Earlier this week, at a Pennsylvania rally former President Donald Trump branded his verbose speaking style as “the weave.”
“You know what the weave is? I’ll talk about like nine different things, and they all come back brilliantly together, and it’s like, friends of mine that are, like, English professors, they say, ‘It’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen.’”
The weave was on full display Friday in a rambling, confrontational press conference where he railed against multiple women who have accused him of sexual assault, and his lawyers after appealing a jury’s $5 million award to writer E. Jean Carroll for sexual abuse and defamation.
Most media outlets cut quickly from the Republican presidential nominee’s nearly hour long statement at Trump Tower, rather than showing the event in its entirety. Trump did not take questions from the press. With that, here are USA TODAY’s take-aways from his comments just days before he is scheduled to debate Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris.
Trump spoke Friday after three New York federal appeals judges heard his appeal of a 2023 civil jury verdict that he sexually abused advice columnist Carroll decades ago in a department store, and then defamed her in 2022 by calling her allegations a “con job.” Jurors awarded Carroll $5 million for sexual abuse and defamation. A jury in a separate case awarded Carroll another $83.3 million in January for defamatory denials by Trump in 2019. Trump is also appealing that verdict.
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Highlighting past allegations
Perhaps the most startling part of Trump’s remarks was that he voluntarily brought up past allegations of sexual misconduct, including one which was not allowed to be mentioned in the Carroll case, that had likely dropped from voters radar.
Trump’s lawyers had just argued in court that Carroll’s 2023 rape trial was tainted by the presence of other allegations. Dozens of women have accused Trump of sexual misconduct dating back to the 1970s.
He said of a woman who has accused him of sexual misconduct on a plane in the 1970s that “she would not have been the chosen one,” and also commented on journalist Natasha Stoynoff, who testified that while she visited Mar-a-Lago to interview Trump and Melania for an article in 2005, Trump pushed her against a wall and forcibly kissed her before they were discovered by Trump’s butler.
Trump said she wouldn’t have written a “beautiful” article if he had assaulted Stoynoff, whose name he could not recall.
“Whatever her name was − I don’t know the lady, so. Perhaps it’s better that way, but I don’t know the lady,” he said.
He reiterated of Carroll, “I never touched her. I would have had no interest in meeting her in any way, shape or form.”
Saying he never met Carroll
The two court rulings against him stem from Trump claiming that Carroll made up that he attacked her in a department store dressing room in the 1990s. Carroll’s attorney’s have said that “all options are open” if he continues to make the claims.
On Friday, he said again that Carroll was telling a “made up, fabricated story,” causing her lawyers to reiterate their position in a statement.
“Never met her, never touched her, never had anything to do with her,” Trump said.
Trump claimed in his press event that he had never met Carroll, adding that he didn’t think a 1987 photo showing him talking with Carroll and her then-husband, John Johnson, counts. In his comments Friday, Trump stressed that Johnson is Black.
In a deposition, Trump identified Carroll in the photo as his former wife Marla Maples. He was married at the time to Ivana Trump, who appears in the photo.
Trump also falsely said Friday that the photo, which has circulated publicly since 2019, might have been created using artificial intelligence – though Trump has previously acknowledged that the photo is authentic., but said the interaction was insignificant.
“I never met the woman, other than this picture – which could’ve been AI-generated, I don’t know, showed up out of nowhere. But it’s fine, nice picture,” Trump said Friday.
Criticizing his lawyers
“I’m disappointed in my legal talent, I’ll be honest with you,” Trump said, because they had not brought up “such a famous dress” which he claimed would have exonerated him that was “Monica Lewinsky part two.”
In Feb. 2023, Judge Lewis A. Kaplan rejected a last minute offer by Trump’s legal team to provide DNA to rebut Carroll’s claims. Kaplan said at the time that the lawyers had years to make such an offer, but chose not to until weeks before the trail date in an effort to cause delay.
Carroll’s lawyers spent years seeking Trump’s DNA to compare to stains found on the dress Carroll wore the day she says Trump attacked her.
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