Tornado Alley (PROG)

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Defamation Trial II: The Trumpening

Closing arguments begin today… and quite possibly end today… in the Defamation Trial of D4FRFP1 Donald Trump: Part Deux. It has the potential to be the Ford Pinto of legal cases, and not just because Trump’s testimony could blow up in his face.

Trump testified in his own ostensible defense yesterday for a hilarious and sexual-metaphor-enabling three minutes. It’s quite possible the jury will take even less time to decide whether Trump defamed writer E. Jean Carroll when he verbally attacked her for revealing that he physically attacked her. (h/t)

And, yes, Carroll already won $5 million from him. Today’s case is over other comments.

The jury will be instructed to take as fact the previous jury’s conclusion that Trump sexually assaulted her (New York state law doesn’t classify what Trump did as rape, but Webster’s dictionary does).

Now here’s what I mean about the Pinto thing. Automakers were literally calculating how much they’d have to pay for blowing people up with their shitty cars — and weighing that cost against the cost of making their cars less blow-uppy.

The massive Pinto jury award established the concept that juries could end that barbaric accounting practice by giving awards so high that manufacturers couldn’t predict how much their shitty manufacturing would cost them. And therefore had to obey the law to survive. Make sense?

I hope so, cuz that’s where we are with Trump.

If Trump decides he and/or the suckers he’s still grifting can afford to cover his defamation penalties… he’ll keep defaming. So it’s possible that at some point he’s going to get a historic penalty and people will lose their minds and argue that the defamation itself didn’t amount to $8 million… but remember that the point of a super-high award isn’t just compensation… it’s deterrent high enough to prevent the culprit from engaging in cost-benefit analysis when they’re deciding whether they can afford to keep doing it.

https://thefuckingnews.substack.com/p/jan-26-2024-un-court-orders-israel?utm_campaign=email-half-post&r=6zfhm&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email