Sure, they just gave him nearly unlimited power to reshape the administrative state and turn it into his personal fiefdom/dumping ground for exceedingly online groypers.
And sure, they’ve turned the whole of the shadow docket into a Trump Treat Assembly Line, ruling in his favor 80% of the time and letting him skip over the need to fully litigate a case before getting his way—no matter how illegal that way might be.
But what have they done for him lately?
Trump is, predictably, furious that the nation’s highest court declined to grant his petition for certiorari to review the judgment in his New York civil case, where a jury took a scant few hours to find him liable for sexually abusing writer E. Jean Carroll.
That verdict came in 2023—meaning he’s been dragging this out for three years.
Trump seemed genuinely amazed that the court didn’t jump at the chance to review and rubber-stamp his nonsense.
“Surprisingly, the Supreme Court declined to ‘review’ a Fake Case brought against me by a woman I never met (Decades old celebrity photo line, standing with her husband, does not count!),” he wrote on Truth Social.
So he’s planning to just not pay Carroll the $5 million that he owes her. No, really.
After the Supreme Court declined to save his bacon, his attorneys asked for Carroll’s consent to “delay” payment so he could ask the Supreme Court to reconsider his demand.
Yes, it is procedurally possible to ask the court to review its decision not to take up a case—but in practice, it’s largely impossible. What new argument, really, does Trump have to offer?
This is just another way to torment Carroll, with Trump ignoring that a June 2023 court filing shows that both sides agreed that he would pay up if the Supreme Court declined to hear the case.
Now Carroll’s attorney has to go to court—again.
Is it the money? The $5 million he owes is a literal pittance to him. He made $2 billion—mostly in crypto grifting—in 2025 alone. That’s 0.25% of his “earnings” in one year alone.
To be fair, this case is the basis for Carroll’s additional $83 million victory over him after he defamed her following this loss. Still, that’s 4.15% of his earnings from last year, so maybe now we’re talking real money?
Lol, nope.
If you’d like these amounts in human scale terms, the national average wage index for 2024 was $69,846. In this scenario, the average wage earner dinged with a judgment for 0.25% of their yearly income would have spent three years going scorched earth to avoid paying about $175.
Even at the 4.15% rate, that average wage earner would have spent three years fighting a $2,898 judgment.
So is it that he’s desperate to erase a decision saying that he sexually abused someone? That seems unlikely given how little he seems to actually care about any negative perceptions about how he treats women.
This is the guy who not only wasn’t knocked out of presidential contention for saying “grab ’em by the pussy” but who also seems to view it as a perfectly sound ethos to guide his life.
Somehow, Trump believes that, though his sexual abuse of Carroll happened decades before he was president—and the trial and judgment occurred when he was also not president—the case was an unforgivable and unconstitutional intrusion on his presidential duties.
“This mistreatment of a President cannot be allowed to stand,” wrote Justin Smith, one of Trump’s many personal lawyers rewarded with a lifetime seat on the federal appellate bench.
There’s no other litigant in the United States who could have stretched this out for so long or spent this much money—like Trump actually pays his own attorney bills, lol—to crush someone.
There’s also no other litigant in the United States who could try to force Carroll to buckle by having the Justice Department open a federal criminal investigation, alleging that she committed perjury in the civil trial against him.
And there’s no other litigant in the United States who the Supreme Court has treated so tenderly.
Published with permission of Daily Kos
