NEW YORK – Donald Trump has suffered back-to-back legal blows over his sexual abuse of a writer and money paid to a porn star – but the jury is out over how much it may cost him among women voters in his race to regain the White House.
The Republican frontrunner late Wednesday brushed off any notion that a decision by New York jurors to find him liable for abusing former Elle magazine columnist E. Jean Carroll would turn women voters against him.
“No, I don’t think so,” Trump said in a combative live appearance on CNN, adding of Carroll: “This woman, I don’t know her. I never met her. I have no idea who she is.”
The civil case ruling, in which Trump was ordered to pay US$5 million in damages, was the first time he faced legal consequences over a string of sexual assault accusations dating back decades. He has denied all the allegations.
It came a month after he pleaded not guilty to 34 counts in a criminal case that accuses him of falsifying business records as part of a scheme in 2016 to silence adult film actress Stormy Daniels, who claims an affair with Trump years ago.
Political expert Debbie Walsh thinks Trump’s defeat to Carroll is unlikely to change the minds of his loyal base – who have stuck by him through years of sexist controversy that would have sunk many a politician.
That said, added the director of Rutgers University’s Center for American Women And Politics, “I think this will have the potential to have an impact if he is the nominee in a general election.”
If Trump, 76, is to regain the presidency, he will have to attract broad-based support and appeal to more than just his ardent, typically white, blue-collar followers.
Among those he would likely need to draw support from are women. President Joe Biden won 55% of women voters in 2020 compared to Trump’s 44%, according to a Pew Research Center study in June 2021.
Trump’s liability for sexual abuse and defamation, for calling Carroll a “complete con job” after she went public with her allegation, is unlikely to encourage female voters to vote for him, says Walsh.
“One of the things that Donald Trump has done for the Republican Party is losing some of those white college-educated women who voted (and) who were pretty reliable Republican voters,” she told AFP.
Recent history offers a cautionary tale when it comes to Trump’s ability to weather blistering controversy on the subject of women.
In the run-up to the 2016 election, around a dozen women accused Trump of sexual assault. He was heard boasting of groping women when The Washington Post published the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape.
Independents
The allegations and the tape failed to derail Trump’s candidacy, and he went on to stun Hillary Clinton to win the presidency.
But the day after his inauguration, millions of women marched in Washington and across the country to demonstrate their opposition to America’s 45th president.
Since then Trump has effectively overseen three election defeats in four years: the 2018 midterms when the Democrats took control of the House, his 2020 loss to Biden, and last year’s midterms when he promised a red wave that never materialised.
In 2020, independent voters swung towards Biden, a trend that Republicans will need to reverse to win back the White House in 2024.
The barrage of legal cases bombarding Trump, which include probes into his efforts to overturn the 2020 election result and his handling of classified documents, threaten to turn off those undecideds.
They also give ammunition to his challengers for the Republican nomination to take on White House incumbent Joe Biden.
“Republican rivals will be within their rights to point out that where Trump goes, a storm cloud of nasty allegations follows,” the conservative tabloid the New York Post wrote in an editorial Tuesday.
Trump’s more serious rivals, such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and ex-UN ambassador Nikki Haley, have yet to comment – but others are not holding back.
Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Asa Hutchinson said the Carroll case verdict “should be treated with seriousness and is another example of the indefensible behaviour of Donald Trump.” – AFP, May 12, 2023
