What did Donald Trump do today?

He filed the latest in an endless series of appeals to avoid paying a woman he raped and defamed what a jury said he owed.

In 2023, a New York jury found that Trump had raped E. Jean Carroll in the mid-1990s, and that his public statements accusing her of lying about it for money and attention were defamatory. As a result of those defamatory statements, Carroll, 82, endured public humiliation and death threats. The result of the trial was that Trump was ordered to pay her $5.6 million in damages.

Carroll is one of about thirty women who, at various different times dating back to his first marriage, have accused Trump of sexual assault, sexual harassment, or lewd conduct towards minors. (That list does not include conduct Trump may have participated in or known about related to his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein.)

While the trial continued in the penalty phase (but after the jury's verdict) Trump repeated his defamatory comments. That resulted in a separate judgment, this time for $83.3 million. The higher damages were intended to deter Trump from continually reoffending. (They've worked: Trump no longer repeats the defamatory claims.)

Trump subsequently lost every single appeal, including one at the Supreme Court—and even an extra bite at the apple he gave himself by demanding that the Court reconsider its judgment. The original $5.6 million verdict, plus interest, was ordered paid to Carroll earlier this month. (Trump is challenging even that routine order, claiming that Carroll should not be able to invest the money in the stock market, where it might lose value, because he may someday, somehow be able to get a verdict affirmed by the highest court in the land overturned.)

Today, Trump filed an appeal of the second, $83.3 million verdict to the Supreme Court, even though it springs from identical conduct and was issued as a continuation of the same trial. 

Trump's actual argument in this appeal is that he should be immune from civil liability for defamatory statements he made while he was in office. In this case, that means that Trump is arguing that he should be allowed to call Carroll a publicity-seeking liar for saying he raped her—which a jury established as fact—because he was President at the time. This is the same argument that the Supreme Court rejected earlier, leaving a lower court's ruling intact.

He also argued, unsuccessfully, that the United States government should be allowed to replace him as the defendant, which would allow him to use taxpayer money to satisfy the verdict rather than his own.

The Department of Justice had historically declined to prosecute sitting presidents for criminal acts while they are in office, although until Trump that meant that presidents who broke the law in office could still be prosecuted after the fact. This was a custom, rather than established law, until Trump's own appointees on the court provided the majority in Trump v. United States (2024). That ruling carefully granted criminal immunity to presidents exercising unspecified "core powers" and, at least temporarily, got then-candidate Trump free from federal indictments relating to his attempts to overthrow the results of the 2020 election and stay in power illegally. (Trump could still be prosecuted for the underlying crimes under a new indictment, assuming he survives his current term and leaves office voluntarily.)

In the current case, Trump is arguing that calling his own rape victim a liar is a "core power" of the presidency.

Notably, while Trump relies on his control of the DOJ to avoid prosecution, he's succeeded in getting a criminal investigation launched against Carroll, on the theory that she committed perjury. That appears to have been a more or less empty threat: the investigation does not appear to have really commenced and even Trump diehards, like his former defense lawyer and current acting Attorney General, Todd Blanche, have distanced themselves from it.

Trump has spent much of this year trying to pay himself and supporters who committed crimes on his behalf billions of taxpayer dollars for the supposed "weaponization" of government against them.

Why does this matter? 

• This is pretty much what you'd expect an unrepentant sexual abuser to do with the powers of the presidency.   

• The American people are not Donald Trump's piggy bank and the Department of Justice is not his personal goon squad.  

• Flaunting your ability to get away with horrific acts against your political enemies is what tinpot dictators do.