Trump Lies About Supreme Court to Avoid Paying E. Jean Carroll

Donald Trump’s latest attempt to weasel his way out of paying E. Jean Carroll involved a bold-faced lie to a federal judge.

In a legal filing submitted Tuesday, Trump’s attorneys asked Judge Lewis Kaplan not to release some of the funds he owes to the beleaguered columnist on the basis that the president’s petition for a new hearing was still pending before the Supreme Court. The only hiccup: The Supreme Court had rejected Trump’s petition filing.

By Wednesday, though, the SCOTUS docket had been updated to reflect that the nation’s highest court was anticipating a corrected petition from the president’s team.

Carroll has a long and grim history with the president. Trump was found liable by a jury in May 2023 for having sexually abused her in the mid-1990s, for which she was awarded $5 million in damages.

Trump lost his defamation case against her the following January, when Kaplan ruled that Trump had continued to defame the advice columnist by denying the rape on the basis that she wasn’t his “type,” and by accusing her of making up the sexual assault allegations against him for the benefit of her book. A jury awarded Carroll $83.3 million in that case.

But Carroll hasn’t yet seen a dime from either of her legal victories. In May, a federal appeals court allowed Trump to continue staving off his payments until the Supreme Court decided whether to pick up the case. The high court did so last week, rejecting Trump’s challenge and allowing the verdict to stand.

Late last month, Carroll’s attorney Roberta Kaplan asked a judge to implement an expedited payment schedule for the sum that Trump owes Carroll (Kaplan is not related to the New York–based judge of the same name). She referred to a June 2023 filing in which both parties agreed that Carroll could collect if the Supreme Court refused to hear the case.

Kaplan added that, by this point, the $5 million sum had accrued an additional $779,783 in interest, raising Trump’s debt in the initial case to nearly $5.8 million.

“This is the end of the line,” Kaplan wrote in a June 30 filing. “It is time for him to pay Carroll.”

This story has been updated.

President Trump made two glaring mix-ups Wednesday while speaking to the press at a NATO summit in Turkey.

“We had 111 missiles shot by the Islamic Republic of Japan. They were shot at the aircraft carrier,” Trump said, inventing a new government and confusing Japan with Iran.

A few minutes later, sitting alongside Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and pointing to him directly, Trump asked reporters, “You have a question for President Putin, please?” The assembled press chuckled, and some tried to correct Trump, who then tried to spin his mistake by claiming that’s what he meant.

“Do you have a question for President Putin, not Zelenskiy, Putin?” Trump said, again pointing to the Ukrainian leader on his right. “What would you like to ask him, because I’m going to ask him that question.”

These kinds of mistakes are becoming all too common with Trump. By now, it’s obvious to anyone who regularly watches the president that he’s experiencing some kind of cognitive decline. Zelenskiy brushed it off because he’s seen it before and can’t afford to even mildly antagonize Trump, as he needs the president’s support for U.S. military aid. For the rest of us, though, it raises the question of whether Trump has the mental acuity to be president, and how long the octogenarian can keep going on like this.

If Republicans are really looking for election fraud, they might want to check on their own party members.

In Massachusetts, the State Ballot Law Commission ruled last week to disqualify Republican candidates for lieutenant governor and attorney general from the state’s primary election after they submitted allegedly forged signatures to get their names on the ballot.

Adam Roof, executive director of the Massachusetts Democratic Party, had filed objections to the veracity of the signatures collected by the campaigns of Anne Manning Martin, who is running for lieutenant governor, and Michael Walsh, who is running for attorney general.

Candidates needed to gather 10,000 signatures to appear on the primary ballot. The commission invalidated 1,279 of Martin’s 10,692 signatures and 1,021 of Walsh’s 10,677 signatures.

In Martin’s case, signature gatherer Joe Bronske allegedly used a list of registered Republican voters to forge hundreds of signatures. The allegedly forged signatures were first noticed by another Republican candidate for lieutenant governor, who had also hired Bronske and found he’d collected signatures from deceased voters. When deposed by an attorney for Shawn Oliver, one of Martin’s opponents, Bronske repeatedly pleaded the Fifth Amendment, suggesting he had “something to hide,” according to the ruling.

In Walsh’s case, a handwriting expert determined that many of the signatures from certain towns were “more likely than not written by the same person,” according to the commission’s ruling.

Thousands of miles away in Florida, five people, including three elected officials, have been charged in connection with a scheme to allegedly create and distribute a fake voter guide.

Ahead of the 2024 general election, residents in St. Johns County received flyers that listed the Republican Party’s “official 2024 membership-approved endorsements”—but included a very different list of candidates from the one the party actually supported.

St. Johns County Commissioners Sarah Arnold and Christian Whitehurst, St. Augustine Beach city commissioner and former Mayor Dylan Rumrell, and Jamie Lynn Johnson each face two misdemeanor counts for conspiracy and producing a false voter guide.

Brianna Jordan, Whitehurst’s campaign manager, was also charged with tampering with physical evidence. She allegedly tried to destroy the voter guides after the scheme was discovered.

It shouldn’t be all that surprising that the recent instances of alleged voter fraud are coming from the Republican Party, the same party that idolizes a county clerk found guilty of tampering with voting machines, celebrates a rule-skirting billionaire, and bows at the altar of an election denier and alleged fraudster.

The Great American State Fair seemed to attract dozens of attendees ahead of America’s 250th-year Fourth of July celebration. Now it’s attracting no one.

Meghan McCain, the daughter of late Arizona Senator John McCain, hosted the “Race2Win” quiz show at the sprawling semiquincentennial celebration Tuesday. But a picture of the game stage, as shared by McCain herself, illustrated that nobody had shown up to her event. Instead, McCain’s voice rang out to an empty field, speckled by just a few lonely chairs.

“So cool to host @2waytvapp new game show ‘Race 2 Win’ at The Great American State Fair today!” she wrote on X.

But even McCain couldn’t be bothered to show up to the event. The pundit’s image was broadcast onto large screens on the enormous stage while she remained in a presumably climate-controlled room, speaking with participants over Zoom.

The event technicians overseeing the show couldn’t be bothered by its technicalities, either. Instead, they streamed McCain’s show as is on the two vertical monitors that bordered the stage, mangling the image while cutting off the text of a trivia question about the building materials used to construct the Capitol dome, due to the altered aspect ratio.

Practically every component of Donald Trump’s wildly expensive plan to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary has turned out to be a dud. The $15 million renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool failed to rid the iconic monument of algae; a multiweek lineup of musical acts had to be canceled after practically every artist pulled themselves from the program; and a fleet of buses carrying a contemporary retelling of American history have failed to make a splash in their journey across the country.

The Great American State Fair was supposed to be the centerpiece of the Trump administration’s America 250 celebration, yet even it is more of a Potemkin village than a sincere homage.

The booths, which offered space for each state to represent its heritage and culture (visitors could pet a replica of a bison at the North Dakota pavilion, or walk away with a bag of chips from Maine), were ideologically pitted against the seismic presence of the federal government and Trump’s authoritarian expansion (banners featuring his grim face flanked the event, while a small-scale replica of his proposed “Triumphal Arc” sat center stage).

The fair also suffered from power outages and dangerous technical failures that included large stage equipment falling behind dancers during rehearsal. But the extreme heat that consumed Washington over the weekend seemed to be the final blow to the expansive celebration: Even the thin crowds that did appear to watch the world record–shattering fireworks display were forced to leave the area for several hours due to an unprecedented weather advisory.

President Trump went on a sprawling, rambling rant Wednesday at the NATO summit in Turkey, in which he called Iranian leadership “scum” and announced that the ceasefire was over, called for an end to all trade with Spain, threatened to colonize Greenland, and continued to attack NATO for not doing exactly what he tells it—all while NATO Secretary Mark Rutte heaped praise on him.

Here were the worst moments:

On Iran

“We attacked, very powerfully last night, the very dangerous people from Iran. They’re sick. There’s something wrong with them. We said, ‘Go and do your funeral stuff,’ and instead of that, they start shooting rockets at ships,” Trump said. “So we hit them very hard last night, very hard. I would say 20 to one … I told them every time you hit, we hit.… They’re a bunch of scum. You want to know that? They’re scum. So we don’t like them, I don’t like them, and they’re evil people.”

Trump also called Iranian officer Qassem Soleimani, who was killed in a U.S. strike in Trump’s first term, the “father of the roadside bomb.”

“He was an evil genius, but a bad guy, and he was the father of the roadside bomb. The roadside bomb is a bomb that goes on when you’re driving your little vehicle around, and it goes on, and you have no legs, no arms, and no face,” Trump said.

He was later asked about the status of the ceasefire, given both Iran and the U.S. had resumed aggression.

“It’s a very interesting question. To me? I think it’s over,” he replied. “They’re scum. You know what scum is? They’re scum. They’re sick people. They’re led by sick people, and they’re vicious, violent people. And if they had a nuclear weapon, they’d use it. As far as I’m concerned, it’s over.”

On Spain

The president attacked Spain for being “a terrible partner in NATO,” going as far as to demand the U.S. cease all future trade with the nation.

“Spain is a wasted cause. We don’t want to do any trade business with Spain anymore. By the way,” he said. “Spain is a terrible partner in NATO. They don’t participate, they don’t pay. I don’t want anything to do with Spain. Cut off all trade with Spain, including visits.… Watch them, watch them come running back. Oh, they’ll come running back.

“We’ll see how hostile they remain when they call [me] up, and they, ‘Please, please, we want to trade with you, sir,’” Trump continued, using a high-pitched begging voice to mock Spain. “‘We want to trade with you, sir.’ They make so much money with us, and we’re going to see that they make a lot less. I want no business with them.”

On Greenland

Trump again took time to attack Greenland, one of his most constant targets for potential takeover in his second term.

“I’m not happy with NATO because of what they did with Greenland, and I’m not happy with NATO because of the fact that they didn’t want to help us with the number one state sponsor of terror; that’s Iran. They were unwilling to help us,” he said. “Greenland is very important for the United States, but it’s not important for Denmark. In fact, when Denmark was overrun by the Nazis in less than one day—Hitler beat them out in one day, took over—they asked us to take care of Greenland.

“In fact, we took Greenland, and then stupidly we gave it back. We shouldn’t have given it back to them, because we’re the ones that need it. We need it for protection of the world, not just the United States. And it’s very important. It doesn’t help Denmark, but it helps us, and it’s very important for us.”

This was a textbook crashout from a president who has done more damage to U.S. alliances than perhaps any other president this century. Focusing on his petty gripe with NATO payments, restarting the war with Iran, and rekindling rumors of annexing Greenland, all while sitting next to the NATO secretary general, is just a routine Wednesday for Trump.

For what it’s worth, Rutte did absolutely nothing to push back on any of Trump’s drivel, only chiming in to applaud him for keeping Israel, Europe, and “the region” (the Middle East) “safe” by downgrading Iran’s ballistic missile capabilites—even as that success is highly questionable.