Ordinary people get mad and move on. Billionaire narcissists file another lawsuit. When he ran for the White House for the first time, USA Today reported that Donald Trump had been involved in 4,095 lawsuits over just three decades. That’s more than two-and-a-half lawsuits a week. Since the data goes only until 2016, it doesn’t even count the 62 lawsuits Trump and his allies filed in their attempts to overturn the 2020 election.
With Elon Musk filing a frivolous attack on Media Matters for America, it seems Trump couldn’t resist filing suit against 20 media outlets for erroneously reporting that his Truth Social media platform had lost $73 million. As Bloomberg reports, that number came from a regulatory filing by Digital World Acquisition Corporation, the special-purpose acquisition company (and allegedly a massive scam) behind Truth Social.
However, news outlets including Reuters and The Guardian, which were among the first to report the number, made a mistake in tabulating the numbers. Other media outlets then cited those erroneous figures. Rather than demanding a retraction, Trump is claiming that the whole thing constitutes a “coordinated media campaign, by no less than 20 major media outlets, to attack Trump Media & Technology Group.” He’s seeking $1.5 billion in damages.
In just the past year, Donald Trump has:
That’s more than $1 billion in dismissed lawsuits this year, with the new Truth Social suit promising to more than double that number. And that’s not even counting the many times Trump has lost in suits or motions related to his many criminal proceedings, such as losing a lawsuit against the FBI for searching Mar-a-Lago.
Right now Trump is facing an ongoing civil trial in New York for inflating the value of properties; a criminal trial for business fraud set to go to trial in February; a federal trial over his actions leading up to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, which is scheduled for trial in March; a federal trial over his illegal handling of national security documents set for April; and a racketeering and election fraud case in Georgia, for which a trial date hasn’t yet been set.
Overall 2023 has been a very busy legal year for Trump, but 2024 is going to be worse.
It might seem like wasting time on frivolous lawsuits should be way down the to-do list—and this one is very frivolous. All the sources citing Reuters’ original report are clearly protected from any claim of defamation. And in the case of Reuters, Trump’s attorneys would have to show that the news outlet acted maliciously or with “a reckless disregard for the truth.” That’s not going to happen.
Then again, this isn’t about winning in court. It’s about giving Trump something else to whine about and use in fundraising emails. Outlets like Newsmax are already running stories about how Trump is going after “big media” or taking on the “fake news.” Posts on Truth Social are claiming that even more outlets may be added to the nonsense suit.
It’s another generic bit of outrage turned out by the constant outrage machine. And when it fails, Trump will stop whining about the media and whine some more about the justice system.
Meanwhile, Truth Social will keep right on gathering dust.
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