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Tuesday was a busy day for Donald Trump at the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. At the very moment he was arguing to revive a RICO trollsuit against Hillary Clinton, his effort to revive a defamation trollsuit against CNN got unceremoniously kicked to the curb.
It’s just another day in the life of the world’s most vexatious litigant. It’s also a potent reminder that, when media outlets stand up to the president’s shakedown lawsuits, they always win.
Trollsuits for fun and profit
Donald Trump spent much of his time out of office pursuing garbage lawsuits. He sued Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook for tortious deplatforming. He sued the Washington Post and New York Times over stories about the Mueller Report. He sued Simon & Schuster for publishing recordings made by Bob Woodward for his book “Rage.” He sued the Pulitzer Prize Board for refusing to retract prizes awarded in 2018. He sued New York Attorney General Letitia James twice. He sued Clinton, Jim Comey, Robert Mueller, Rod Rosenstein, the DNC, and half of DC for doing THE RICO to him. And he sued CNN for using the phrase “Big Lie,” which he said was defamatory.
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The Clinton suit got him and his lawyer Alina Habba sanctioned to the tune of $1 million. Judge Donald Middlebrooks fumed that “the rule of law is undermined by the toxic combination of political fundraising with legal fees paid by political action committees, reckless and factually untrue statements by lawyers at rallies and in the media, and efforts to advance a political narrative through lawsuits without factual basis or any cognizable legal theory.” We’ll find out in a few months if Trump’s lawyers managed to convince the 11th Circuit panel to overturn the trial court’s ruling — apparently it did not go well.
But Trump’s efforts to resuscitate the case against CNN are DOA.
The inchoate airing of grievances filed in 2022 was a classic SLAPP suit, or strategic lawsuit against public participation, whacking a disfavored media outlet for unflattering coverage.
“CNN has undertaken a smear campaign to malign the Plaintiff with a barrage of negative associations and innuendos, broadcasting commentary that he is like a cult leader, a Russian lackey, a dog whistler to white supremacists, and a racist,” Trump whined in his complaint. “It is the stuff of tabloids cloaked as ‘honored’ news.”
Unbelievably, he claimed to be protecting free speech, arguing that “suits like these do not throttle the First Amendment, they vindicate the First Amendment’s marketplace of ideas.”