Buried in President Trump’s failed effort to obtain a mistrial in E. Jean Carroll’s civil suit against him for libel and battery — which maintains that he raped her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in a year she can’t remember — is an accusation of bias on the basis of literary snobbery.   

A mistrial occurs when a jury cannot reach a verdict or in the presence of a procedural error or misconduct of such seriousness that it would result in an unfair trial. In such circumstances, a new trial can be ordered. While such an outcome eludes Mr. Trump’s grasp for now, his lawyers raised an unusual argument to obtain one, an objection rooted not in law but in literature.  

The indignation expressed by one of Mr. Trump’s attorneys, Joseph Tacopina, for  Judge Lewis Kaplan’s comprehension of a literary reference is the latest chapter in the fraught relationship between literature and the law — it was William Shakespeare who wrote, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers” — and the saga of Mr. Trump’s tangled legal plot. 

The reference was to the Anglo-Irish satirist Jonathan Swift, who served as dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin. He was a peripheral player in England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688, mostly as a secretary to the higher-born. He is most famous for his satires: “A Tale of a Tub,” “A Modest Proposal,” and “Gulliver’s Travels.”

The third section of Mr. Tacopina’s request for a mistrial is titled, “The Jonathan Swift Reference,” and zeroes in an exchange where Mr. Trump’s attorney cites a passage of a book by Ms. Carroll — who is herself a journalist and author — titled, “What Do We Need Men For? A Modest Proposal.”

In Swift’s original, both the English and the affluent “solve” the problem of Irish poverty by selling their children as food to the rich. As Swift puts it with straight-faced irony, “A young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee.”  

Mr. Trump’s counsel notes how Ms. Carroll adopted this rhetorical device to suggest that all the men in America be sent to Montana for “retraining.” He pressed her on this point on the stand, asking of “all the men here in this courtroom, in this country, all get shuffled off to Montana and retrained?”

Ms. Carroll concedes that she proffered the Treasure State plan, but adds, “You understand  that was said in satire,” to which Mr. Trump’s lawyer responds, “Ah. Okay.” It is Judge Kaplan who steps in to inform that “it comes from Jonathan Swift’s ‘A Modest Proposal’ 700 years ago.” It was actually written 293 years ago. 

In moving for a mistrial, Mr. Tacopina characterizes this exchange as one where the “Court interjected in a manner that corroborated” Ms. Carroll’s testimony. The motion adds that if Ms. Carroll “wished to elicit testimony about a 300 year old book that did not address the subject matter of her own book,” she could have done so without Judge Kaplan’s assistance.