This lawsuit was designed only to be used as a bludgeon, not to be won.
This lawsuit was designed only to be used as a bludgeon, not to be won.
O n Tuesday, Paramount Global, the owner of the television network CBS, settled a lawsuit filed by Donald Trump last year, days before the election that returned him to the presidency. For those who have forgotten: On November 1, 2024, he filed suit in the Trump-friendly Northern District of Texas, demanding an astronomical ten billion dollars from CBS News’s 60 Minutes.
CBS’s offense? Editing a recent 60 Minutes interview of Kamala Harris before broadcast — something that 60 Minutes has done, along with all other news organizations, including Fox, as standard practice since it came into existence. Trump’s lawsuit claimed that by editing out Harris’s fumbling non-responses, 60 Minutes had harmed America’s ability to see her incompetence, thus . . . harming him too? Harming his campaign’s ability to win? Harming America? This last is actually what his lawyers went with: The official language in their complaint argued that 60 Minutes’ editing was meant to “confuse, deceive, and mislead the public.” But none of this matters, of course.
This lawsuit was designed only to be used as a bludgeon, not to be won. It never could have been, for obvious reasons; it must be emphasized how Trump’s claim was utterly farcical on its face. Anyone who has survived law school Torts knows that no conceivable mechanism exists in the law — in the law of any modern civilized nation in the world, mind you, not just the United States — sufficient to allow Donald Trump to compel a third party to release unflattering details about a political rival. (Hence the language about “deceiving the public” — and yet the “public” is rather obviously not a party to this suit.)
Are CBS News and 60 Minutes laughably biased outfits that distort the news in favor of the left? Of course they are, and as someone who’s been watching 60 Minutes since the days of Bradley and Wallace, I can tell you they didn’t arrive at that position recently. I think much the same applies, in fact, to every single media outlet on television. But that never has been, nor will it ever be, grounds for a civil suit. “Confusing the public” is not a cause of action. (If it ever becomes one, I propose the first thing we do is band together as a certified class and sue Tucker Carlson.)
No, this was instead yet another example of Trump’s famously long history of employing lawfare against his enemies: using the costs and burdens of the legal system to intimidate and persecute his opponents. In his old pre-presidential days, Trump and his attorneys were fond of the so-called SLAPP suit (“strategic lawsuit against public participation”), suits designed to punish speech about him that he didn’t like but had no plausible legal recourse against. The legal process and expense of conducting a proper defense — especially for poorer defendants — is meant to be the punishment itself. It’s an unfortunately common and cynical tactic when rich actors have the money to face off against the little guy.
But now Trump, as president of the United States, is the biggest man of them all — the leader of the free world and the head of American government. And he has not changed his ways; his actions threaten to set terrible new precedents for how a president can wield the power of the state against the media and the private sector to get them to say and do what he wants.
For it is widely understood that the real reason Paramount settled Trump’s lawsuit — for $16 million donated to his presidential library, plus a promise to publish all presidential interview transcripts in the future — is because it is desperate to complete its corporate merger with Skydance Media. Both Paramount and the federal government are, of course, at great pains to deny that there is any relationship whatsoever between the sudden settlement of a completely spurious lawsuit filed by the president of the United States in his private capacity, and the need to complete an $8 billion merger currently being held up by federal regulators, and if you buy that line, then congratulations: You might be the only person in America who does.
This is appallingly vulgar, of course. (For one thing, I imagine CBS News employees are in excellent spirits with high morale right about now.) But it represents something far beyond mere crassness: This is the sort of nakedly cynical use of state power that feels more like the strong-arm tactics employed by — which euphemism suits us best here? — “emerging democracies” than anything American.
Trump seems entirely happy to pursue his private interests with all the tools given to him by his temporary control over federal power, as if both are merely part of the same personal industry. (And if you doubt this, recall that only a month ago this man accepted a new Air Force One from a nation of shady Gulf oil billionaires, one he plans to retire to his private control after the presidency.) And I suspect it will never stop. I think that as far as Trump is concerned, the power he wields is there to be used — on his behalf as well as what he perceives America’s to be.
A confession: In December of last year, after Trump won but before he took office, I celebrated his victory over ABC News and George Stephanopoulos in an eerily similar lawsuit to the just-settled CBS one. And although I can still intellectually distinguish that case from the present one — Stephanopoulos was nailed dead to rights on his erroneous on-air statement that Trump was found liable for rape in the E. Jean Carroll case, raising a facially plausible defamation claim — I immediately lived to regret my enthusiasm when it became clear that Trump made no such distinctions himself.
Instead, the man was merely out for revenge in its most vulgar and spiteful form. A mere two days later, on December 17, he proved it by suing Iowa pollster Ann Selzer for publishing a bad final poll. His logic there was equally as insane as in the CBS case: He claimed that since he “was always so popular,” Selzer must have conspired to alter her final Iowa results in order to dampen GOP enthusiasm in the state. (The statutory ground, amusingly enough, is claimed to be a violation of the Iowa Consumer Fraud Act.)
Of course, the real purpose of the suit is to exhaust both parties’ financial resources with a full proctological discovery process on Selzer and the Des Moines Register, and Trump continues to pursue it doggedly. Just this week, Trump’s attorneys, fearing they had erred by filing their case in a federal court, attempted to drop and refile it on the state level; they intend to pursue this to the bitter end. And why not? Trump has all the resources in the world now — and he’s president of the United States.
This is a shameful milestone. Not just for CBS News — although I find it easy to see things from Paramount’s position, with $8 billion and the future of the company currently at stake — but for us all. Trump’s fiercest fans no doubt celebrated this week’s settlement, thrilled to see the liberal media once again humbled. But look beyond that, to the principle you are ratifying by cheering it: the use of gangster government methods of coercion, to extort money or speech from the enemies of whoever controls the presidency. And understand that one day, that enemy could easily be you.