Donald Trump talks big about being a winner but one place where he keeps losing is in the courts. He has been racking up an impressive series of legal defeats all over the place, starting with his numerous challenges to the validity of the 2020 election.
He has also been futilely suing the media and yesterday he lost yet another case.
A judge in New York has thrown out Donald Trump’s 2021 lawsuit accusing New York Times reporters of an “insidious plot” to obtain his tax records.
The former president has also been ordered to pay all attorneys’ fees and legal expenses the Times and its reporters had incurred. The lawsuit alleged that the newspaper sought out Trump’s niece Mary Trump and persuaded her “to smuggle the records out of her attorney’s office”.
The Daily Beast first reported the news. Donald Trump had also made claims against his niece, which have yet to be ruled on.
The Times’s 2018 Pulitzer-winning stories relied on information from Mary Trump to cast doubt on the ex-president’s claims that he was a self-made millionaire, showing that he inherited hundreds of millions through “dubious tax schemes”. The series also revealed a history of tax avoidance.
…Last year, the former president also sued CNN, claiming defamation and seeking $475m in damages. In 2020, his re-election campaign also sued the New York Times and the Washington Post over opinion pieces linking him to Russian interference in the election. The cases against each newspaper were dismissed.
I hope that his devoted supporters who send him money begin to realize that it is all just going down the drain in lawyers fees to indulge his fantasies.
They’re their own fantasies that Trump reflects back to them. His fantasy is that he will be dictator of a powerful country.
When you get right down to it, most of Trump’s previous court ‘victories’ have been from him going ‘so sue me’ and in essence threatening to drag any case out long enough to cost the other party more money than they’d be getting from him anyway. Generally after stiffing contractors.
He’s rarely had to deal with people who would actually call his bluff on that and who had the resources to seriously go after him and think it was worth it.
Not to mention that Trump is a serious lawyer’s worst nightmare as a client: he won’t listen to advice and he won’t shut up. So by this point his lawyers are pretty much all ALEC/Federalist Society types who are really more trained for ‘how to write laws that we can use against our enemies’ and not ‘how to argue in a courtroom’. They were trained to be think-tank people, legislature members, or judges who will favour partisanship over the actual law; and worse, the people who were actually good at it are in those jobs so the ones acting as Trump’s lawyers are the ones who couldn’t even manage that. How to act when you’re in someone else’s courtroom and they don’t agree with you just isn’t in their skill set.
His fantasy is that he will be dictator of a powerful country.
… Which he would run into the ground through incompetence, like he did every other business he was involved in. He’s no Elon Musk, after all. (cough, choke)
Mano:
I hope that his devoted supporters who send him money begin to realize that it is all just going down the drain in lawyers fees to indulge his fantasies.
This is inaccurate. It’s not all going to lawyers’ fees. If how he spent the $250mn they brought in with the “stop the steal election fund” probably $50-$60mn went to Trump’s fellow grifters, a bunch of it was spent with Trump-circle businesses, and the lawyers got the rest. Although some of it may have left in those padded-looking gym bags Ivanka and Jared left with. There were a lot of hangers-on besides just lawyers, and a lot of them got very rich -- to the tune of tens of million$.
Are we tired of it yet?
Yup. He keeps on winning.
For a given definition of winning.
That was an image I could do without.
I’m getting tired of all the losing. When can the incarceration part begin?