Even by Donald Trump’s standards for frivolous defamation lawsuits, this one is impressively stupid. On Monday, the president filed yet another lawsuit against the NY Times—this time seeking $15 billion over a book that claims he’s not quite as successful a businessman as he pretends to be.
The timing is almost comically bad. Trump is suing over allegations that he’s not actually that successful… right after winning the presidency in a landslide and making absolute bank while doing it. Has there ever been a sorer winner in the history of politics? You’re the fucking President. Get over the fact that some people criticize you already.
Trump has a decently long history of suing media outlets over unflattering coverage, including multiple failed attempts against the Times. Just last year, he had to pay nearly $400k in legal fees after another bogus lawsuit against the Times failed. But why let past failures slow you down when you can file an even dumber one?
The lawsuit is against the NY Times and book publisher Penguin Random House, along with some reporters at the NY Times. The complaint is… well… it is not the most organized or professional of complaints. It is, as so many Donald Trump lawsuits seem to be, political documents designed to please Donald Trump and his legally ignorant MAGA base, rather than convincing judges.
The complaint reads more like a press release than a legal document, packed with ego-stroking passages that reveal just how pathetically thin-skinned Trump remains. Consider this actual paragraph from a federal lawsuit:
Thanks solely to President Trump’s sui generis charisma and unique business acumen, “The Apprentice” generated hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, and remained on television for over thirteen years, with nearly 200 episodes. “The Apprentice” represented the cultural magnitude of President Trump’s singular brilliance, which captured the zeitgeist of our time.
And, yes, that picture is included.
The complaint starts out by claiming that the NY Times endorsing Kamala Harris was a form of “election interference” which is not how anything works.
President Trump trounced Harris with 312 electoral votes and a sweep of all seven “battleground” states. This victory was remarkable for many historic reasons, including because President Trump had to overcome persistent election interference from the legacy media, led most notoriously by the New York Times.
That’s literally in the first paragraph of the complaint (though the claims themselves do not revolve around election interference, but even weaker claims of defamation). But, admitting that you won the election already undermines the idea that there was any damage done to Trump’s reputation from [checks notes] political reporting on him (historically some of the most protected of speech under the First Amendment.)
Indeed, Trump is going to have a pretty difficult time showing “damage” done to his reputation here. He claims that the NY Times tried to do three things:
Defendants’ pre-election goal was to kill three birds with one stone: (a) damage President Trump’s hard-earned and world-renowned reputation for business success, (b) in the process, sabotage his 2024 candidacy for President of the United States, and (c) prejudice judges and juries in the unlawful cases brought against President Trump, his family, and his businesses by his political opponents for purposes of election interference.
If that were true (and it isn’t) then they failed on all three counts. Trump won the election easily in 2024, he’s making absolute bank while being President (perhaps more than doubling his wealth) and all of the lawsuits against him have basically been shut down with Trump coming out on top.
Also, for anyone who has followed the NY Times’ repeated (and somewhat pathetic) attempts to bend over backwards to appease Trump and sanewash his attempt to bring fascism to America by pretending it’s politics-as-normal, this following sentence is ridiculous:
Today, the Times is a full-throated mouthpiece of the Democrat Party.
There is no one who has followed the NY Times’ willingness to “both sides” every crazy thing Trump does who actually believes that.
Then, after nearly five pages of screaming about how liberal the NY Times is, the lawsuit finally says that this lawsuit is not really about the NY Times at all, but rather a book written by two of its reporters (hence the Penguin Random House inclusion on the defendants list).
The subject matter of this action—a malicious, defamatory, and disparaging book written by two of its reporters and three false, malicious, defamatory, and disparaging articles, all carefully crafted by Defendants, with actual malice, calculated to inflict maximum damage upon President Trump, and all published during the height of a Presidential Election that became the most consequential in American history—represent a new journalistic low for the hopelessly compromised and tarnished “Gray Lady.” Defendants’ pre-election goal was to kill three birds with one stone: (a) damage President Trump’s hard-earned and world-renowned reputation for business success, (b) in the process, sabotage his 2024 candidacy for President of the United States, and (c) prejudice judges and juries in the unlawful cases brought against President Trump, his family, and his businesses by his political opponents for purposes of election interference. With President Trump having won the Presidency, Defendants’ goals remain similar and unlawful: tarnish his legacy of achievement, destroy his reputation as a successful businessman, and subject him to humiliation and ridicule.
Specifically, on September 17, 2024, Penguin published a false, malicious, and defamatory book titled “Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success” (the “Book”), authored by Craig and Buettner.
Dude. You won! Has there ever been a sorer winner in the history of politics? My goodness.
Before diving deeper into this mess, it’s crucial to understand what Trump actually needs to prove. As a public figure, he must show “actual malice”—and despite what Trump’s lawyers seem to think, that’s not about being mean to him.
Actual malice requires proving the defendants published something they knew was false or with reckless disregard for the truth (and reckless disregard also means something different than most people assume: it means you have to have ignored evidence that what you were publishing was false). It’s an extremely high bar, deliberately designed to protect robust debate about public figures. It has absolutely nothing to do with being angry or hostile—which is what Trump’s very bad lawyers seem to think it means.
Defendants each desire for President Trump fail politically and financially. Each feels actual malice towards President Trump in the colloquial sense: that is, each—Craig, Buettner, Baker, and Schmidt, as individuals, and the Times and Penguin’s relevant executives as corporations—subjectively wishes to harm President Trump, and each wish to manipulate public opinion to President Trump’s disadvantage to worsen his current and future political and economic prospects. Put bluntly, Defendants baselessly hate President Trump in a deranged way.
That final sentence—”Defendants baselessly hate President Trump in a deranged way”—reads like it was written by a sixth grader having a tantrum, not a lawyer filing a federal lawsuit. More importantly, nowhere in this 85-page screed do Trump’s lawyers actually demonstrate the knowing falsity or reckless disregard that the law requires.
They describe completely typical best practices in reporting as if they’re nefarious, such as the following:
Likewise, the Times and its reporters, including Craig, Buettner, Baker, and Schmidt, have a pattern and practice of contacting President Trump and his team regarding negative stories on a short timeline so as to be able to state that they sought comment—in order to preserve a scintilla of the pretense of neutrality—while making it functionally impossible for President Trump to comment on stories with factual errors, correct those errors, or provide a responsive quote before publication. This policy further enables the Times and its reporters to publish negative assertions about President Trump about which they subjectively harbor doubts as to their truthfulness by permitting them to claim that they sought factual confirmation or denial regarding their stories, even when they subjectively realize that they did not do so in good faith.
Again, that’s not how any of this works, and it’s certainly not how the NY Times’ reporting works. I have plenty of criticisms about the NY Times and its coverage, but the idea that they do this for the reasons stated is ludicrous.
The incredibly weak attempt to argue for reckless disregard… is to claim that because they didn’t interview producer Mark Burnett about Trump’s time on The Apprentice, that’s a form of ignoring counter evidence.
For non-exhaustive examples, and as detailed supra, Defendants published numerous statements regarding President Trump’s role in “The Apprentice” without first securing an interview from primary sources senior to the production of The Apprentice, such as Burnett. Defendants knew that Burnett would likely have contradicted numerous specific false, malicious, and defamatory purported statements of fact that they made regarding President Trump’s role in “The Apprentice” as well as their general narrative regarding President Trump’s role in the show’s success. Defendants therefore did not sufficiently pursue speaking with Burnett even after he did not grant an interview, did not sufficiently seek to obtain his original notes or records, and otherwise failed to engage with Burnett and other potential insiders with “The Apprentice” because they subjectively believed that these sources would have tended to contradict the defamatory lies that they wished to publish about President Trump.
Again, this is not how the NY Times works. If Burnett would have spoken to them (and historically he has refused to talk to the media about Trump beyond a single press statement he made before the 2016 election), the NY Times would have loved it and would have quoted him extensively, as that would be a huge scoop, given how often Burnett has refused to comment on Trump.
There’s also a whole tangent building off of Tulsi Gabbard’s ridiculously misleading statements earlier this year, falsely claiming that the Obama administration tried to fake Russia’s attempts to interfere with the 2016 election, even though multiple investigations (including those led by Republicans) have found that Russia absolutely tried to influence the 2016 election, even if it didn’t have much actual success.
The lawsuit then asks for… $15 billion dollars. How very Dr. Evil. The NY Times, for what it’s worth, is currently valued at less than $10 billion.
A lot of people discussing this lawsuit are claiming two things: that it’s really all about getting a settlement out of the NY Times like he’s been getting out of others, and second that it’s an attempt to get NYT v. Sullivan (the key case that established the actual malice standard) overturned.
While that may be the intent behind this lawsuit, I find both unlikely. Yes, in the lawsuit, Trump lists out a bunch of those corrupt settlements, as if they’re somehow relevant here. But plenty of people have observed that those settlements had nothing to do with the merits of the cases, but rather were entirely about capitulating to a bully and trying to get him off their backs. And, in the case of CBS, it seemed quite clear that the settlement was so that Shari Redstone could get her deal to sell Paramount/CBS to Larry Ellison’s son.
And, when it comes to the NY Times, they have a very good legal team that tends to relish taking on bad faith, bullshit SLAPP style lawsuits. They have a very good track record on those, and don’t often roll over. I would imagine that the legal team feels pretty strongly about defending this case rather than settling.
As for the attack on the actual malice standard, that’s the same thing people claimed about the last Trump lawsuit against the NY Times and it went up in smoke. It’s what people seem to want to claim about a bunch of frivolous defamation claims lately, and while it may be what the lawyers want, they seem like really bad cases to make these arguments. Because the underlying facts are so silly and so obviously bullshit, that the facts make for really bad cases to argue that the NYT v. Sullivan standard is somehow unfair.
Honestly, this just feels like so many of Trump’s lawsuits: engaging in pointless vexatious SLAPP lawfare just to punish media properties that publish negative stories about him. He has long admitted that he enjoys filing such lawsuits. Famously, he once said:
“I spent a couple of bucks on legal fees, and they spent a whole lot more. I did it to make his life miserable, which I’m happy about.”
That’s the very definition of a SLAPP suit. And, if you’re wondering, Florida does have an anti-SLAPP law, though it’s a bit quirky compared to other states. Also (more importantly) the Eleventh Circuit (which covers Florida) has said that you can’t use anti-SLAPP laws in federal court.
But, really, if you want proof that this is just Trump trying to punish those who dare to report on him accurately, just witness how he responded to a question about how he felt about Pam Bondi’s unconstitutional claims of punishing people for hate speech, by immediately threatening to go after the journalist who asked the question.
JON KARL: What do you make of Pam Bondi saying she’s gonna go after hate speech? A lot of your allies say hate speech is free speechTRUMP: We’ll probably go after people like you because you treat me so unfairly. You have a lot of hate in your hate. Maybe they’ll have to go after you.
