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Trump's Huge Fraud Verdict Is A Watershed Moment for Accountability—And New Corruption
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Trump's Huge Fraud Verdict Is A Watershed Moment for Accountability—And New Corruption

Democrats and the media need to pay close attention to what happens next.

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Brian Beutler
Feb 20, 2024
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Trump's Huge Fraud Verdict Is A Watershed Moment for Accountability—And New Corruption
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(Photo by Mikhail Svetlov/Getty Images)

Maybe we’ll look back in a few months and credit Arthur Engoron with forcing Democrats and mainstream journalists to take Donald Trump’s corruption seriously.  

I had set my expectations low because Justice Engoron had tolerated so much abuse from Trump during the proceedings, forever promising that he’d run out of patience next time. But on Friday he delivered a fitting punishment. It has the Trumps so rattled that his second son Eric nearly broke down in tears about it on right-wing propaganda television.

Engoron dinged Trump for well over $300 million worth of fraud, plus the extra interest Trump would have had to pay to lenders if he hadn’t lied to them about his finances. Trump will appeal the approximately $450 million judgment, but New York law will obligate him to front all of it and then some in bond. Trump probably doesn’t have enough liquid assets to cover that amount, and that’s without accounting for the bond he’ll have to post to appeal the almost $90 million judgment he’s been ordered to pay E. Jean Carroll, the woman he raped and then serially defamed.

Mainstream news has thus far covered these verdicts thoroughly enough, but in rote—here’s the latest crazy thing that happened in the life of Donald Trump. Reporters are habituated to the fact that Trump’s base doesn’t care how corrupt he is, so they never frame new frontiers of corruption or accountability in the metaphorical language of dark clouds, which appear over Joe Biden’s campaign anytime he garbles a sentence. 

Democrats, meanwhile, barely talk about Trump’s legal woes at all. The Biden campaign’s Twitter account, a generally spirited rapid-response operation, didn’t mention either verdict. 

But the corruption I’m talking about, that I hope Democrats finally take pains to scrutinize aggressively, isn’t the retrospective corruption of a fraudulent businessman who believes he can assault women with impunity.

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