What did Donald Trump do today?

He tried to say that defaming a woman he raped was part of his presidential duties—again.

In 2020, while he was still president, Trump had his Justice Department attempt to intervene as the defendant in E. Jean Carroll's defamation and sexual assault suit against him. As this site wrote at the time:

DOJ lawyers argued, in effect, that when Trump called Carroll a pathological attention-seeker who was endangering women who had been assaulted, he was doing so in his official capacity as the President of the United States.

This kind of move is routine in the many lawsuits involving the executive branch, but using it to keep a president out of civil court for personal attacks on the character of a woman he's accused of raping is totally unprecedented.

The attempt to make Trump's problems the government's was unsuccessful, but the inevitable appeals dragged the case on two years longer than it otherwise would have. Once that question was finally settled, the case proceeded to trial and Carroll won not one but two judgments against him, because Trump repeated the defamatory claims in defiance of the first judgment. The total damages awarded to Carroll were $88.3 million—$5.3 million for the first verdict, and $83 million for the second.

The jury in that trial found Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation. The judge's final ruling made clear that the jury's verdict and the facts established in the case meant that Trump had raped Carroll in the sense that the word is commonly used.

Today, five years after the first time he tried this, Trump once again had his DOJ file a motion seeking to have the United States government stand in as the defendant while he appeals the original verdicts—the exact same stance as before, on the exact same matter, in the exact same case.

In his unrelated crusade against law firms who have opposed him or his administration in court, Trump has called for severe penalties for those who file "frivolous" legal claims. That term has a specific legal meaning, and it encompasses claims meant to delay justice that are "based on an indisputably meritless legal theory."

Why does this matter?

• "L'etat, c'est moi" is the slogan of a king, and presidents are not kings.

• Government lawyers don't exist to protect Donald Trump personally—even if most of them got their jobs because they used to be his criminal defense lawyers.

• Lying about a woman you raped in order to discredit her claim is still not part of the official duties of the President of the United States.