Elle advice columnist E. Jean Carroll has accused Donald Trump of rape. It’s not new for a president to be accused of rape, but due to its seriousness, let’s consider this charge.

We won’t quote Carroll’s rather sordid details, but suffice it to say that she says the alleged assault happened in the dressing room of New York’s Bergdorf Goodman’s department store in the mid 1990s. She claims to have told friends at the time but not the police, because one friend advised her, “Tell no one. Forget it! He has 200 lawyers. He’ll bury you.” Both friends “confirmed their accounts to New York” magazine, which broke the story.

Trump certainly had a team of lawyers, and he definitely had a penchant for misbehaving with beautiful women. Yet this also brings to mind the cravenly timed accusations against now-Justice Brett Kavanaugh — a man who absolutely did not have Trump’s track record. Those almost certainly false allegations had no corroborating witnesses and no contemporaneous reports of any kind. They were timed solely to destroy the nomination of Trump’s Supreme Court nominee.

When did Carroll bring her accusations? Just days after Trump launched his 2020 reelection bid. Also, she has written a soon-to-be-released man-hating book that she’d like people to buy. Indeed, in vigorously denying the allegations, Trump said, “I’ve never met this person in my life. She is trying to sell a new book — that should indicate her motivation. It should be sold in the fiction section.”

Trump’s morality — or utter lack thereof — has been the subject of various analysis here in our humble shop, including to note that it was, so to speak, baked into the cake for voters in 2016. Trump is the guy who said, “You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. … Grab ‘em by the p—y. You can do anything.”

Perhaps Carroll’s allegation is meant to up the ante from marital infidelity with porn stars to actual sexual assault. But we find it telling that the story has not dominated all news coverage 24/7 since it dropped Friday. True, Carroll made the rounds on a few talk shows — where she bizarrely claimed she wished she had asked for Trump’s tax returns during the assault and insists that she’s not filing charges because it would be “disrespectful to the women who are down on the border who are being raped around the clock down there without any protection.” Whatever that means.

In any case, it hasn’t been a front-page blockbuster. Perhaps the Leftmedia learned a lesson with the Kavanaugh debacle.

Update: Trump responded, “I’ll say it with great respect: Number one, she’s not my type. Number two, it never happened. It never happened, OK?” The first part might qualify as one of the worst defenses we can imagine.

But, to be clear, Carroll is a loon. Her media interviews have been a disaster and she’s clearly not credible.