President Donald Trump just filed another one of his now-routine personal lawsuits against a media company because that is a totally cool and normal thing for the president of the United States to spend his time doing.
This time around, it’s the BBC. The BBC’s monstrous behavior seems to have consisted of editing two parts of Trump’s Jan. 6 Insurrection Jamboree speech together in a fashion that Trump says defamed him by giving the impression he directly called for violent action.
Any time Trump feels unhappy about media coverage, he decides he has been legally harmed by it. He’s been defamed, he’s been caused mental anguish, whatever. If he weren’t the actual factual president, he’d just be a weird guy who kept suing networks and getting his ass handed to him, but since he is the actual factual president, his whiny sham lawsuits get results.
Thus far, he’s gotten tons of cash (for his library, guys!) from media companies eager to bend the knee. In the case of CBS, he even got an entire network news organization to beclown itself by hiring an unqualified conservative pet, Bari Weiss, to run the place into the ground.
Trump may have overlooked the part where the BBC is not actually in America and can’t be hammered with the same threats to broadcast licenses or access that work on American-based companies. Additionally, the extremely terrifyingly defamatory thing Trump is pretending to be so mad at was never aired by the BBC on its American channels. You could see it when it was broadcast on the BBC or via the BBC iPlayer, neither of which is available here.
What Trump didn’t overlook, however, is that the British government was set to begin its required once-a-decade review of the BBC’s charter on Dec. 16, so he made sure to get that lawsuit in just under the wire. Roughly 65% of the BBC’s funding comes from public license fees, so the timing here is clearly intended to threaten the British government itself, extracting some sort of concession on how the government regulates or funds the broadcaster.
However, it’s also that public funding that might prevent Trump from getting the multi-million-dollar payday he’s come to crave. As a largely publicly funded entity with a charter from the government, the BBC can’t blithely make the customary presidential library bribe like ABC or CBS could, as that bribe would in large part be actual British taxpayer dollars.
So, let’s presume that, for now at least, the BBC is going to be less pathetic than its American counterparts and actually defend this lawsuit. That is honestly where the fun for the BBC and the rest of us would begin, and the fun for Trump sorta ends.
To prevail in a defamation claim, Trump has to show that what the BBC conveyed was deliberately or recklessly false. But that’s just one part. To get the big $10 billion he is demanding, he also has to prove damages.
The operative word here, of course, is “prove.” Trump loves to allege damages, but he gets around the part where he actually has to show he was harmed by getting settlements instead. But if he can’t get a settlement, he has to go through discovery, where he has to provide information showing how he was financially damaged or otherwise harmed.
And what the BBC is likely to drop on Trump if this thing continues will look a lot like what he just got served in his dumb lawsuit against the Pulitzer Board.
Trump sued the Pulitzer Board to force it to retract the Pulitzer Awards given to both the Washington Post and The New York Times for their coverage of Russian interference in the 2016 election. Trump’s logic here is that he says there was no Russian interference, therefore there wasn’t, therefore he was defamed, financially harmed, and oh, oh, so anguished.
Trump drew a very favorable three-judge panel in Florida state court earlier this year, which has let him proceed with this nonsense suit. But the problem for Trump with his lawsuit proceeding is that it is now at the discovery stage, so the Pulitzer Board just served him with 12 pages of demands.
And since Trump has alleged that somehow this damaged him to the tune of bazillions, he has to give up his financial information: documents showing all assets and all liabilities and all evidence of any losses suffered from the Pulitzer Board’s refusal to retract the awards.
And since he’s alleged he has suffered such, such anguish, he has to produce evidence of his physical and mental health over the last ten years, including all medications and all yearly physical examinations. He can sidestep providing that material, the board helpfully explained, as long as he confirms in writing he’s not seeking any damages for physical, mental, or emotional harm.
There’s no question Trump will push back on this, but it isn’t something that even a friendly court can make go away. If you’re claiming damages, you have to prove you suffered damages. If you’re claiming mental or physical anguish, you have to prove you suffered mental or physical anguish. Trump could avoid this by just dismissing the lawsuit, but you can expect him to try some other, stupider, more bully-ish move first.
But much like the BBC, the Pulitzer Board doesn’t need access, nor does it need approval for media mergers or anything else that Trump can hold over its head, so the threats that worked on CBS and ABC won’t land here.
Hmm. Not so much fun now, is it?
