Intelligencer - The One Room Trump Can’t Dominate

This week, Donald Trump, the frontrunner for the Republican nomination for president, has been in court, battling a credible allegation of rape.
For nearly 250 years of American democracy, a sentence like that would have meant the death of a presidential campaign. Sometimes it is worth taking a moment to dwell upon the obvious: Trump is running a different kind of campaign. On the night of January 15, after winning a landslide victory in the Iowa Caucuses, he returned to Manhattan to attend a civil-defamation trial over the rape accusation, flying home “at the wee hours of the night,” his lawyer later told the judge, to be at the federal courthouse for the opening of jury selection. The plaintiff in the case, magazine writer E. Jean Carroll, alleges Trump sexually assaulted her three decades ago, and then defamed her by questioning her honesty, motivations, and physical attractiveness when she dared to write her story. Trump, who acts as if his Republican primary opponents are unworthy of his competition, had decided that the Carroll case would be this week’s campaign stop.

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