The Giuliani defamation verdict and reassessing Donald Trump

 This morning, I have a simple observation.  Rudy Giuliani has been ordered to pay $148 million in damages for defamation, based on all of the batshit lies he told about a pair of election workers in Georgia.  Since he is broke, there is a great deal of speculation about how much money they will actually be able to collect, but call it some measure of justice.  My observation, though, is not about "America's mayor."  Rather, consider Donald Trump, on whose behalf Rudy told those lies.  Rudy was likened to a flat-earther by his own attorney in an attempt to reduce the damages, courting sympathy for being bonkers (which... he is), but the question raised by the verdict is, what about Trump?  His attorneys are all being disbarred and hit with defamation suits, and otherwise everyone around him goes down, but consider.  Donald Trump told fuckloads of lies about the 2020 election.  Giuliani gets hit with a defamation suit and $148 million in penalties.  What about Trump?  To be sure, he is facing criminal charges, but he'll skate on those.  Remember the cases he has lost.  They have been civil cases, and they haven't only been bench verdicts.  Civil cases are decided on "preponderance of evidence" rather than the "reasonable doubt" standard.  That is a much lower standard.  In order to avoid criminal penalties on 2020 election charges, he just needs reasonable doubt, and all he needs for that is a lawyer better than Rudy.  Also, a Republican on the jury.

But I have another simple observation.  Much as it pains me to admit it, Donald Trump may be more savvy than I care to admit.  Rudy went down because he was so brazen with his lies.  One of the benefits of being the big bossman is you can direct everyone else to go tell your lies for you.  Sure, he can spout off at his circus-rallies, but if he is just the tiniest bit more cautious in his wording, he can avoid defamation.

E. Jean Carroll got him on defamation because he was direct and used no weasel words.  Weasel words are meaningless to the crowd, but they mean everything to the court.  A court of law is not a court of moral culpability.  It can only respond mechanically.  As I so often describe it, a legal code is Turing-Solomon.  A machine without sentience, programmed to mimic the wisdom of Solomon's court.  Code, not morality.  Weasel words are the hack.  Most of the time, Trump uses just enough weasel words to hack the code.  Rudy didn't.

Sure, it is fun to make jokes about how stupid Trump is, and while he lacks analytic rigor or problem-solving capacity (or even the ability to make money on New York real estate!), he does have the savvy of an experienced criminal con artist.

Because that's exactly what he is.  But he's not actually stupid.  Uneducated, anti-intellectual, batshit crazy, sociopathic, and hardly the smartest, but not stupid.

Ronald Shannon Jackson, "Decoding," from Decode Yourself.  Fun detail-- lead guitar on this weirdo jazz album from 1985 is none other than Vernon Reid, from one of the greatest hard rock groups ever, Living Colour!  A few years later, that group released Vivid, which made them a one-hit-wonder with "Cult of Personality."  That song has one of the most recognizable guitar riffs in rock history, and some mind-bending solos.  Reid started in jazz, having his ass kicked around the block by Ronald Shannon Jackson, who started as a disciple of Ornette Coleman, and if you listen to any of Reid's work closely, you can trace it back to Ornette Coleman.  But I digress.  Point being, Vernon Reid is fucking awesome.