On Monday, the Supreme Court of the United States declined to review Donald Trump's appeal in the E. Jean Carroll case, which means the jury's finding that he sexually abused her stands, final and unappealable, forever. Trump responded to this on Truth Social by expressing surprise and announcing that he would "continue the fight" with all of his "power and strength."
There is nowhere to continue the fight to. The Supreme Court is the last court. It is the top one. There are no further courts. When people say a case has gone "all the way to the Supreme Court," they mean it has arrived at the terminal destination of the entire American legal system, beyond which there is only the sky, and the sky does not hear motions. Trump, who has been sued approximately 3,500 times and has been President of the United States twice, appears to believe there is a higher authority to whom he can appeal a Supreme Court decision. There is not. There is God, possibly, though the theological jurisdiction over defamation judgments is unclear and God has so far declined to intervene in the Bergdorf Goodman matter.
This is not the first time the President has been surprised by how his own country operates. It is part of a rich and ongoing tradition.
He was surprised to learn that health care is complicated. "Nobody knew that health care could be so complicated," he announced in 2017, a sentence delivered with the wonder of a man discovering fire, regarding a subject that approximately everyone knew was complicated, it being the single most litigated, debated, and legislated domestic policy area of the previous century.
He was surprised to learn that Frederick Douglass was dead. "Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who's done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I notice," he said in 2017, describing a man who had died in 1895 in the present tense, as though Douglass were an up-and-coming talent whose career was really starting to take off.
He appeared to believe that you could stop a hurricane with a nuclear weapon, an idea he reportedly raised more than once with national security officials, who had to explain that detonating a nuclear device inside a hurricane would produce a radioactive hurricane, which is worse, being both a hurricane and radioactive.
He suggested, during a televised briefing about a respiratory virus, that people might inject disinfectant into their bodies to fight it, and that light might be brought "inside the body," gesturing vaguely at the concept of putting a flashlight into a person. Poison control centers reported an uptick in calls. He later said he was being sarcastic. He was not being sarcastic. Sarcasm requires knowing the thing is absurd.
He believed the noise from windmills causes cancer. He believed that you need a photo ID to buy groceries. He believed that airports existed during the Revolutionary War, delivering a speech in which the Continental Army "took over the airports," a logistical achievement made more impressive by the airplane not being invented for another 128 years. He believed that Colorado shares a border with Mexico. It does not. There is an entire additional state in the way, called New Mexico, the name of which contains a helpful clue.
He believed he won an election he lost by seven million votes, and continues to believe this, which is less a factual error than a permanent residence he has established in a reality of his own construction and refuses to vacate despite numerous eviction notices from the actual numbers.
And now he believes he can appeal the Supreme Court, the appealing of which is not a thing, in the way that appealing the weather is not a thing, or appealing gravity, or appealing the ocean. The Supreme Court has spoken. There is no one to complain to. The building has no upstairs.
What unites these beliefs is not merely that they are wrong, because anyone can be wrong. What unites them is the specific quality of the wrongness, which is the wrongness of a man who has never once, in seventy-nine years, encountered a fact he could not simply overrule by feeling differently about it. He has spent his entire life in an environment where being wrong carried no cost, where the people around him rearranged reality to match his preferences, where the bill was always paid by someone else, and he has emerged from that environment with the unshakable conviction that reality itself is a kind of negotiation, and that if he pushes hard enough, with all of his power and strength, the Supreme Court will agree to hear his appeal of the Supreme Court.
It will not. The case is over. He owes E. Jean Carroll five million dollars, plus the eighty-three million from the second case, for a total that even he cannot describe as a rounding error, regarding a woman he claims never to have met, in a photograph in which he is meeting her.
He will continue the fight. There is no one on the other end of the fight. He is, as he has always been, swinging with tremendous force at an opponent who left the building, because the building, as he is about to discover for the ten thousandth time, has no upstairs.
We will update this series as required. It will be required.
You have hand it to donny, you’ve really gotta put some effort into it to be this supremely, blissfully, ignorant, I sincerely doubt the man has learned a single thing since he was ten years old.
He’s spent around six years being the actual president, and has learned less about the office than the average child learns in the sixth grade.
Since he has always been absolutely, incomprehensibly insecure about how dull of wit he actually is, he’s spent a lifetime pretending to be the smartest person in any room, which ironically, is the thing that has kept any new information from getting in, making him its opposite.
What a sad, pathetic little man, to have absolutely everything, and yet lead an existence completely devoid of any joy, happiness, or fulfillment, he’s just taking up space.
Brilliant - “He believed that Colorado shares a border with Mexico. It does not. There is an entire additional state in the way, called New Mexico, the name of which contains a helpful clue.” 👏👏👏