Donald Trump Files $15B Defamation Suit Against NY Times
President Donald Trump Files $15B Defamation Lawsuit Against NY Times
President Donald Trump is suing the New York Times for what appears to be little more than an assault on the president’s vanity.
According to NBC News, Trump filed a $15 billion defamation suit against the Times, four of its reporters, and a publishing company on Monday in U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida. The suit accuses the defendants of attempting to ruin his reputation as a businessman, undermine his 2024 presidential campaign, and “prejudice judges and juries against him in coverage of his campaign,” NBC reported.
Even if we were to pretend for a moment that this lawsuit isn’t just part of Trump’s continued propaganda effort to attack the free press and convince people (including himself) that every unfavorable story about him is “fake news,” one sample of the language in the suit pretty much reveals it’s all about Trump being a big, ego-driven baby whose feelings are hurt because not everyone worships the ground he walks on. That’s not hyperbole, either. The suit literally alleges that the Times “continued spreading false and defamatory content about President Trump” and refused to recognize that he “secured the greatest personal and political achievement in American history” with his 2024 win.
Imagine winning your bid for a second term in the White House and still being so salty you feel the need to sue a publication for rooting against you.
Even if we were to consider Trump’s 2024 win — which came after his 2020 loss and him losing the popular vote by about 3 million votes in 2016 — a great “political achievement, it would only be great and historic because a bumbling idiot who Mr. Magooed his way into a Republican politics monopoly and managed to get reelected even after he started a domestic terrorist attack on the U.S. Capitol after spreading months of propaganda about 2020 election fraud as part of an extended temper tantrum.
Sure, it’s historic, but Trump would still want to sue if a media outlet told the truth about the reasons why.
The suit even singles out the NYT’s editorial board for endorsing Trump’s Democratic opponent, former VP Kamala Harris. (Again, does this man realize that he won this election already?)
“The [editorial] Board asserted hypocritically and without evidence that President Trump would ‘defy the norms and dismantle the institutions that have made our country strong,'” the suit states.
Oh really? Trump is going to “defy norms” and start dismantling long-standing institutions? You don’t say!
Gee, one should really hope the defendants can’t show that Trump has, oh, I don’t know, “defied norms” by doing things like sending the National Guard and other troops into U.S. cities to fight crime against the wishes of those cities’ leadership and, often, without even consulting them.
It would be a shame if the Times argued that Trump has moved to dismantle the institutions that have made our country strong by, say, playing fast and loose with the U.S. Constitution by picking and choosing when due process matters or withholding congressional-approved federal funding from states and “institutions” without bothering to go through Congress.
It’s not like the Trump administration has rolled back or sought to do away with key civil rights protections that have been in place for decades, taken over institutions of the arts like the Kennedy Center and the Smithsonian, moving to force them to MAGA-fy their content, programming, and exhibits.
No, no, Trump has plenty reason to sue — as long as he hasn’t sought to undermine the democratic electoral process, dismantle the Department of Education, propagandize the media into “fake news” oblivion, re-write history to appease conservative ideology, threaten to take away the citizenship of U.S. citizens just for being “nasty” to him, and repeatedly muse about possibly becoming a dictator. Whew, that would have been a shame.
Anyway, Trump also named in his suit Penguin Random House, which published a book by Craig and Buettner titled Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success. The four specific Times reporters he named as defendants are Susanne Craig, Russ Buettner, Peter Baker, and Michael S. Schmidt.
“Today, the Times is a full-throated mouthpiece for the Democrat Party,” the lawsuit alleges. “The newspaper’s editorial routine is now one of industrial-scale defamation and libel against political opponents. As such, the Times has become a leading, and unapologetic purveyor of falsehoods against President Trump.” (By this logic, every Democrat over the last couple of decades should be getting their attorneys on the phone to sue Fox News, but whatever.)
Newsroom lawyer David McCraw responded by defending the reporting in articles mentioned by Trump’s lawyers.
“Little needs to be said about the rest of your letter, which is principally a litany of personal complaints about The New York Times and its reporters, punctuated with falsehoods and premised on the deeply troubling notion that anyone who dares to report unfavorable facts about a presidential candidate is engaged in ‘sabotage’ (as opposed to, say, contributing to the free exchange of information and ideas that makes our democracy possible),” McCraw wrote, according to the letter attached to Monday’s suit.
Carolyn K. Foley, Penguin Random House senior vice president and associate general counsel, responded to Trump’s lawyer Edward Andrew Paltzik: “The fact that the authors of the book do not share your favorable view of your client’s career, does not provide the foundation for a defamation claim.”
It’s worth mentioning that Trump’s latest anti-media lawsuit comes after ABC and Paramount, the parent company of CBS, both settled lawsuits brought by Trump, who also filed a suit against the Wall Street Journal and its ownership in July.
Welp, if the truth hurts, you take legal action against the truth teller. It’s the Trumpian way.
SEE ALSO:
Thanks To Donald Trump, The American Dream Is Dead
Donald Trump Wants To Send Americans To Foreign Prisons
Donald Trump Wants To Give Reparations To Jan. 6 Insurrectionists
President Donald Trump Files $15B Defamation Lawsuit Against NY Times was originally published on newsone.com
