There is a long list of descriptors used to identify Donald Trump: real estate mogul, reality TV star, former president, insurgent, criminally induced hush money payer.

From Tuesday, a new particularly incriminating label can be added: Sexual attacker.

Still, it seems unlikely that a civilian jury’s determination that Trump physically assaulted writer E. Jean Carroll will make much of a difference to his staunch political base or, for now, change the fundamental dynamics of the 2024 presidential race.

“I don’t see this moving at all,” said Charlie Cook, a nonpartisan campaign analyst who has obstructed elections for decades. “Every time we thought something would hurt him, it doesn’t.”

That said, Trump continues to face a series of criminal investigations related to his attempts to overturn the 2020 election, the January 6 coup attempt he inspired, and mishandling stolen documents he sent to his Mar -a-Lago retreat.

By the time Republican voters cast the first ballot in Iowa in February, will the cumulative weight of Trump’s legal burdens, compounded by the verdict in Carroll’s lawsuit, be enough to drive a significant number of GOP voters away? to hunt?

That jury is still out.

A Manhattan panel of six men and three women deliberated for less than three hours, just enough time to provide lunch, before handing down a verdict and concluding that Trump had forced himself on Carroll in the dressing room of an upscale department store nearly three decades ago in Manhattan.

The jury found Trump liable for sexual assault and defamation and awarded his victim $5 million in damages.

But if the speed of the decision seemed clear and decisive, the verdict turned out to be less so.

Jurors did not accept Carroll’s claim that the ex-president raped her, dismissed the most inflammatory allegation and crucially kept the combination of “rape” and “Trump” out of the headlines.

Even that may not have deterred many Trump supporters.

His criminal charges in March for paying hush money to cover up an extramarital affair and prop up his shaky 2016 presidential campaign, a career killer under most circumstances, turned out to be a fundraising bonanza and led many Republicans to rally behind Trump’s effort. rally to reclaim the White House.

Minutes after Tuesday’s verdict, Mike Madrid, one of the founders of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, joked on Twitter, “That noise you’re hearing is Trump’s polls rising in the Republican primary.

Maybe.

Much will depend on what happens on the campaign trail in the coming months, even more than in a courthouse, as the battle for the Republican nomination presumably heats up.

Most of Trump’s GOP rivals have so far shown a reluctance to go beyond the slightest veiled criticism of Trump, or offered only lame admonitions.

“The jury’s verdict should be taken seriously and is another example of Donald Trump’s indefensible behavior,” said the former governor of Arkansas. Asa Hutchinson tut-tutted after Tuesday’s verdict.

That kind of friendliness is not uncommon at this stage of the campaign. As the vote approaches and the competition heats up, the candidates will have to make a strategic decision. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Trump’s main rival at the moment, in particular, will have to decide how openly and aggressively he wants to go after the GOP frontrunner.

“There is an available segment of the Republican electorate that wants to leave Trump,” said Sarah Longwell, a GOP strategist and longtime critic of the former president who has led numerous focus groups to gauge voter sentiment.

“The question I’ve had is whether any of the candidates running against Trump have the political talent to hire him directly and grab that available audience,” Longwell said. “Can they surround Trump and show people they can be a tougher fighter? Maybe. But no one has figured out how to do that yet.”

It is Trump’s great fortune that his political future is not decided by the jury in Manhattan. He turned out to be a completely terrible witness for himself.

In a videotaped statement, Trump did not take the stand, appearing alternately bored and bloated, at one point suggesting that Carroll might have enjoyed being raped.

When he got a picture of Carroll, he mistook his accuser, “not my type”, for his second wife, Marla Maples. He defended his infamous hot-mic moment on “Access Hollywood” in which he said he could grab women by the genitals “and when you’re a star they let you do it” by saying that history backs him up.

“If you look at the last million years, I think that’s been mostly true,” Trump said in his statement. “Not always, but mostly true. Unfortunately, or fortunately.”

During the 2016 campaign, Trump famously boasted that he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue in Manhattan and shoot someone without losing votes.

Now, with Tuesday’s swift verdict, he’s about to test another proposition: whether he could sexually maul a woman in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room and still make that claim.