It’s MLK Day today; the Iowa Caucuses are tonight.

Over the weekend the final Des Moines Register poll came out, putting Trump at 48% in Iowa. At this point there are only three other Republican active candidates of note: former South Carolina governor and UN ambassador Nikki Haley, polling at 20%; Florida governor Ron DeSantis, at 16%; and political neophyte Vivek Ramaswamy, a biotech entrepreneur, at 8%.

And tomorrow, yet another trial involving Trump will commence in New York. I’d kind of forgotten about this one which, given what I’m about to describe, is remarkable, in a sad way.

As background: In 2019, the journalist E. Jean Carroll published an account of her having been sexually assaulted by Trump in the mid-1990s in a department store dressing room. Trump vehemently denied this, leading Carroll to sue Trump for defamation. While that case (Carroll I) was still wending its way through the court, Carroll sued Trump again in November 2022 (Carroll II) under a newly-passed New York law called the Adult Survivors Act, which created a one-year window in which civil suits relating to sexual offenses for which the statute of limitations had passed could be filed.

Carroll II went to a jury trial in April 2023, and the jury found that Trump had committed sexual assault and defamed Carroll, awarding Carroll $5 million of damages. In the wake of the verdict, Trump immediately made defamatory comments about Carroll on national television, leading Carroll to amend her allegations in Carroll I accordingly to add the new comments.

The progress of Carroll I through the system had been delayed by questions of – what else? – Presidential immunity, on the theory that the sitting President’s response to an allegation against him constituted an official act for which he would be immune from civil litigation under the so-called Westfall Act (a 1988 statute enacted to override the SCOTUS decision in Westfall v. Erwin). In light of a D.C. Circuit appellate decision in January 2023 in Carroll I, in July the DOJ submitted a letter indicating that it no longer believed that Trump was “acting within the scope and employment of his office as President” in his 2019 comments about Carroll, and hence it no longer believed the Westfall Act was salient to this case.

This removed the impediment for Carroll I to proceed to trial. In September 2023 the assigned judge, Lewis Kaplan, issued a summary judgment in favor of Carroll, in light of the findings in Carroll II. As such the trial scheduled to start tomorrow in Carroll I is, much like the Trump Org civil trial, very limited in scope to determining the amount of damages Trump owes for defamatory acts that have already been legally deemed to have occurred. In particular, quoting from a memorandum opinion Kaplan issued last week in advance of the trial: “[T]he fact that Mr. Trump sexually abused – indeed, raped – Ms. Carroll has been conclusively established and is binding in this case.”

So, to sum up: The candidate currently polling at 48% in a four-way Iowa caucus field is the individual who, the very next day, will be standing trial for $10 million of potential damages relating to the fact that, several months ago, a jury “conclusively established” that he committed sexual assault and defamed his accuser.

Once again, everything about that sentence would have been stunning prior to the last several years. But in our world, tomorrow’s trial might not even make the Top Five list of Trump-related trials currently in the public eye.