Donald Trump Sues New York Times For $15 Billion Jillion For 'Endorsing Kamala Harris,' Other Crimes
He also had a grand time threatening reporters in person yesterday.
Donald Trump is suing The New York Times for $15 billion, alleging in a bizarre legal complaint that the Times defamed him and lied a whole bunch, although it’s a little difficult to tell what exactly the supposed libelslander consisted of until a few dozen pages into the 85-page document.
Would you believe that the complaint starts by bragging about how Trump won the 2024 election, and that it was “the greatest personal and political achievement in American history”? Of course you would! But the New York Times was against him at every step, and that’s why he has to sue it for more than its entire market capitalization. Why, it even published a “deranged endorsement of Kamala Harris,” which began with the “hyperbolic” line, “It is hard to imagine a candidate more unworthy to serve as president of the United States than Donald Trump.”
As far as we can tell, that’s not even part of what the suit claims defamed Trump, but it had to be mentioned because we guess it really pissed him off.
The suit, filed in Florida, also accused the Times of being a “fullthroated mouthpiece of the Democrat Party,” which is both some bullshit and also not defamatory to Trump even if it were true — and judging by how many of you have given us your NYT subscription moneys, it’s definitely not. Trump also got on his fake Twitter account (archive link) to blurt that the Times had “engaged in a decades long method of lying about your Favorite President (ME!), my family, business, the America First Movement, MAGA, and our Nation as a whole.” In another of those dumb phrases he’s so fond of, Trump vowed, “that stops, NOW!” He’s so presidential, thank you for your attention to this matter.
The complaint is full of high praise for Trump’s brilliance and success, plus gripes about how mean the Times was to him, before eventually deciding that Trump had been defamed by a book written by two Times reporters, Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner, and published by Penguin Random House, another defendant in the lawsuit. For good measure, the suit also names reporters Peter Baker and Michael S. Schmidt, claiming they also wrote “third false, malicious, defamatory, and disparaging” articles about Trump, too.
So where’s the supposed defamation? Everywhere in everything the Times ever published about Trump, we guess, including the punctuation, but mostly in that book, Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father's Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success, as well as an article based on it, both of which defamed Trump by reporting in detail how Trump blew through far more of his father’s tax fraud money than anyone knew before, and even worse, by saying Apprentice producer Mark Burnett “discovered” Trump, even though he was already a superstar the likes of which the world has never seen. As for the other two pieces, Baker tortiously reviewed a bunch of Trump scandals leading up to the election, and Schmidt reported on former Trump chief of staff John Kelly, who warned that Trump would “rule like a dictator,” when in fact … well, hmmm.
Legal experts mostly rolled their eyes at the lawsuit and said it was weak sad poop, especially the bits where the complaint bragged about how Trump had wrung big settlements out of ABC and CBS by suing them. The Times, unlike the TV networks, isn’t part of a larger conglomerate, and unlike CBS’s parent company Paramount, isn’t in the middle of trying to get approval for a merger, so it’s more likely to fight back in court. Trump isn’t likely to be able to meet the “actual malice” standard for lawsuits claiming libel of a public figure, because he’d have to prove that the paper and reporters published statements they knew to be false, or acted with “reckless disregard for the truth.” And no, just repeating those phrases a lot in the complaint isn’t proof.
The greater threat isn’t that Trump will be able to sue the Times out of existence, but that the lawsuit may turn into a vehicle for a broader attack on press freedom. Harry Melkonian, a constitutional law prof at the University of Sydney, said that Trump may really be looking for the chance to appeal his stupid loser case all the way to the Supreme Court in hopes his six pals there will decide to overturn Times v. Sullivan, the 1964 case that established that “actual malice” standard that has protected journalists from being sued over minor errors and the like.
Apparently chuffed about the lawsuit and excited that rightwing backlash to last week’s murder of Charlie Kirk will give him a pretext to silence criticism, Trump was also generous in making threats against reporters yesterday. First, Trump had this bizarre reaction when John Lyons, a reporter for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, asked him a question about all the money Trump is raking in while presidenting.
LYONS: Should a president in office be engaged in so much business activity?
TRUMP: I'm not, my kids are running the business. Where are you from?
LYONS: Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Four Corners programme.
TRUMP: Love the Australians, you’re hurting Australia — In my opinion, you are hurting Australia very much right now. And they want to get along with me. You know, your leader is coming over to see me very soon, I'm going to tell him about you, you set a very bad tone.
Trump then turned to Jon Karl from the other, American, ABC News, saying, “Go ahead, Jon, you can set a nicer tone.” When Lyons tried to ask a follow-up, Trump snapped at him, “Quiet!” but probably only to keep him from hurting Australia even more.
Referring to AG Pam Bondi’s unconstitutional threat to suppress “hate speech,” Karl asked Trump, “What do you make of Pam Bondi saying she’s gonna go after hate speech? … A lot of your allies say hate speech is free speech.”
Trump’s reply made clear that ABC’s $15 million settlement to make his lawsuit against George Stephanopoulos go away only encouraged him to keep attacking journalists and news organizations:
TRUMP: She’ll probably go after people like you, because you treat me so unfairly, it’s hate. You have a lotta hate in your heart. Maybe they’ll come after ABC.
KARL: Would that be appropriate?
TRUMP: Well ABC paid me $16 million recently for a form of hate speech, right? Your company paid me $16 million for a form of hate speech. So maybe they’ll have to go after you.
Libel, hate speech, settlement to get rid of a nuisance lawsuit, it’s all just a big mess of mush to him, and it all means Trump WINS — unless people fight back, which unfortunately too many media organizations seem not to notice.
PREVIOUSLY!
We’re betting that the Times will push back against Trump, but then, we’ve been disappointed before. And honestly, considering the growing threat to Times v. Sullivan, we can also imagine that media organizations may be calculating that settling with Mad King Donald in the near term is less risky than fighting all the way to the Supreme Court and seeing the old landmark case, and press freedom, shunted aside by whatever horrors might come in a Trump v. Times opinion written by Sam Alito.
[Trump v. New York Times / CNN / WaPo / TNR / NJ.com]
Yr Wonkette is funded entirely by reader donations. If you can, please become a paid subscriber, or if you’d prefer to make a one-time donation, you can use this here free speech button:
"The suit, filed in Florida, also accused the Times of being a “fullthroated mouthpiece of the Democrat Party,” which is both some bullshit and also not defamatory to Trump even if it were true"
Again, I have to ask, as a person who has lived in several countries in which it's entirely ordinary and unremarkable for newspapers to align with political causes, and also often political parties, what the fuck would be wrong with it if this were true? Fox News has always been a fullthroated mouthpiece of the Republican Party. The Wall Street Journal has never been shy about its politics. The New York Post has been openly and actively supporting Trump for years.
https://bsky.app/profile/razzball.bsky.social/post/3lyyaxtrabc27
OT but hilarious.
A thing I go off about a lot is that people don't think about what the things they say mean. Things like "in real time" or basically any idiom they just happen to turn into an extended metaphor, for example. Eric, whose brain has never been one of the best, says that his dad thought of Charlie Kirk as "as second son", apparently, which is rather sad given that Eric is his father's literal second son.