'Thin, smoggy layer' of Trump: Writer says defamation trial shows how he's consumed U.S.

E. Jean Carroll spent decades building a reputation as a writer — now she is known only as the woman who accused Donald Trump of sexually assaulting her, a columnist wrote Thursday.

The author and journalist has written advice columns, biographies, memoirs and other books, but now she's only ever asked to write about or comment on the former president found liable for sexually abusing and then defaming her. And Washington Post columnist Monica Hesse sees Carroll as an avatar for the rest of the nation.

"Following the E. Jean Carroll trial feels like watching one 80-year-old woman realize there is just nothing she can do to rid herself of this omnipresence, and then realizing that we are, all of us, that 80-year-old woman," Hesse wrote.

"That we have been, for some time, subsumed and consumed by one man and his very strong MAGA base. In the future when sociologists and historians study this period of time, I wonder if this will be the most lasting psychological stain. Not any specific acts, but the general weight, the inescapable pull, the black hole, the fog, the fug, the reality that our atmosphere is coated in a thin, smoggy layer of Donald Trump."

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Trump barely won his first election, lost his second and was never popular as president, but yet his presence hovers over all aspects of political and cultural life, she wrote

"We used to have debates. We used to have a normal political system," Hesse wrote. "Now we have only the memory of who we were before he became a main character in our story."