Biden Kicks Off Second Bid for Office as Trump Goes on Trial for Rape

No one knows what’s going to happen between now and 2024. But assuming Ron “Pudding Boy” DeSantis doesn’t start surging in the polls—and Robert Kennedy Jr.’s lock on the anti-vaxxer vote doesn’t clinch him the Democratic nomination—it’s looking extremely likely that the presidential election will be a rematch between Joe Biden and Donald Trump.

Given how the last number of years have panned out, it probably feels a little strange to compare and contrast the two men, as though reasonable arguments could be made for either side. It would be sort of like making plans for a Friday night and asking your friend if they’d rather catch a movie or get cancer. But just for yuks, a few data points to consider would be that only one of the candidates:

• Has been charged with 34 class E felonies stemming from various hush money payments he made before running for president the first time;
• Regularly professes his admiration for a literal war criminal, in addition to the other authoritarians and dictators he loves;
• Is largely responsible for Roe v. Wade being overturned;
• Incited a violent insurrection that left multiple people dead;
• Continues to demand violence from his supporters.

Oh, and only one of them is currently on trial for allegedly raping a woman.

Yes, on the same day that Joe Biden formally launched his reelection bid, jury selection began in the civil trial over journalist E. Jean Carroll’s claims that Donald Trump raped her in a department store in the mid-1990s—and then defamed her when he accused her of lying about the alleged assault for personal gain. Trump has called Carroll’s allegations, among many others things, “a con job,” a “hoax” and “a complete scam.” He has also insisted that he couldn’t have raped Carroll because she was supposedly not his “type.” (In addition to being beyond gross, this claim does not actually appear to be true; in a deposition with Carroll’s lawyer, Trump mistook a photo of her for his second wife, Marla Maples.)

It’s not clear how the jury will rule, though things were not looking great for Trump even before the trial kicked off. Last month, a judge rejected his legal team’s appeal to prevent the infamous Access Hollywood tape being used as courtroom evidence; as a reminder, it was on that tape that Trump was heard telling host Billy Bush: “I’m automatically attracted to beautiful [women]. I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.” The same judge ruled that Carroll’s attorneys can use testimony from Jessica Leeds and Natasha Stoynoff, who have both accused Trump of sexual assault. (Leeds has claimed that Trump tried to put his hand up her skirt on flight from Texas to New York in 1979; Stoynoff has alleged that when she was visiting Mar-a-Lago as a reporter for People magazine in 2005, Trump pinned her to a wall and forcibly kissed her.)

Trump has faced allegations of sexual misconduct from at least 26 women, all of which he denies. During her 1990 divorce deposition, Ivana Trump reportedly said that Trump had raped her the prior year, after ripping out handfuls of her hair. (She later claimed she had not accused him in a “literal or criminal sense.”)

Before he was charged by the Manhattan district attorney’s office, Trump insisted he would not drop out of the 2024 race if indicted. No one’s asked what he’ll do if he’s found liable for rape, but presumably the answer is the same.