Donald Trump’s failed attempt at getting a mistrial tells you just how badly he’s about to lose the E. Jean Carroll case
Judge Kaplan has immediately denied Trump lawyer Joe Tacopina’s baseless request for a mistrial. This was never going to work, nor will it get anywhere on appeal. Tacopina knows Trump is going to lose this E. Jean Carroll trial, and he wants to make sure Trump blames someone other than him.
Remarkably, Tacopina is asking the judge to declare a mistrial on the grounds that the judge supposedly acted improperly. If the judge had actually done anything wrong, this would set up a viable appeal. But here, it’s just further pissing off an already pissed off judge.
Judges do not retaliate for this kind of thing. But when Trump’s side has to make other requests as this trial goes on, and the judge has to try to figure out if those requests are being made in good faith, good luck on those rulings.
So now we know that Tacopina 100% expects Trump to lose this case with big damages. That doesn’t mean he’s correct. But now we know how he thinks things are going. Of course with Trump too afraid to testify, Trump’s only chance of winning was if Tacopina could bully Carroll into cracking on the stand, and discredit herself. And that didn’t happen. That was a high-risk move for Trump’s side that didn’t work and probably only upped the damages.
Tacopina is doing very poorly here. But he’s previously used thug tactics successfully for other clients. It’s as if Trump sees people strategically using cartoon villain tactics, hires them, and then demands that they instead behave like actual cartoon villains – which doesn’t work.
If you’re going to use evil to get ahead, it has to be strategic, calculated acts of evil. If you’re just doing random acts of evil for kicks, that doesn’t get you ahead. It just creates liabilities for you, and takes you down. Trump used to understand this. He no longer does. It’s costing him in this civil rape trial. And he’ll take just as dumb of an approach to his upcoming criminal trials as well.
