberta Kaplan, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper she’d never seen someone as contemptuous of the U.S. justice system as Trump. (Unless he can turn it againt his enemies, also naturally.)
Trump is not enough
Democrats will use this case and Trump’s other legal troubles against him in this year’s elections. And against his fellow Republicans (Politico):
So far, Democrats have launched Trump-themed attacks on a handful of vulnerable Republicans across the country, using billboards in battleground districts.
In New York, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee plans to highlight Trump’s role in restricting abortion through his Supreme Court appointees who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade. They are also pointing out a 2017 law that limited state and local tax deductions to $10,000 — a provision known as SALT that hurt homeowners in high-tax states like New York and that suburban GOP lawmakers have pushed to change.
Taken together, they are aiming to build a case against anyone who shares a party ID with the controversial former president and native New Yorker as the Democrats fend off attacks on their own record on migrants and crime.
[…]
Democrats also want to make Rep. Elise Stefanik, the House GOP conference chair and a lightning rod for liberals, a liability for Republicans this year. Stefanik is a prominent Trump supporter and has been floated as a potential running mate.
It’s what Republicans have done with Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) for years: tie any and every Democratic candidate to the “San Francisco liberal” no matter how ridiculous the association. Despite the fact that it frequently doesn’t work. They believe it gins up the GOP base, and maybe it does.
Tying GOP candidates to Trump might do that with Democratic voters. But what Democrats need if they expect to win is to give “low-propensity” unaffiliated voters a reason to turn out for Democratic candidates in the fall. “We’re not Tump” is not enough. “There has to be a dream. We have to be for a thing,” messaging expert Anat Shenker-Osorio tells students. Rev. Martin Luther King is not famous for saying, “I have a complaint.”
“Chaos follows him,” former South Carolina Gov. Nikki says of Trump as though his hands are clean of sending his MAGA mob to sack the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. Voters not in the Trump cult have had enough Trump chaos. They will vote against that, as they did in New Hampshire this week.
But Democrats have to offer a positive alternative and sell it hard if they expect to generate enough youth turnout to do more than sqeak by. Running hard on women’s rights is already a proven vote-getter. Winning 55 percent of the national vote is not out of the question, says Simon Rosenberg, and “may be the only way we’re going to get the Republicans to abandon MAGA and become a more traditional center-right party.”
Not that I won’t settle for squeaking by. But a decisive win for Biden in November will help put MAGA back in the box and help avoid another Jan. 6. So paint the beautiful tomorrow, Democrats. Sell the brownie, not the recipe. Let the Lincoln Project do what it does better than you anyway.