Dem
47
GOP
53
Donald Trump has, of course, tried very hard to silence media outlets that he believes to be unfriendly. And while he
had some success, in past months, in getting some outlets to pay protection money settlements, he suffered two
high-profile setbacks in the last 72 hours or so.
The first of those, in chronological order, involved his utterly absurd $15 billion lawsuit against The New York Times, basically because he thinks the paper's staff is a bunch of big meanies who have been extra mean to him for many years. You don't need to be a law school graduate to know that the suit is preposterous on its face. Heck, you don't even need to be a graduate of sixth grade. There is, first of all, the fact that the bar for defaming a public figure, particularly if they hold elective office, is VERY high. There's also a little thing called a statute of limitations.
Perhaps most importantly, it's nearly impossible to imagine how much defaming it would take to do $15 billion in
damages. In fact, there's only one way we can think of to get there. Imagine you defame someone by saying they lied
about being sexually assaulted by you, and you get hit with a $5 million judgment. Then, you respond to that by defaming
them again, in exactly the same way, and you get hit with an $83.3 million judgment because you clearly haven't learned
your lesson. If you play that stupid game for enough rounds, your idiot tax liability might get up to $15
billion. But you'd probably have to repeat the behavior six or seven times, rather than just stopping at two.
As it turns out, the lawsuit was not only meritless, but the filing made by Trump's "attorneys" reads like the work of someone who... well, hasn't graduated sixth grade. It is a rambling manifesto that spends its first 80 pages lionizing Trump and/or carping about his grievances. For example, there's this, from Page 28:
President Trump's late father, Fred C. Trump, was a legendary businessman and a patriot, who built over 27,000 apartments in New York City. He likewise was responsible for building one of New York City's first modern supermarkets, called Trump Market, in Woodhaven, Queens; building Shore Haven in Bensonhurst, which included thirty-two six-story buildings and a shopping center covering some thirty acres; constructing the twenty-three building Beach Haven Apartments over 40 acres near Coney Island; building barracks and garden apartments for the U.S. Navy along the East Coast during World War II; and building middle-income housing for the returning veterans and their families after the war had ended. For his efforts and accomplishments, in 1985, Fred Trump received the Horatio Alger Award for distinguished Americans.
That may seem to be lionizing Trump's father, and it is, but it's there because it's the prelude to something like 15 pages laying out the son's accomplishments in great detail, including a listing of all the properties he owns or manages, all the books he's written, and all the movies and TV shows he's appeared in. The Apprentice alone gets mentioned 48 times in the document, with multiple passages, many pages apart, recounting the same basic story of what a trailblazing and popular and record-breaking show it was.
As you might imagine, the judge who drew the case—Senior Judge of the United States District Court for the Middle District of Florida Steven Merryday, a George H.W. Bush appointee—was neither amused nor impressed. He quickly bounced the case, noting that it did not follow the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, and further observing that it is not appropriate to have 80 pages of boilerplate blather as the setup for 4 pages of actual complaint.
Merryday allowed 28 days for Trump's team to re-file, and made clear that if the President takes advantage of that opportunity, the next filing damn well better be less than 40 pages. Team Trump says they'll be back with a new filing, but we'll see if that actually happens. The whole thing was just a cheap PR stunt anyhow, and since the claim has no merit, it's likely to get bounced again, which means another poke in the eye for Trump. And if the case somehow survives and moves forward, then the discovery phase will loom, and Trump definitely does not want the highly skilled lawyers and investigative reporters who work for the Times to have a hall pass to dig into his life, looking for dirt. These things being the case, he could just quietly drop it.
Meanwhile, the considerably bigger defeat came yesterday, as ABC announced that Jimmy Kimmel will return to the air, starting tonight. That was ultimately a rather short "indefinite suspension," especially since the Trump administration has not backed down on its threat to potentially suspend ABC's broadcast license. The show's going to do very good ratings tonight, as everyone tunes in to see whether Kimmel offers some sort of apology, or he goes in the other direction and pokes the bear a bit more. We don't imagine he would say anything more about Charlie Kirk, but he could certainly have some pointed remarks about, say, government censorship. Having his show canceled definitely did not cause Stephen Colbert to take the edge off. See here.
What changed Disney's mind here? The corporate brass isn't saying, but a few explanations suggest themselves. To start, the boycott and cancellation of Disney content was apparently quite substantial. On top of that, 400 Hollywood notables, with Tom Hanks, Meryl Streep and Robert De Niro particularly notable among them, signed an open letter lambasting the suspension. There was also much talk about some/many of these people refusing to work on Disney projects going forward.
Presumably in response to these developments, Disney stock took a hit, starting the day after Kimmel's suspension was announced, and continuing through yesterday (it's already bounced back a bit in futures trading). Here's the graph:
The drop is about 3 points, which isn't enormous, but when a company has 1.8 billion shares outstanding, that's over $5 billion in market value lost. To put that in context, that's about 3 years' revenue for Disneyland, so it's nothing to sneeze at.
Sinclair-owned affiliates will not be bringing Kimmel back, incidentally, at least not right now, because Sinclair is a staunchly right-wing corporation, owned by staunchly right-wing people, and broadcasting to an audience that is substantially right-wing and/or MAGA. Maybe Sinclair will eventually back down but, in any case, Kimmel will be back on in the rest of the country. And even if he's mildly contrite tonight (no sure thing), he's surely going to join Stephen Colbert in giving it to Trump with both barrels going forward. So, once again, Trump has almost certainly done himself more harm than good with one of his stunts. (Z)