From E. Jean Carroll to Epstein's victims, no woman matters enough to faze GOP | Opinion

The bar for a President Donald Trump scandal is set incredibly high. That’s probably why his latest legal loss is barely news in the days after it was announced.

A U.S. Court of Appeals on Sept. 8 declined to throw out a case that found Trump owes writer E. Jean Carroll $83.3 million over comments he made disputing the veracity of her sexual assault claims. The three-judge panel ruled that presidential immunity does not protect him, and that a lower court did not err in how it handled the case.

The revelations about Trump’s sexual abuse and the subsequent court rulings in Carroll’s favor should be shocking. For any other president, this would be damaging.

Yet we’re nearly a decade into Trump’s rise to political power, and nothing about this is surprising. We’ve become so numb to his indiscretions that we are now OK with the most powerful elected official in our country being an adjudicated sexual abuser.

Republicans, the very party that claims it wants to protect women, couldn’t care less about these court findings. This is also unsurprising – time and again, the GOP has proved that listening to women is not part of its party agenda.

E. Jean Carroll won't faze MAGA faithful. Can anything?

In 2019, Carroll accused Trump of sexually assaulting her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in 1996.

Trump immediately refuted the claims, telling reporters that Carroll was “not my type” and saying she made the story up. She sued him for defamation and sexual abuse and won both cases. In all, Trump owes Carroll nearly $90 million across two judgments.

The latest ruling is not the first time Trump has tried to overturn a decision in this case. In December, he appealed a $5 million judgment for sexually abusing and defaming Carroll. He lost that appeal, too.

Yet the fact that Trump is an adjudicated sexual abuser is not enough to sway the MAGA faithful; they would sooner decry the bias of the courts than believe a woman who dares to speak out against their president.

Republicans want to round up every criminal but their own

This isn’t even the only revelation about Trump’s sexual history to happen Sept. 8.

Democrats on a U.S. House committee released a birthday note purportedly signed by Trump, complete with a suggestive drawing, in a book that was once a gift to Jeffrey Epstein, who died in jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking charges. The president denies that he is responsible for the note.

As with the Carroll lawsuit, I’m sure there are members of the Republican Party who are trying to write this off as fictitious left-wing drivel, who believe that Trump is being smeared by the left. There are also plenty of people who will write all of this off and decide that the abuse of women is a small price to pay for a president accomplishing the “conservative agenda.”

These are the same Republicans who once clutched their pearls when they heard about President Bill Clinton's infidelity, the same powerhouses who turned that complicated yet consensual instance into a media circus. Apparently, sexual indiscretions are completely fine, so long as they are being perpetrated by a member of the political party you support.

This is also the same administration that claims to be for law and order, that sent the National Guard into Washington, DC, to fight crime, and claims that immigrants are nothing but rapists and murderers. Yet when it's the man leading the party being found liable for illegal activities, it's the courts that are wrong.

The facts are that our current president is a known misogynist and sexual abuser. It’s also true that he has enough people who support him who will sweep all of this under the rug. In all, it’s an unsettling situation for the women of this country to be in – one where we are subject to the whims of a man who does not recognize our humanity.

Follow USA TODAY columnist Sara Pequeño on X, formerly Twitter:@sara__pequeno