As former president and presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump found himself on the hook for another $83.3 million for continuing to defame E. Jean Carroll following a jury’s verdict last year ordering him to pay her $5 million for doing that decades after sexually assaulting her, he responded in character by continuing to defame her.
After walking out of her lawyer’s closing argument, he whined on social media that her story about him forcing himself on her in a Bergdorf Goodman changing room in the 1990s was a “Hoax” — quite possibly setting himself up for still another huge payment from a future third jury.
This couldn’t be happening to a nicer guy, by which I mean a guy who’s spent his life bragging about having his way with women and who talks endlessly about using the law to lock up his real and perceived enemies.
The question, as Trump will have to either put up the money while he appeals the jury’s verdict or find a bank willing to front it for him, is if his mouth has finally written a check that his ass can’t cash.
Or will he keep getting away with this stuff by winning another presidential election and becoming, in effect, too big to sue while ignoring a nearly $100 million judgment explicitly intended to stop him from continuing to defame Carroll the way a scofflaw would sneeze at speeding tickets?
About “scofflaw,” that most American portmanteau turned 100 years old this month.
As Britt Peterson detailed in a 2014 Boston Globe essay drawing from Ammon Shea’s book “Bad English: A History of Linguistic Aggravations,” the word was coined by two different winners of a contest sponsored by a cheerfully eccentric second-generation moneybag and vice president of the Massachusetts Anti-Saloon League with the memorable name of Develvare King.
Three years into the prohibition established by America’s 18th and most idiotic constitutional amendment, King, son of Granite Trust Company President Theophilus King, offered $200 — or what would be nearly $4,000 today — of gold for “a word which will stab awake the conscience of the drinker [and] the public conscience to the fact that such lawless drinking is, in the words of President Harding, ‘a menace to the republic itself.’ “
Two different people from Massachusetts split the prize after submitting “scofflaw” in a contest that supposedly drew 25,000 submissions — including such losers as “wetocrat,” “boozshevik” and “sliquor” — from people in every state and several other countries.
The winning word was an immediate hit, inspiring cartoons, commentary and even a poem by a New York Sun columnist including the verses
A scofflaw cop is on the beat;
He’s on a scofflaw force
And when he sees a scofflaw fete
He scoffs his share, of course
It wouldn’t do to make arrests
Of scofflaws small or great,
For in the court the scofflaw’d find
A scofflaw magistrate
After the 21st Amendment repealed the 18th Amendment, the neologism seemed to have had its day, with H.L. Mencken eulogizing it three years later in his 1936 edition of “The American Language”:
“The word came into immediate currency, and survived until the collapse of Prohibition.”
But by the time Develvare King — who later tried to popularize Esperanto as a second language — died in 1964, the word his contest coined had revived.
And it had evolved, referring as it does today to car owners who didn’t pay their tickets, along with what one article that year described as such “scofflaw activities as jaywalking, filching dimes from pay telephones, walking on forbidden grass, walking a dog without a leash… refacing walls or public monuments or finagling with the income tax.”
Trumpy!
When New York, then the largest state, repealed its own prohibition law in 1923, that didn’t change the Constitution or make booze legal here. But it did mean that just 250 federal agents were left to enforce a law New Yorkers had already largely rejected. By one count, 13,000 indictments under the state law had led to only 18 convictions.
Those breakdowns — between federal and local law, and between the government’s rules and the people’s actions — led President Harding to deliver a speech addressing the existential issue, one that’s pressing again today, of “whether the laws of this country can be and will be enforced” within its states before absurdly defining “lawless drinking as a menace to the republic itself.”
A century later, making an unrepentant scofflaw like Trump commander in chief again really would be a menace to the republic itself.
Siegel (harry@thecity.nyc) is an editor at The City, a host of the FAQ NYC podcast and a columnist for the Daily News.
Harry Siegel: Scofflaw Trump is a defaming menace to America
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28.01.2024
As former president and presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump found himself on the hook for another $83.3 million for continuing to defame E. Jean Carroll following a jury’s verdict last year ordering him to pay her $5 million for doing that decades after sexually assaulting her, he responded in character by continuing to defame her.
After walking out of her lawyer’s closing argument, he whined on social media that her story about him forcing himself on her in a Bergdorf Goodman changing room in the 1990s was a “Hoax” — quite possibly setting himself up for still another huge payment from a future third jury.
This couldn’t be happening to a nicer guy, by which I mean a guy who’s spent his life bragging about having his way with women and who talks endlessly about using the law to lock up his real and perceived enemies.
The question, as Trump will have to either put up the money while he appeals the jury’s verdict or find a bank willing to front it for him, is if his mouth has finally written a check that his ass can’t cash.
Or will he keep getting away with this stuff by winning another presidential election and becoming, in effect, too big to sue........
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