Jon Wiener: From The Nation magazine, this is Start Making Sense. I’m Jon Wiener. Later in the show: The leading autopsies on the 2024 defeat of Democrats are missing two big things, Steve Phillips argues: the centrality of racial hostility, and of gender resentment, as central organizing forces in American politics. But first: Donald Trump owes E. Jean Carroll 88 million dollars. She’ll explain why – in a minute.
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One person has sued Trump twice and won both times. Of course, that is E. Jean Carroll. He sexually assaulted her in 1996 in a dressing room at Bergdorf Goodman in Manhattan. The case went to trial in 2023, and she won. And now she’s published a book about it. The book’s title comes from what Trump said about her, Not My Type. It’s subtitled One Woman versus a President. E. Jean Carroll is a journalist who’s written for the Atlantic, Rolling Stone, New York, Esquire, Outside, and Vanity Fair. She was also the first female contributing editor to Playboy. And she’s the author of five previous books. We reached her today at her cabin in the mountains in upstate New York. E. Jean Carroll, welcome to the program.
E. Jean Carroll: Well, thank you very much, Jon. The Nation is important to American journalism for many reasons, but chiefly because The Nation supported Hunter Thompson during his early years as a journalist.
JW: I should add that one of your five previous books is about Hunter Thompson.
EJC: Yeah.
JW: When Donald Trump crossed paths with you, at the front door of Bergdorf Goodman in 1996, he knew who you were. What did he say to you?
EJC: He said, ‘Hey, you’re the advice lady.’
JW: And what was he talking about?
EJC: For 27 years, I was the advice columnist at Elle Magazine.
JW: And I understand this was the longest currently running advice column in American publishing at that point.
EJC: Yes.
JW: I want to talk about some of the key figures in your book, the lawyers. Tell us about Trump’s lawyer, Joe Tacopina.
EJC: A man who was built like Popeye, had a voice like a shotgun going off in a gravel pit. Fabulous dresser, wore $6,000 suits, had a $3 million watch. Trump hired him because he got Michael Jackson acquitted.
JW: What was Michael Jackson’s crime that Joe Tacopina took on?
EJC: Child abuse.
JW: To quote your book, “when Michael Jackson is accused of molesting little boys, who does he call? Tacopina. When that Sopranos actor is accused of killing a cop, who’s he going to call? Tacopina. When that police officer is accused of raping a drunk woman, who’s he going to call? Tacopina. And when Donald Trump is on trial for sexually assaulting and defaming a person who’s Trump going to call? Tacopina.”
EJC: Tacopina is one of the most famous and certainly one of the most intelligent defense attorneys. Unfortunately, Jon, he followed Trump’s instructions. That’s what defense attorneys do. They defend their client, and that’s what Tacopina did. So it was fascinating to watch him with this huge ego flail away at me. He was trying to make the case that I lied, and that Trump is a saint, and that I’m only in it for the money. I’m a gold digger, a slut, whatever. So it was interesting.
JW: Trump’s other main attorney was Alina Habba. You describe her as “the most distinguished and illustrious graduate of Widener University Commonwealth Law School, a superb institution which accepts only 65% of its applicants.” Why do you think Trump picked her?
EJC: She handled the parking lots for her husband. But mainly Alina Habba is devastatingly beautiful, and don’t kid yourself, she’s very bright. She didn’t know diddly squat about the law, but she had the ability, Jon, while her client was in the courtroom and berating her and telling her what to do, she had the ability to go on and try to tear me to shreds. So you’ve got to salute Alina Habba.
JW: And tell us about your attorney, Roberta Kaplan. Isn’t she famous?
EJC: Well, she’s merely probably the greatest legal mind of her generation. She opened the gates for gay rights in the country. She trounced the Nazis and the white supremacists in Charlottesville. And when she takes the front of the courtroom, it’s like Alexander the Great Landing in Persia. Just watch out.
JW: Robbie Kaplan deposed Trump at Mar-a-Lago and reminded him – he was sitting behind the Resolute desk in the Oval Office when he said about you to a reporter for the publication, The Hill, “She’s not my type.” Robbie showed him a picture where you are standing next to him at some social event. He’s with Ivana, you’re with your husband at the time. And Robbie Kaplan pointed at you and asked him who that was. And what did he say?
EJC: Well, he didn’t recognize Ivana. He pointed to Ivana. He said, “I don’t know who that is.” And then he pointed to me and said, “that’s Marla. That’s Marla. That’s my wife.”
JW: ” That’s my wife.” Now actually, you do look a lot like Marla Maples. Isn’t that true?
EJC: Yes. Back in the day.
JW: How did the jury learn about this mistake that Trump made in identifying a picture of you?
EJC: Well, it was one of the high points of the trial. We had big screens in the courtroom at both trials, and let’s just take our hats off right now to Robbie Kaplan, because she got it introduced into court, right? There was, we ran nearly an hour of his deposition. So the jury, Jon, was thrilled with Donald Trump. It was, as we say, wonderful.
JW: Before the trial began, your attorney staged a test trial with real New Yorkers as jurors. Presented all the evidence; one trial, three different sets of jurors. How did that go?
EJC: Not so well.
JW: Tell us.
EJC: Well, the jury agreed on three facts. Number one, two people could end up in a Bergdorf dressing room in 1996, easily. Two, something sexual easily could have happened in a Bergdorf dressing room in 1996. And the two people in the dressing room in 1996 were Trump and me. They all agreed on that. And they thought that I wanted it. I asked for it. Because I was too old and too ugly for anybody to imagine anybody, let alone Donald Trump, attacking me.
JW: So your attorneys said they had to change your appearance to something the jury would find Trump would want to attack. How did they want to change your appearance?
EJC: Well, it’s impossible to. I’m 81. What are you going to do? I’m an old lady sitting there, desiccated, a carcass sitting there. What are you going to do? So what we did is I had a live talk show in 1996, the same year that the event happened, a television show. And so we cut my hair, exactly. That’s why he recognized me out in front of Bergdorf’s. He said, Hey, you’re that advice lady. I had a talk show at the time, cut my hair exactly like it was in ‘96. We did my makeup exactly as it was in ‘96. I wore the same clothes that I wore in ‘96, and it gave the jury a chance to imagine I could have been that woman.
JW: The jury consultants then told you what would be the worst possible jury – the jury you had to avoid. What was that?
EJC: Men.
JW: One word answer. And what jury did you end up with?
EJC: Men. In the first trial, we had six men and three women. And the second trial we had seven men and two women. We had our work cut out for us, because male jurors like a strong man, and Trump is a strong man.
JW: One of the big issues for Trump’s defense was that when he grabbed you in the dressing room at Bergdorf’s, you did not scream. And after that became a big issue, lots of women posted on Twitter using the hashtag “#IDidn’tScream.” Tell us about that.
EJC: That was a very moving experience, particularly if you read any of those stories. One in particular I’ll never forget: she was on a big camp bus going home from a kid’s camp. The man who ran it was in the front. His wife and kids were in the back. And he raped her in the front seat in the bus while they were going home. And she didn’t scream.
Not all women scream. Every woman has a different reaction. We went a long way in this trial of bringing out that little fact. Not every woman is a perfect victim. Not every woman goes to the police. Not every woman screams.
Particularly Joe Tacopina, Alina Habba, both beat up on me because I like to go to parties. I’m not allowed to go to a party because I was sexually assaulted in 1996, so I should stay home in my hovel, never leave the house. They couldn’t understand how a so-called victim could leave the house and have a good time. I made it a point to lead as fabulous a life as I could after the event.
JW: I also really liked the part in your lawyer’s summation when he emphasized the significance of Trump’s defense making a big deal out of the fact that you said you did not scream. Trump’s defense, of course, was that he never went into that dressing room at Bergdorf’s at all. None of it ever happened. He had no idea who you were. So your attorney told the jury in his summation, “if you find yourselves in the jury room talking about whether Ms. Carol consented, then she wins.” And why was that?
EJC: If we’re there, if we’re in the dressing room, we win – because it means we were there, because their whole case was “it never happened.” But it did happen. And we proved it.
JW: And one of my favorite parts of your case was the summation where one of your lawyers told the jury this was not a case of ‘he said, she said.’ And why was that? Because he never testified. He never swore to tell the truth and told the jury ‘I didn’t do it.’
EJC: He didn’t say anything. He just stood outside on the golf course in Doonbeg, Ireland, and called me a gold digging whatever.
JW: He didn’t show up at the first trial. He did not testify in his own defense. You say Trump learned a lesson from that — that not appearing to testify in his own defense made him look guilty. So he wanted to testify at the second trial. That was a trial that was just about defamation. It was about how much he owed you for all the lies he told about you. What was it like for you to have Trump in the courtroom, sitting at the defense table?
EJC: I was sitting right in front of him If I turned around and reached, about two feet, I could grab him by the hair. I could hear everything he was doing and saying. I could hear the snorting, and the whining, and the hissing, and the spitting, and the groaning, and the pounding on the desk when Judge Kaplan made a ruling that he disagreed with. I could hear him saying about the judge, ‘Nasty Man!’
Here’s the thing: the jury could hear him, if I could hear him. They were utterly entranced the whole time.
JW: How much time did he end up spending on the witness stand in that trial?
EJC: It was very short because the first trial found him liable. The court case had been gone through; all the witnesses had been heard. It had been decided by a unanimous federal jury. He was liable for sexual abuse. He was not allowed to retry the case. He was not allowed to do that. And so it was very controlled. So his testimony had to be constrained. He could not bring a new case. He could not go over contested details. He could not bring in all the conspiracy theories that he brought in, by the way, 24 hours a day outside of court. So the questions to him had to be constrained and his answers had to be limited to the damages, not to whether he was guilty or not, because that had been decided. It had all been decided. This drove him nuts.
JW: In her summary for the second trial, your attorney, Robbie Kaplan, told the jury Trump “didn’t even bother to show up for the first trial,” which was the one about sexual assault, but for the second trial, where the issue was how much money he has to pay, “here he is,” she told them, “And what does that mean? It means the one thing that Donald Trump cares about is not truth, not law. The one thing Donald Trump cares about is money.”
And Trump was sitting right there in front of the jury. What was his response?
EJC: His face turned vermillion and he stood up in the middle of her closing argument and walked out. Huffing and puffing. He couldn’t take it. Don’t go up against Robbie Kaplan.
JW: Okay. Then your attorney told the jury, “Donald Trump sexually assaulted her. He defamed her. He keeps defaming her. Make him stop. Make him pay enough so that he will stop.” How much did the jury decide was the right amount to make him stop?
EJC: 83.3 million, which is a lot more today because it is been accruing interest.
JW: Trump has appealed that 83 million award to you. His argument is that defaming you was part of his official duties as president. That doesn’t sound like a very good argument to me.
EJC: Well, I think you’re right. And tomorrow Robbie will argue our case in the United States Court of Appeals Second Circuit, against Trump, and she’s going to shred him. He’s going to ask that the Second Circuit overturn the jury verdict. It’s never going to happen. Don’t go up against Robbie in appeal court. Do not do it. He’s got, I mean, I’ve heard her, she’s given me her argument several times on the phone because they keep changing. And she is on fire. I’m telling you she is – that there’s flame coming off her head. She cannot wait to get into court. They couldn’t, Jon, they tried Friday to stop the arguments going forward tomorrow. They tried, because guess what? He has no attorneys.
JW: He doesn’t have any attorneys. What happened to his attorneys? Where is Alina Habba right now? In the book you called her “Trump’s most beautiful attorney.” In the closing arguments for the second trial, you write, “she wore a very tight white sweater and an electric blue pantsuit hugging her round bottom.” And where is she now?
EJC: Oh, poor Alina. She’s stuck in New Jersey as the acting Attorney General arresting congresswomen of the United States. She’s very busy.
JW: So Alina Habba was appointed by Trump acting US attorney for the district of New Jersey. What about Joe Tacopina? Tacopina quit, is that right? He resigned from this case.
EJC: He resigned. And I think it’s because you either have to go along with what Trump wants or you don’t. You either start crossing lines because the president tells you to cross a line, or you don’t, and Tacopina withdrew. And so hats off to Tacopina.
JW: You’re going to have somewhere around $90, $95 million when this is over. What are you going to do with that money?
EJC: Give it to everything Donald Trump hates. I don’t need it. I’m perfectly happy here in my hovel. I love it. Give it to binding up the wounds of our democracy, which he’s ripping apart. You know what? If it’s going to piss him off, I’m going to give money to it.
JW: E. Jean Carroll – she proved Trump is a liar. She beat him twice. Time Magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Her new book is Not My Type: One Woman versus a President. E. Jean, thank you for suing Trump. Thank you for writing this book. And thanks for talking with us today.
EJC: Well, you’re fabulous, Jon!
JW: A brief update on the appeals court hearing on Tuesday: Trump’s lawyers told a 3-judge panel that the verdict finding him guilty should be overturned because of the Supreme Court’s 2024 ruling that presidents have broad immunity from criminal prosecution for their actions as president. This case, however, was civil, not criminal, so that argument doesn’t seem to be a very good one. E. Jean’s Carroll’s attorney Roberta Kaplan did not comment after the hearing, But Politico reported that quote “the panel appeared skeptical” about Trump’s arguments. One final note: of the three judges, one is an Obama appointee and two were appointed by Biden.
Trump is expected to appeal their ruling to the Suprem’e Court.
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Jon Wiener: The leading autopsies of the 2024 defeats of Democrats are missing a couple of big things – that’s what Steve Phillips has concluded. He wrote the bestseller, Brown is the New White, How the Demographic Revolution has created a New American Majority. He also hosts the podcast Democracy in Color, and he writes for The Guardian, The Washington Post and The Nation. His book How We Win the Civil War: Securing a Multiracial Democracy and Ending White Supremacy for Good is out now in an updated edition. Steve Phillips, welcome back.
Steve Phillips: Thanks for having me.
JW: There are a lot of opinions about why the Democrats lost in 2024, based mostly on exit polls and opinion surveys. But now we have much better data about how people actually voted. We’re talking about the long-awaited voting data report from Catalist, the progressive organization that compiles data on all 256 million voters in all 50 states. This is not statistical sampling. The Catalist report is regarded by many as kind of the gold standard, the best source of information on the success or failure of Democratic efforts to turn out the base, to win over swing voters, to persuade the persuadables and to mobilize the infrequent and low propensity voters. It answers questions about where we succeeded and where we failed. And this Catalist report confirmed what a lot of the exit polls and opinion surveys had suggested. Harris lost ground compared to Biden, especially among younger voters, men, Latino and Black voters, and infrequent voters. Now, there’s a lot of different ways you can look at this Catalist data. You have a different way.
SP: I think there’s a danger with so much data that you can get so overwhelmed in it, and all of the minutiae in it – I talk about it in The Nation piece – is that being so obsessed with the trees, we miss the forest. And it remains – and even when you were talking to us about lost ground, even if you would concede that point, it remains the fact that Kamala Harris won every single racial group except whites. And so if you look at it that way, then Kamala Harris prevailed across all of these other parts of the spectrum. So what is it that’s going on with white voters? LBJ said famously that when he signed the Voting Rights Act, we may have lost the South for a generation, and that in fact, Democrats have never won the white vote since the Civil Rights Act and since the Voting Rights Act.
JW: And that was 1965.
SP: Correct. And so what I’ve tried to show in my work and my writing is that there still is what I call a meaningful minority of whites who support Democrats. But that this notion or that we’re going to get the majority of that population has no empirical support at all. So you do have to look at all these other dimensions to it, but the fundamental reality remains that people of color remain more drawn to Democrats and that whites remain fairly implacably siding with the Republicans and that has much larger implications in this country in future politics.
JW: Yeah, the pundits have focused on the fact that support for Kamala Harris among young Black men dropped from 85%, which it had been under Biden to 75%. For Kamala, that is a drop. But I have to say 75% of young Black men voting for Harris is pretty good. If 75% of young white men voted for Harris, our troubles would be over.
SP: Exactly. And so I think that there’s a way of, again, what lens are you looking at it? And we have to be careful not to scapegoat African American voters or Latino voters for something that misses the larger dynamic. And what I like to try to point out to people, again reframing, is that Black men are the most progressive Democratic voting demographic of any other demographic group in the entire country except for Black women,
JW: Except for Black women.
SP: And so if you look at it that way, then it’s a different thing, but it’s not like, ‘oh, all these Black men are so conservative.’ But both of these points, and then one of the things that the Catalyst report does get at, but in passing again, this forest for the trees issue, is the reality of gender and sexism and patriarchy. Our previous podcast episode we had on Anna Malaika Tubbs who wrote the book Patriarchy and really looking at the – also college educated white men moved more towards Trump. And so what’s the explanation of that? So if you see that sexism, misogyny, misogynoir, were all realities, then that explains some of the shifts that you may have seen. So that reality transcends racial groups, and so it affects whites, it affects blacks, it affects Latinos. So all of those groups may have moved a little bit towards Trump because of this sexism reality. But that’s very much buried in and overlooked in the analysis of what happened in 2024.
JW: So you emphasize that all groups voted in the majority for Kamala Harris, with the exception of white people, but white people do constitute 72% of the voting population of the United States, and that’s our problem.
SP: Well, they’ve compromised 72% of those who voted in 2024, which is another completely overlooked aspect. Whites were only 69% of the voters in 2020. And so this electorate was whiter. And so you hear very little about that. You hear like, ‘oh, well, Biden was too old and inflation was too high,’ and Kamala didn’t whatever, do enough 60 minutes interviews. But you don’t hear that the electorate was whiter, which meant that the voter turnout of the Republican operation was more effective at getting out their whiter voting population than progressives were, which squandered a billion dollars through the future forward Super Pac just doing TV ads trying to target that same white demographic rather than hiring staff and organizations to get the vote out in the communities of color, which would’ve made a major difference.
JW: The one thing that Catalyst data does not do is it doesn’t explain anything about why this happened. It has to be interpreted. And of course, this is where the disagreements come in. I mean, Joe Biden’s interpretation is since Kamala Harris got 2% less of the white vote than he did, he should have been the candidate. I don’t think very many people agree with that. But the basic problem is the taboos against racism are very strong in America. So you are not going to get white people telling a pollster, ‘I do not want a Black woman to be president’ – even if that’s why they didn’t vote for her. So this is where your work comes in of kind of teasing out of the data. Where can we find evidence that explains what’s going on?
SP: And even that Biden point is that even looking back at 2020, there’s a lot of misinterpretation there. People were like, ‘oh, Black voters love Biden’ – maybe as Obama’s vice president or whatever. So they were attributing Biden’s strong Black support in the primaries to this deep love of Biden where my analysis even back at that time was that black people were very clear-eyed about racism in this country and they were like, to get this white man Trump out of the White House, we need our own white guy. And so that really was what that, I think, was all about – then in terms of looking at the interpreting the data. It was just very interesting to me how minor the conclusion was or how under-emphasized regarding the reality of gender in particular, both within the Catalyst report. It was like one of their many findings buried among them.
They didn’t lead with that at all. And then just in writ large, I mean it’s like how much longer of a data set do we need than having had elections from 1790 until 2024, and we have never elected a woman president. That’s a pretty substantial data set that suggests something about the perception of the electorate around what a leader should look like, even one as fundamentally flawed as Trump: 34 felony convictions, two impeachments, bragging about grabbing women by their private parts, still getting this increase in support. And so the fact that people just do not incorporate that into their analysis is really very poor science, frankly.
JW: Another place you have looked to find relevant hard evidence about this is the competitive states, the swing states where Kamala Harris did not lose ground to Biden. Which were those, and what did we learn from them?
SP: Right. So you had in that situation, so there’s this assumption that, oh, Kamala lost ground everywhere – but she actually got more votes than Biden did in Georgia, in North Carolina, in Nevada and Wisconsin. What do we take from that? And so that’s a different calculus than there’s this erosion of support. People drifted away from the Democrats. A lot of people in the Democratic Party, including many members of Congress, are proceeding from a standpoint of fear and weakness that is premised on this belief that we had all this erosion, all this gravitating away from the Democratic party, therefore we have to moderate our politics and go on bended knee in this Trump world. Whereas if you look at those numbers, what really happened is that Trump out-mobilized us, so that he got more people, more infrequent voters to come out than even we did. So Kamala and the Democrats boosted our support in those critical states of Georgia, North Carolina, Nevada, and Wisconsin, but they did even more. And so it’s not that we need to retreat, it’s we need to advance. We need to be more investing in, inspiring, speaking to showing people that we are the champions of the issues that they care about, not that we’re also amenable to the right-wing agenda of Trump.
JW: And another interesting comparison that you have emphasized is places where a woman of color and a man of color have both been tested at the ballot box in particular Georgia and Arizona. Tell us about that.
SP: Right. And so you saw it in 2022 when Stacey Abrams ran for governor again of Georgia and the same ballot as Raphael Warnock. And that’s a situation where actually they had the same percentage of the Black vote Warnock and Abrams did, but that Warnock did better – and again, ‘better’ – this is all relative. 30% of whites, Stacey got 25% of whites. We should not be seeing 30% like some great harbinger. But to me, what is the obvious difference between Stacey and Warnock? It wasn’t their policies; it wasn’t their politics. Clearly something else was going on. And then similarly, in 2024 in Arizona, you have Kamala running and you have Ruben Gallego running for Senate and Gallego winning in Kamala losing. And so I talk about Occams’s Razor in The Nation piece – is that often the most obvious answer is the correct answer, the clearest immediate difference. You have both Democrats, both Democrats of color, both running one winning, one losing. Gender, you can’t just say it’s not a factor. And if you are honest and be able to get past what we would want, how uncomfortable it makes people, you would start to come to the conclusion that that is a meaningful determinative factor in electoral behavior in this country.
JW: A lot of our friends remain puzzled though by young Black men. A higher proportion of young Black men voted for Joe Biden than voted for Kamala Harris. I wonder how surprised should we be that some young Black men are part of this same bro subculture that young white men and young Latino men are part of. We shouldn’t be surprised at all.
SP: That, gender, is a very powerful reality. Sexism is an ever-present reality within our society. And to think that it doesn’t affect people of color is naive and inaccurate. So this notion around grappling with gender dynamics and relationships and the role of women and who’s an uppity woman and who’s one we actually like, et cetera, are things that span the rainbow. And so it affects people of color as well as it affects whites. So it really shouldn’t be surprising if we have an accurate understanding of history and behavioral science.
JW: So the question of course, is what is to be done? We’ve talked about the centrality of racial hostility in American politics and of gender resentment in American politics. What are the best ways in your judgment to combat these powerful forces?
SP: We have to take these on directly. So the policy and the approach of so many people in the Democratic side of the spectrum is to not talk about these issues, downplay them, distance ourselves from them, not fight for them. After George Floyd was killed, there was this racial reckoning. Democrats controlled both Houses of Congress, and yet were still unable to pass a bill saying that yes, we should study what should be done in terms of the legacy of slavery within this country. And so there is not an identity and a brand as being champions of the fight against racism and champions of the fight against sexism and champions for people of color and women. There’s far more fear about taking that stand resulting in white men defecting than there is excitement or belief that taking that stand will attract people of color and women to us. But as this election showed, the other approach doesn’t work. And so you take that along with the numbers that white men are 29% of the population within this country. And so a multiracial coalition that’s unapologetic and forceful about tackling racism and sexism is in fact a majority proposition. If you can get people to believe it and champion it, and work for it.
JW: Steve Phillips – he wrote about ‘What analyses of the 2024 election are getting wrong’ at thenation.com. Steve, thanks for talking with us today.
SP: Thanks for having me on.
