Columnist relishes the “karmic justice” of 5 powerful women bringing down Donald Trump

Donald Trump continues to consume the American (and perhaps the global) psyche, but one columnist feels comforted by the likelihood that at least Trump is lying awake at night haunted by the fact that he is being taken down by a group of “nasty women.”

“Letitia James. Fani Willis. E. Jean Carroll, and her lawyer Roberta Kaplan. And, of course, Stormy Daniels. The five women who are living rent-free in Mr. Trump’s mind these days,” wrote New York Times columnist Jessica Bennett.

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James is the Attorney General of New York who brought a civil fraud case against Trump. Willis, Fulton County, Georgia’s District Attorney, filed 13 criminal charges against Trump in connection to the alleged conspiracy to falsify Georgia’s 2020 election results and steal the state’s electoral votes.

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Carroll was sexually assaulted by Trump in 1995 and, with Kaplan’s help, recently won $83.3 million in a suit accusing the former president of repeatedly defaming her. This judgment came after a jury already found he sexually assaulted her and had ordered him to pay her $5 million.

Daniels is the adult film star at the center of Trump’s ongoing hush money trial – the first criminal trial of a former president in history. Trump and the Trump Organization are accused of hiding its hush money payments, made in 2016 and 2017, to silence potentially unflattering stories about Trump’s alleged affair with Daniels during the 2016 election. Trump and his organization allegedly misrepresented these payments to hide their breaking of federal campaign finance laws.

“Women,” Bennett declared in her column. “I suspect he never thought they would be the ones to corner him, making the case about his craven and possibly criminal behavior.”

“Mr. Trump has long treated women as objects, targets, supplicants; everyone knows the ‘Access Hollywood’ recording, but he has demeaned and degraded them for years… He seems to mostly associate women with sex… or with spite… He will woo them, he will grab them, he will scorn them, he will mix them up, he will call them names. But he never took them as much of a threat, until now.”

No man gets Trump “spinning like a top” the way women with “bravery and moxie” do, she continued. “Imagine being called to account by people — by a gender, I’d argue — that you consider beneath you.”

She also pointed out that the women currently circling Trump “loom even larger now that the women who used to surround him [namely, Melania and Ivanka Trump] are nowhere to be found.”

One thing is for sure, Bennett emphasized: The “level of vitriol he spews” at these women shows that they are deeply in his head.

“There is a particular kind of woman that Mr. Trump can stomach,” she explained, “and it typically doesn’t include an aging spinster, Black women who challenge him, a Jewish New York lesbian or a sex worker who has nicknamed him ‘Tiny.’ If his by-the-minute posts on Truth Social shouting ‘ELECTION INTERFERENCE!’ and ‘WITCH HUNT’ are any indication, these women get to him.”

Bennett also acknowledged the “karmic justice” in the situation.

“After Mr. Trump talked about grabbing women in the ‘Access Hollywood’ tape, women talked about grabbing him back by defeating him at the ballot box in 2016. They didn’t. Maybe what we are seeing now is the grab-back moment, albeit more of a slow and steady pinch. After years of demonizing women who refuse to do his bidding, he is getting a measure of comeuppance at their hands.”