About a week ago, for reasons that were not altogether clear, Donald Trump threatened to sue The New York Times. As it turns out, he wasn’t kidding: Earlier this week, the president and his lawyers filed a $15 billion civil suit (that’s not a typo) against the newspaper, claiming the Times had defamed him and tried to ruin his reputation.
Four days later, a federal judge rejected the case — but not on the merits. Reuters reported:
A federal judge on Friday struck Donald Trump’s $15 billion defamation lawsuit against the New York Times. U.S. District Judge Steven Merryday said Trump violated a federal procedural rule requiring a short and plain statement of why he deserves relief, and that a complaint is not ‘a public forum for vituperation and invective’ or ‘a protected platform to rage against an adversary.’
Merryday gave Trump 28 days to file an amended complaint.
In other words, the federal judge didn’t conclude that the case was meritless, at least not yet. Rather, he concluded that the actual court filing was, for all intents and purposes, unserious nonsense. Like a teacher telling a student to redo his homework, Merryday effectively told Trump’s lawyers that if they want their case to be seriously considered, they’ll have to file a less silly document.
The judge’s reaction was understandable. Putting aside every other consideration — the White House’s unprecedented offensive against the free press, the absurd dollar amount, the fact that the newspaper doesn’t appear to have done anything wrong, the unsettling frequency with which Trump files civil suits that seem awfully frivolous, et al. — the actual legal document filed with the federal court in Florida was an 85-page joke.
Reading it, I felt a little embarrassed for the lawyers who were responsible for producing it. The complaint (I’m using the word loosely) included random Trump-related images that seemed to have been included for no apparent reason. It described in unnecessary detail assorted television and film appearances the president made before his political career, as well as his role in beauty pageants.
“The Apprentice,” the president’s lawyers wrote in an actual court filing, “represented the cultural magnitude of President Trump’s singular brilliance, which captured the zeitgeist of our time.”
As writer Jesse Berney summarized, the lawsuit is “like an 85-page Trump Truth Social post. It’s hilarious.”
That was true, though Merryday clearly wasn’t amused. Judges tend to prefer serious legal documents to self-indulgent public relations presentations. In fact, Merryday’s smackdown was so brutal that Politico’s Kyle Cheney noted that the judge called Trump’s court filing “essentially garbage.” In a court order dripping with disdain, Merryday wrote: “As every lawyer knows (or is presumed to know), a complaint is not a public forum for vituperation and invective — not a protected platform to rage against an adversary. A complaint is not a megaphone for public relations or a podium for a passionate oration at a political rally or the functional equivalent of the Hyde Park Speakers’ Corner. “A complaint is a mechanism to fairly, precisely, directly, soberly, and economically inform the defendants — in a professionally constrained manner consistent with the dignity of the adversarial process in an Article III court of the United States — of the nature and content of the claims. A complaint is a short, plain, direct statement of allegations of fact sufficient to create a facially plausible claim for relief and sufficient to permit the formulation of an informed response. Although lawyers receive a modicum of expressive latitude in pleading the claim of a client, the complaint in this action extends far beyond the outer bound of that latitude.” He proceeded to give Trump’s lawyers four weeks to file a shorter and more “dignified” document. Whether the president will throw some kind of online tantrum directed at the jurist (a George H.W. Bush appointee) remains to be seen.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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