Most Americans see Memorial Day as a time to pay tribute to the U.S. service members who gave their lives for their country, or perhaps fire up the BBQ with friends and family to celebrate the unofficial start of summer, or maybe save some money on a new mattress. According to Google, a lot of Americans also make a point to look up what the “Memorial Day meaning” is. Then there’s Donald Trump.
For years, MAGA’s once and future king has made a tradition of celebrating major holidays — from Christmas to Mother’s Day to Easter — by launching CAPS-littered attacks on his perceived enemies. And if Trump Googled the meaning of Memorial Day on Sunday morning, even the search engine’s bizarre new AI is unlikely to have answered that the holiday was about “human scum” or a good opportunity to rack up some more defamation damages.
In a Truth Social post, the former president wished a happy holiday “to All, including the Human Scum that is working so hard to destroy our Once Great Country,” before repeating his attacks on two of the judges in New York who have presided over cases against him and his corporation this year. Trump devoted most of the post, however, to once again defaming E. Jean Carroll, the writer whom, according to Carroll — and, last year, a jury in a civil trial — he sexually assaulted in a New York department store in the 1990s, and who has twice successfully sued Trump for defamation, including in January when a jury awarded her well over $80 million in damages.
Trump did not refer to Carroll by name in his post on Sunday, though it was obvious she was the “woman” he mentioned and once again called a liar.
The massive sum the jury awarded Carroll in January — which Trump is trying to appeal — was largely an effort to deter Trump from further defaming her, but the deterrent lost its effectiveness less than a month and a half later. When he resumed his defamation of Carroll in March, her attorneys indicated they might indeed file another lawsuit. Carroll lawyer Roberta Kaplan reiterated that point again in response to Trump’s new attack on her client Sunday. “We have said several times since the last jury verdict in January that all options were on the table. And that remains true today — all options are on the table,” Kaplan said in a statement to New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman.
