About a week ago, for reasons that were not altogether clear, Donald Trump threatened to sue The New York Times. Evidently, the president wasn’t kidding. NBC News reported:
President Donald Trump on Monday filed a federal defamation lawsuit against the New York Times, four of its reporters and Penguin Random House over coverage of his 2024 campaign. The suit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida, which covers the area where Trump resides outside the White House, accused the newspaper of attempting to ruin his reputation as a businessman, sink his campaign and prejudice judges and juries against him in coverage of his campaign.
The Republican and his lawyers are seeking no less than $15 billion (that’s not a typo) in compensatory damages, as well as unspecified punitive damages. (Among the defendants are Susanne Craig, Peter Baker and Michael Schmidt, each of whom has worked at one time as analysts or contributors for MSNBC or NBC News.)
In a semi-coherent 232-word rant published to his social media platform, the president described the Times as “one of the worst and most degenerate newspapers in the History of our Country,” adding that the outlet “has engaged in a decades long method of lying about your Favorite President (ME!).”
Right off the bat, it’s important to note that describing the court filing as a “lawsuit” is itself generous. As writer Jesse Berney summarized, the lawsuit is “like an 85-page Trump Truth Social post. It’s hilarious.”
That characterization is more than fair. Reading it, I felt a little embarrassed for the lawyers who were responsible for producing it, especially after seeing random Trump-related images that seemed to have been included in this dreadfully silly document for no apparent reason.
There’s no reason to think the case will succeed. For that matter, Trump’s attorneys should hope they avoid sanctions for having filed such an absurdity in the first place.
But that doesn’t mean the suit is irrelevant. On the contrary, it’s a reminder of the sitting president’s overt hostility toward the First Amendment and the idea of a free press. Let’s not lose sight of the recent pattern: Trump’s case against the Times comes on the heels of other civil lawsuits he’s brought against The Wall Street Journal, CBS News, ABC News, The Des Moines Register and CNN, among others. The volume of cases might make it seem as if this has become routine, but the broader circumstances remain bizarre: Americans have never had a president who, while in office, sued independent news organizations for publishing reports the White House disapproved of. And yet, Trump can’t seem to stop suing independent news organizations for publishing reports the White House disapproves of.
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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