ANDREW NEIL: Donald Trump being labelled a sexual abuser won’t bother his base

It wasn’t until Donald Trump was indicted in New York at the end of March on charges of paying porn star Stormy Daniels hush money that his hitherto languishing campaign for the US presidency got off the ground.

How much it was hounded by a case heard six full weeks before the one that made headlines this week was starkly revealed in a bombshell poll last weekend.

It was run for ABC News and The Washington Post, not exactly hotbeds of pro-Trump sentiment. The survey nevertheless gave Trump a solid two-to-one (43 percent to 20 percent) lead over his main challenger, Ron DeSantis, in the battle for the Republican nomination.

The Florida governor’s bid to be the Republican nominee in next year’s presidential election has been in the doldrums since Trump’s indictment and increasingly looks like it may never recover.

The more we see DeSantis on the national stage, the more it seems like he can’t hack it on a massive scale. Yet no other Trump challenger for the nomination is even close to double digits.

The survey nonetheless gave Trump a solid two-to-one (43 percent to 20 percent) lead over his main challenger, Ron DeSantis, in the battle for the Republican nomination

More importantly, in a matchup with President Biden for the White House, Trump comfortably led by 49 percent to 42 percent for the president, whose approval rating has fallen to an all-time low of 36 percent. The poll, a Democratic TV pundit said, was “brutal for Biden.”

It was, of course, held before Tuesday’s ruling in another New York court. This time, a jury concluded that Trump sexually assaulted a journalist named E. Jean Carroll in the dressing rooms of a New York department store nearly 30 years ago.

He was ordered to pay her $5 million (£4 million) for the attack and his subsequent defamatory comments about her. Whether this will bring more missile boosters under Trump is less clear.

The previous indictment against Stormy Daniels was drafted by a left-leaning district attorney, Alvin Bragg, who has admitted that he has been out to get Trump for years. The prosecution was so premeditated, it was part of Bragg’s election pitch.

Even some anti-Trumpers found the allegations weak and convoluted, the prosecution unimpressive. The Trump base saw it as much worse than that.

His most enthusiastic supporters claimed it was a politically motivated show trial. The Trump base got energized and rushed to his defense, derailing DeSantis. Even the Republican establishment was forced to rally behind a man they hoped they had seen.

There was a palpable, perhaps unstoppable rise for Trump among Republicans, as the weekend’s poll confirmed. But now, just maybe, things have changed.

The political ramifications of Trump running for office, despite the finding of sexual assault, are not so clear. Admittedly, he was found innocent of rape, Carroll’s most serious charge. But sexual assault is hardly a minor offense, as the $5 million award illustrates. (It was a civil matter, so jail time was never at stake.)

The conservative Wall Street Journal perhaps summed up the politics best. The verdict should make a difference in how voters view Trump, it argued, but — it depressingly added — American politics is now so “humiliated and polarized” that it probably won’t.

I feel it will further boost the Republican base for Trump and consolidate his status as the clear front-runner for the party’s nomination. But it could seriously undermine his ability to appeal further, in the general election. He has enough hold of the party believers to become the Republican nominee. But that base alone isn’t enough to propel him back to the White House.

There is certainly enough unusual, even strange, about the verdict to convince the ghosts to believe that Trump has fallen victim to yet another political stab by a New York justice system completely hostile to him.

He was ordered to pay her $5 million (£4 million) for the attack and his subsequent defamatory comments about her. Whether this will bring more missile boosters under Trump is less clear

The jury found in this case that he had not committed rape, but had slandered Carroll for strenuously denying rape her. Go figure, as they say on that side of the Atlantic.

It is not clear on what basis the jury could distinguish between rape and sexual assault, as there were no witnesses to the encounter. The judge kept Trump’s lawyers from interfering in legal matters they felt were important, but was more lenient with Carroll’s lawyers, who even allowed them to play the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape, first revealed during the presidential campaign. 2016, in which Trump brags that “you can do anything to a woman if you’re a ‘star’, even ‘grab them by the genitals’.”

As disgusting as Trump’s feelings are, many might conclude that this tape has nothing to do with the Carroll case and yet could just be a blowhard’s bravado. Other women who claim to have been assaulted by Trump were also allowed to testify, even though their claims have never been properly tested.

Trump, of course, only made things worse for himself. He declined to testify at trial, but in a video deposition he duplicated the Access Hollywood tape and said that “stars” had behaved “unfortunately for a million years” as he portrayed them — adding incredulously, “or happy’.

He went on to say that he should be considered a “star” and reiterated his claim that he couldn’t have attacked Carroll because she was “not his type,” before telling her non-charity lawyer that she was “not his type either.” After all that, some sort of criminal verdict was almost inevitable.

In a civil trial, the bar is of course lower than in criminal cases. The jury had only to decide whether the “preponderance of the evidence” rested with Carroll, rather than whether her evidence was “beyond a reasonable doubt.” Had this been a criminal case, a conviction would have been unlikely. In fact, it probably wouldn’t have made it to court.

These legal finesses won’t matter much to a crucial demographic in US elections: suburban middle-class women often referred to in America as “soccer moms.” These are prosperous working women, often highly educated, who still find the time to go to football training with their children. They left Trump in 2020 and nothing in the Carroll case is likely to endear him to them again. In fact, they are likely to be divested even more than before.

So the Democrats should be the favorite to keep the White House. Except that Biden has made it clear that he wants to run again. This has left top party executives in desperation, but they have no idea how to stop him.

Republicans will make his age — he would start a second term at 82 — a major campaign issue, aided by the fact that his much younger Vice President, Kamala Harris, is widely regarded as worse than useless, even by loyal Democrats.

On Tuesday, the day of the Carroll verdict, I dined with two leading American political strategists: a Democrat and a Republican. Both were desperate.

The Republican said his party couldn’t get healthy again until it cleared itself of Trump — and it didn’t look like it would happen any time soon.

The Democrat wondered aloud whether Biden would survive a grueling campaign. Even when faced with softball questions from a sympathetic TV interviewer (the only kind allowed in his neighborhood) last weekend, he stumbled, lurched, and sometimes fell into incoherence.

The strategist’s hope was that a series of polls showing he would lose would encourage his party’s equivalent of the Tories’ “men in gray suits” to march into the Oval Office to tell Biden that the game is over. used to be. But he didn’t hold his breath.

“So are you telling me the most likely prospect for 2024 is a Biden-Trump repeat?” I have asked. “Is that really the best you can do?” Yes, they both answered gloomily.

They were so miserable about their country’s politics that, to cheer them up, I collected the bill for dinner. I have failed.