Convicted felon Donald Trump — yep, still fun to type those words — has spent the last three weeks throwing a giant, feet-stomping, diaper-filling temper tantrum over an interview Kamala Harris gave to “60 Minutes” that he claims was “deceptively edited” and which anyone with common sense who has ever watched a television interview will tell you was simply “edited.”
For more “deceptively” edited, we’d give you these Trump interactions with Fox barbershop denizens that Fox News edited like so:
The televised broadcast omitted Trump’s comments about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio. He told the barbershop customers that “they just dumped 50,000 people — 32,000 migrants from another country — in Springfield, Ohio. They don’t know what to do.” The actual number of migrants in Springfield is far lower, according to the city’s own data. The broadcast also left out Trump’s gross exaggerations about crime in Aurora, Colorado.
One of the most telling parts of the dialogue began when an audience member asked Trump about finding a way to eliminate federal taxes in the future. On Fox, Trump was shown immediately answering affirmatively: “There is a way.”
But that response from Trump actually came more than seven minutes later, after Trump (and Jones) brought up other topics, including inheritances, the Keystone Pipeline, Ronald Reagan, Russia, and transgender sports players. Trump had to be nudged back on track several times by the unnamed audience member, who kept circling back, apologetically, and said “I wasn’t able to finish my question.” After he repeated his tax inquiry yet again, Trump said “there is a way.”
But why let facts get in the way when you can sue CBS, producer of “60 Minutes,” for ten billion dollars over it? And no, that is not hyperbole. The lawsuit Trump’s idiot lawyers filed this week really claims Trump suffered damages “reasonably believed to be at least $10,000,000,000” because the show’s producers clipped one of Harris’s answers to make it shorter.
We like how they threw “reasonably” in there. That’s like us saying we reasonably believe Taylor Swift owes us a relationship because she badly damaged our self-esteem when she started dating Travis Kelce.
To briefly recap: A few weeks ago, “60 Minutes” asked both presidential candidates for interviews. Trump declined, likely because his advisors recognize that even on his best day he is about as coherent as an infant on laughing gas, and that the less people see of him, the better the chances they will not realize that his brain is a howling void.
Harris accepted, and sat down with reporter Bill Whitaker. At one point, Whitaker asked her a question about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the situation in the Gaza Strip. Harris gave an answer that CBS then used in a promotional spot that ran on October 5. But in the actual interview, which aired on October 6, they trimmed a bit of the answer so it was slightly shorter. This is an extraordinarily common practice in television interviews, when producers are looking to shave seconds here and there so the interview can cover a wide range of topics in a limited amount of time.
To Trump, however, this is yet another excuse, as if he needed one, to accuse the American media of actively working against him. So the convicted felon and his lawyers filed a lawsuit accusing CBS of purposely trying to make Harris sound coherent even though everyone knows she is a big stupid idiot. Doing so, if we were to sum it up in Trump’s usual argot, is ELECTION INTERFERENCE OF A KIND NEVER BEFORE SEEN IN THIS COUNTRY and a TOTALLY ILLEGAL SCAM and an “UNPRECEDENTED SCANDAL”!
Did we write about? Reader, we did!
The complaint is here, and it is clearly meant to be more campaign document than serious lawsuit. In it, Trump calls Harris CBS’s “preferred candidate,” and accuses the network of trying to put its thumb on the scale for her:
A news network pointing out that one presidential candidate has been attacking another presidential candidate? Heavens to Murgatroyd! Next you’ll tell us CBS is reporting the results of the election on Tuesday.
That Harris is unintelligent is one of those broadsides presented as fact, and it appears over and over in the lawsuit. Harris is also referred to throughout as “Kamala,” while Trump is referred to as “President Trump.” We have read enough lawsuits to know that referring to a subject by first name is not common. Here, it is a not-so-subtle sexist way of disrespecting the American vice president.
Quite a range there of between $75k and $10,000,000,000. Why not ask CBS to buy you an aircraft carrier while you’re at it?
Thursday night, Trump bragged about the lawsuit at a rally, whining about CBS and demanding the network lose its broadcast license, which is not actually a thing that networks have. Local affiliates hold broadcast licenses, and if Trump wins and wants to yank the broadcast license for each and every CBS affiliate in the nation, we wish him luck:
“You know why I sued her? [sic] Because she was on, and it was called election interference fraud. Very simple.”
“Election interference fraud” is not a legal standard, but what the hell, he’s rolling.
Now, a judge with an ounce of self-respect would laugh this monstrosity right out of the courtroom. But Trump’s lawyers filed it in Amarillo, Texas. This is the court of Matthew Kacsmaryk, the go-to judge for hearing frivolous conservative lawsuits that a qualified jurist would laugh out of a courtroom faster than any lawyer can yell “vexatious litigant.” The Federalist Society hack has in his five short years on the bench amassed a track record of doing incredibly stupid shit with zero support in law or precedent, like overturning the FDA’s 20-year-old approval of Mifepristone on the grounds that it could be dangerous despite two decades of evidence showing it is safer than Tylenol.
Trump’s justification for filing the lawsuit in Texas? Well, CBS broadcasts “60 Minutes” into Texas, therefore a significant amount of the damage done to Trump occurred in Texas, therefore oh hell, our eyes just rolled back into our brain.
We will be excitedly watching for how Kacsmaryk tortures literally the entire federal legal code in order to find Trump has a right to the jury trial he is demanding. Then we will excitedly write about it, probably right after excitedly downing 10 billion double bourbons.
[The Guardian / Trump’s dumb lawsuit filing]
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OT.
Hot Rod is gone. I held his paw as he passed. I can't stop crying.
And it seems Harris is really good at Dum Dum door knocking.
https://x.com/CharlotteAlter/status/1852399327466950897
https://xcancel.com/CharlotteAlter/status/1852399327466950897
Senior Harris campaign staff say their internal data shows Harris winning battleground state voters who have made up their minds in the last week by double-digit margins. They say that Trump's MSG rally was the "last straw" for late-breaking undecided voters
Top Harris brass says their organizing operation has knocked on 13 million doors across the battleground states. In October, they made 100m calls into battleground states
In PA alone, their team is on track to knock 5m doors and have 1m conversations with voters by election day
Top campaign staff believe Harris's momentum is bc of the work they're putting in, but also bc Trump's MSG fiasco has broken through to late-breaking undecided voters.
The MSG rally has sharpened the contrast and reminded voters what Trump is like