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Trump's latest lawsuit is hilarious—until it isn't



President Donald Trump has sued another major media outlet, this time The New
York Times for libeling him with slander, or … something. But hey, one of his
lawyers in the lawsuit is Alejandro Brito, so you know this thing will be
concise, levelheaded, and airtight.

Wait, wait—we’re getting word that this suit actually looks like this.

As a threshold matter, it does not take a lawyer to understand that this is
not an actual complaint. It’s partly an extended bout of whining, partly an
extortion attempt (Trump wants $15 billion in damages), and partly Trump trying
to tee up a case for the Supreme Court to overturn New York Times v. Sullivan,
the landmark defamation case that theoretically protects the media against just
this kind of sham lawsuit.

And this suit is 85 pages long. It contains multitudes. The second page
contains a screenshot of the 2024 electoral map, apparently taken on a phone.
Not sure why that’s in here, except that Trump seemingly cannot stop himself
from boasting about it. Indeed, the lawsuit makes sure to tell you right away
how Trump’s team feels about his 2024 win: “With the overwhelming victory,
President Trump secured the greatest personal and political achievement in
American history.”

Does Trump’s team think no one has ever been elected to the presidency twice?
Do they see his victory as a bigger achievement than, say, ending the Civil
War? As bigger than founding the nation? Bigger than Ronald Reagan’s actual
blowout victory in 1984?

They probably do.




 



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Eventually, the lawsuit addresses one of the Times’ filthy lies: “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.’”

First, that’s not defamatory. It is an expression of pure opinion. Did they
not teach that at wherever Brito and his friends went to law school?

But the point of the lawsuit doesn’t appear to be making a compelling legal
argument, especially not when it literally claims, with no irony, that Trump
has “sui generis charisma and unique business acumen.” Trump’s lawyers are
right about the “unique” part since it does take a special kind of business
acumen to bankrupt multiple casinos.

The lawsuit contains an entire section on how unfair it was for the Times to
characterize Trump’s former TV show “The Apprentice” as producer Mark Burnett
rescuing Trump from a slow, sad slide into irrelevance and turning him into a
superstar instead. Setting aside that this is what happened, it’s still not
defamation of any sort.

The real meat of this lawsuit is that Trump wants NYT v. Sullivan overturned,
and you know in the mosquito-laden fever swamp that is Trump’s brain, he surely
thinks it would be neatly symmetrical if he could get rid of that ruling … by
suing The New York Times. Genius move, sir.

The lawsuit continues: “Contrary to the Times' and its reporters' apparent
impression, the First Amendment has never furnished the Times—or Penguin, or
anyone else—with an unqualified privilege to make false, malicious, and
defamatory statements about its opponents in order to try and ruin their lives
and livelihoods. President Trump brings this suit to highlight that principle
and to clearly state to all Americans exhausted by, and furious at, the decades
of journalistic corruption, that the era of unchecked, deliberate defamation by
the Times and other legacy media outlets is over.”

You see, America? He’s doing this for all of us! Not just for himself and his
pals who want to sue publications into oblivion unless they become house organs
for the regime, basically.

Sadly, Trump already has a few friends on the Supreme Court who agree with him
that NYT v. Sullivan should be revisited.

Another big chunk of this lawsuit is Trump’s lawyers patting themselves on the
back for helping Trump extort other media outlets:

President Trump's transcendent ability to defy wrongful conventions has been
vividly reflected in his successful undertaking to restore integrity to
journalism, and repair the immense damage caused by legacy media outlets such
as the Times for the better part of a decade. These legal victories were so
significant that even the Times had no choice but to, at last, reverse their
position, and reluctantly recognize the importance of the President's highly
meritorious and successful cases.





 



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It takes a minute before you realize that what Trump’s lawyers are bragging
about here is the settlements they have extorted from other mainstream media
outlets. But maybe his lawyers skipped the infinite days of law school where
they explain that settlements are not victories but instead, well, settlements.

It’s also genuinely weird to brag about previous successful extortion efforts
in a lawsuit seemingly designed to extort The New York Times.

This thing is so bad that even mainstream outlets like CNN are like Come on,
man.

“The 85-page suit reads at times like a pro-Trump op-ed, with page after page
of gushing praise for the president and repeated references to lawsuits he has
filed against other media outlets. Media lawyers immediately expressed
skepticism about Trump’s chances of prevailing,” CNN wrote in their article on
the lawsuit.

Of course, it doesn’t matter much what this lawsuit looks like. Trump’s
lawyers are not really acting as lawyers. Rather, they’re functioning as
enforcers willing to attack any media company that makes Trump sad. To Trump
and his team, writing anything negative about him should essentially be illegal.

What this complaint ultimately shows is the extreme foolishness of seemingly
letting your client write it, especially if your client is a self-aggrandizing,
thin-skinned madman who happens to be president. But the lawsuit’s overall
crappiness isn’t the point. This is now just the way Trump opens negotiations
with media companies: suing them based on lies, demanding billions, and hoping
they buckle.

Sigh. The Times will probably buckle.



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