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Trump tries to stick up The New York Times with a water gun
The lawsuit is beyond parody, even by Trump's standards.
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Yesterday, the world’s most famous mugger leapt out from the digital bushes and demanded $15 billion from The Gray Lady.
After successfully leveraging his official position to squeeze millions of dollars out of CBS and ABC, Trump has now turned his sights on the paper of record. Or, as he blustered on Truth Social, “The New York Times has been allowed to freely lie, smear, and defame me for far too long, and that stops, NOW!”
But the president files a lot of lawsuits, and most of them come to absolutely nothing.
Trump has recently sued CNN, the Washington Post, Simon and Schuster, New York Attorney General Letitia James, E. Jean Carroll, the Des Moines Register, and the Wall Street Journal. He once sued dozens of people. including Hillary Clinton, James Comey, and Trump’s own deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein, for doing THE RICO to him. That case got him a million dollars in sanctions, with the judge calling out Trump’s “deliberate use of a frivolous lawsuit for an improper purpose” as part of a “playbook” that includes “provocative and boastful rhetoric,” “attacks on political opponents and the news media,” and “disregard for legal principles and precedent.”
But even by those debased standards, the suit against the Times is exceptionally ridiculous.
Baghdad Bob would blush
The complaint begins by congratulating Trump for winning the 2024 election, “the greatest personal and political achievement in American history.” It estimates the value of his “one-of-a-kind, unprecedented personal brand” at more than $100,000,000,000. It lists his “hundreds of history-making media appearances” including WrestleMania V, Home Alone 2, and a cameo on the soap opera All My Children.
Having established the plaintiff’s bona fides, the complaint goes on to call the New York Times “a full-throated mouthpiece of the Democrat Party” whose “editorial routine is now one of industrial-scale defamation and libel against political opponents.” As evidence, Trump points to the paper’s “deranged endorsement of Kamala Harris,” as well as an opinion piece from 2021 calling for an end to the Senate filibuster — something Trump himself has also demanded.
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In fact, most of the supposedly defamatory allegations come from the book “Lucky Los