Watch: J.D. Vance Makes an Unfortunate Couch Joke at Nevada Rally (2024)

It looks like Donald Trump may be heading back to court before the polls open in November, and he’ll once again be going head-to-head with author E. Jean Carroll.

A federal appeals court has scheduled oral arguments for September 6, as part of Trump’s appeal of the May 2023 verdict in his first trial against Carroll. At the time, a jury unanimously found Trump liable for defamation and sexual abuse, and ordered him to pay her $5 million.

Lawyers for Carroll had filed a motion to a federal appeals court in May this year to expedite Trump’s appeal, arguing that Trump would use his campaign as an excuse not to sit in court.

“Donald J. Trump has demonstrated a clear pattern of dilatory, obstructionist, and bad faith conduct throughout these proceedings,” the motion said. “With the pendency of the general presidential election campaign (which will intensify in the fall), not to mention several active state and federal criminal proceedings, Mr. Trump may well contend that any oral argument scheduled for later in 2024 must be deferred until early 2025—at which point he could be preparing for an inauguration or awaiting another criminal trial.”

While Trump will likely try to worm his way out of the very proceedings he requested, it seems like some people are very much looking forward to it.

“I AM READY!!!!” Carroll wrote in a post on X (formerly Twitter).

In January, Trump paid a hefty bond and filed to appeal the verdict in his other case against Carroll, after a jury ordered that he fork out a whopping $83 million to the author for repeatedly defaming her.

If oral arguments proceed as planned, they will take place less than two weeks before the former president is scheduled to attend a sentencing hearing for his 34-count criminal conviction in his hush-money case.

Former President Donald Trump on Tuesday backed up a blatantly antisemitic claim about Vice President Kamala Harris’s husband.

During an interview on WABC 77’s radio show Sid & Friends in the Morning, Trump agreed with host Sid Rosenberg, who criticized Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, on the basis of his faith.

“They tell me that this Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, Mr. President, is Jewish,” Rosenberg said. “He’s Jewish like Bernie Sanders is Jewish. Are you kidding me? He’s a crappy Jew, he’s a horrible Jew!”

“Yes, yes,” Trump replied under Rosenberg’s rant. As Trump made perfectly clear throughout the interview, to him, the only good Jewish person is one who’s voting Republican.

During the interview, Trump repeated his old attack against Jewish Americans who refused to support his presidential bid.

“Any Jewish person that voted for her, or him, or whoever it’s going to be, I assume it’s going to be her; anybody that did that should have their head examined,” Trump said. “If you love Israel, or if you’re Jewish—because a lot of Jewish people do not like Israel, and they happen to be in New York, you know that?”

“Yes,” chirped Rosenberg, whose radio talk show is local to New York City.

“If you are Jewish,” Trump continued, “regardless of Israel, if you’re Jewish, if you vote for a Democrat you’re a fool. An absolute fool.”

Trump has previously suggested that any Jewish person who did not vote for him “does not love Israel” and “should be spoken to.” The former president seems to have a pretty limited idea of what a Jewish person can and cannot think. He also claimed in March that “any Jewish person that votes for Democrats hates their religion.”

On Tuesday, Trump complained that Democrats no longer felt afraid to criticize Israel.

“You know, 15 years ago the strongest lobby in all of Washington was Israel. It was by far the strongest. Nobody would say anything bad about Israel! Today, it’s like nobody says anything good—except for Republicans by the way,” Trump griped.

While the American Israel Public Affairs Committee is not the biggest lobby in U.S. politics, its impact is still felt in crucial races. Earlier this year, AIPAC gave a whopping $14.5 million in the New York Democratic primary election to George Latimer, funding his ultimately successful effort to unseat progressive Representative Jamaal Bowman, a staunch critic of Israel.

During the radio interview, Trump also claimed that Harris looked uncomfortable during her meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which he said suggested that she secretly dislikes Jewish people—despite being married to one, of course.

“You can see the disdain,” Trump said. “Number one, she doesn’t like Israel. Number two, she doesn’t like Jewish people. You know it, I know it, and everybody knows it and nobody wants to say it.”

It looks like Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts had his mind made up on presidential immunity from the start, and made no effort to negotiate with the court’s liberal justices.

According to a stunning new report from CNN citing unnamed sources, Roberts looked past any chance of coming to a compromise outside of the conservative majority on the court, as was typical in past cases on presidential power. He instead thought that he could persuade the court’s liberals to look beyond Donald Trump.

The oral arguments for the case on April 25 didn’t indicate such a clear-cut breakdown, as justices seemed ready to vindicate Trump in only some of his legal team’s arguments, while also accepting some of special counsel Jack Smith’s points.

But the justices’ private session the next day did not reflect any of that, with votes quickly breaking down on ideological lines and Roberts ready to rule that presidents have near-absolute immunity for all “official acts.” He tried to steer the conversation away from Trump, writing in his opinion that ​​“unlike the political branches and the public at large, we cannot afford to fixate exclusively, or even primarily, on present exigencies.”

Roberts’s actions flew in the face of his previous rulings, such as the court’s 2022 decision Jackson v. Women’s Health Organization. While Roberts sided with the conservative majority in that case in ruling against the organization, he dissented on overturning the abortion rights enshrined in Roe v. Wade. And a decade earlier, he cast the deciding vote that upheld the Affordable Care Act, breaking with his fellow conservatives in a 5–4 decision.

But this time, Roberts did not seem amenable to compromise, and in fact one of Trump’s appointees, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, was the lone conservative on the court who sought any kind of compromise with the liberal justices. In her opinion on the immunity case, she said the Trump plan to use alternative slates of electors should be considered a “private” and not an official act, and thus subject to criminal prosecution.

Ultimately, the Supreme Court’s decision on immunity, led by Roberts, has upended precedent and put all of Trump’s legal cases in jeopardy. The one criminal case that was decided prior to the court’s ruling has had sentencing delayed. Of the two federal cases that are still being decided, one was dismissed pending appeal by a judge seemingly on Trump’s side, and the other is in limbo. In short, Roberts may have presented himself as moderate before, but his decision on immunity shows that his conservative beliefs come first.