Trump celebrates Memorial Day with defamation of E. Jean Carroll

Photo: Jared C. Tilton/Getty Images

Most Americans view Memorial Day as an opportunity to remember the U.S. soldiers who gave their lives for their country. Or maybe they fire up a barbecue with friends and family to celebrate the unofficial start of summer, or maybe they save some money for a new mattress. According to Google, many Americans also look up the “meaning of Memorial Day.” And then there’s Donald Trump.

For years, it’s been a tradition for the once-and-future king of MAGA to mark major holidays—from Christmas to Mother’s Day to Easter—with all-caps-filled attacks on his perceived enemies. And if Trump had googled the meaning of Memorial Day on Sunday morning, even the search engine’s bizarre new AI probably wouldn’t have told him that the holiday was about “human scum” or that it was a good opportunity to collect even more defamation damages.

In a post on Truth Social, the former president wished happy holidays to “everyone, including the human scum who work so hard to destroy our once great country,” before repeating his attacks on two New York judges who presided over cases against him and his company this year. But Trump devoted most of the post to again defaming E. Jean Carroll, the writer who Carroll — and a jury in a civil case last year — said he sexually harassed in a New York department store in the 1990s. Carroll and Trump have successfully sued for defamation twice before, including in January when a jury awarded her well over $80 million in damages.

Trump did not mention Carroll by name in his Sunday post, although it was obvious that she was the “woman” he mentioned and again called a liar.

The huge sum the jury awarded Carroll in January — which Trump is appealing — was largely an attempt to deter Trump from further defamation, but the deterrent lost its effect less than a month and a half later. When he continued his defamation of Carroll in March, her lawyers hinted that they might indeed file another lawsuit. Carroll’s lawyer Roberta Kaplan reiterated that point in response to Trump’s renewed attack on her client on Sunday. “We’ve said multiple times since the last jury verdict in January that all options are on the table. And that remains true today — all options are on the table,” Kaplan said. in a statement to New York Just Reporter Maggie Haberman.