Nine Regular People Tell Donald Trump to Shut Up and Pay Up

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

86% : When Kaplan threatened to eject him from the courtroom, Trump replied, "I would love it."
63% : But Trump didn't say anything about Carroll in his rant, which must have felt like part of the victory to her.
55% : Shortly after the verdict was read, Trump posted on Truth Social, his proprietary fan site.
52% : Kaplan, during her closing arguments, reminded the jurors that Trump claims to be a billionaire.
47% : On Tuesday, the networks called the New Hampshire Republican Party Presidential primary for Trump the minute the polls closed.
43% : Trump skipped the trial during Carroll's earlier case against him, but was in the courtroom several times for this one, which began the day after he won the Iowa caucuses.
38% : It's almost impossible to keep track of the number of lawyers Trump has gone through since becoming President, but his primary lawyer during this trial was Alina Habba, previously known for representing Siggy Flicker, a former "Real Housewives of New Jersey" cast member who accused Facebook of disabling her account after she wished the former First Lady Melania Trump a happy birthday.
37% : (Letitia James, New York State's attorney general, is currently seeking $370 million from Trump in a separate civil case, related to the Trump Organization's shady business practices.)
36% : She got the idea to sue Trump from George Conway -- the conservative lawyer who was married to the Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway -- who she spoke with at a party in the summer of 2019, a few months after her article ran in New York magazine.
35% : On Thursday, as the judge and one of Trump's lawyers argued about what he would be allowed to say after he took the stand, Trump piped up from the defense table.
34% : "This trial is about getting him to stop, once and for all," the lawyer Roberta Kaplan said on Friday morning, during closing arguments in the case styled Carroll v. Trump.
33% : On Friday, Trump stormed out of the courtroom during Kaplan's closing argument, only to slink back in a while later, when one of his lawyers was talking.
32% : Does Trump even have $83 million?
31% : And yet, after taking a close look at the facts, nine people picked at random determined that Trump was responsible for what he did, and needed to be punished for it.
24% : During jury selection, when Judge Lewis Kaplan (no relation to Roberta Kaplan) asked several dozen potential jurors if any of them believed the 2020 election was stolen, Trump cheekily raised his hand.
22% : But, after the verdict was announced, I wondered if Trump perhaps realized earlier than most that he was in bigger trouble this time around.
20% : Since then, Trump has regularly attacked Carroll publicly, not only denying that the assault happened but calling her a "whack job" who should "pay dearly" for entering "dangerous territory."
18% : Throughout the two-week trial, Trump deliberately made himself a nuisance in the courtroom.
17% : "It will take an unusually high punitive-damages award to stop Donald Trump," she said.
17% : (Never mind that Carroll first sued Trump in 2019, long before Biden was elected.)
13% : "This is a fake story, made-up story," Trump said at a CNN town hall last spring.
8% : Five years ago, Kaplan's client, the writer E. Jean Carroll, wrote an article in New York magazine describing how Donald Trump once forced himself on her in a Manhattan department-store dressing room.
7% : Last spring, after hearing a related case that Carroll brought against Trump, an earlier jury had also sided with Carroll, concluding that Trump had sexually abused her and then defamed her -- but the award in that case was $5 million.
7% : The political reality is that Trump has a grip on the G.O.P's voting base -- but the legal reality is that Trump is in increasingly deep shit.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.