Trump Picks Another Legal Fight That He's Definitely Going To Lose

Donald Trump has had a bone to pick with the Pulitzer Prize board for years, and this week that culminated in him filing a defamation lawsuit against the board. His claims are not only ridiculous, but they don't even meet the criteria necessary for filing a defamation lawsuit, so it is unclear how far this will even go in court. The best guess is that it'll be laughed out of court, as Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins explains.

Check out our merch by visiting our store

Subscribe to our podcast

Become a member today!

Support us by becoming a monthly patron on Patreon, and help keep progressive media alive!

Spread the word! LIKE and SHARE this video or leave a comment to help direct attention to the stories that matter. And SUBSCRIBE to stay connected with Ring of Fire's video content!

Support Ring of Fire by subscribing to our YouTube channel

Be sociable! Follow us on:

*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

You know, I'm starting to think that Donald Trump has a fetish for getting his kicked in court this past week. Donald Trump filed another new lawsuit this time against the Pulitzer Prize Committee, and he's suing them for defamation because, couple years ago, Pulitzer Prize Committee issued the Pulitzer to the organizations New York Times, Washington Post, uh, who were reporting on Russiagate. You know, Russia's attempts to inter influence the 2016 election, uh, possible. They never, by the way, said anything was definitive. They're just talking about possible links between some of Trump's people and the Russians, all of which, by the way, was in fact true, confirmed by the Mueller report they were given the Pulitzer. Donald Trump's been off about it ever since then. So not long ago, Donald Trump demanded that they retract these Pulitzer surprises. He says, these people lied in their reports. So the Pulitzer Committee said, all right, you know what we're gonna go through, we're gonna double check everything we're, you know, triple check, basically make sure we didn't give it to people who are out there lying. So they, they do another check, and they issue this statement like, listen, based on everything that was available at the time, everything they've said is, is true and accurate based on all available information. That's what Donald Trump off. So he is now suing them, claiming that this statement saying these people didn't lie, was done with actual malice. Lemme get bored of that in a second. They did it with quote, actual malice to, to harm me because they are, as he put it, the establishment's establishment.

Here's the fun part. Nothing that Donald Trump claims in this lawsuit, first of all, indicates any wrongdoing by the Pulitzer Committee, but none of it actually meets the standard as what defamation actually is, which is why I find it interesting that they had to include the phrase actual malice. A good lawyer, and I don't know which one of Donald Trump's lawyers filed this stupid lawsuit, but a good lawyer doesn't exactly have to spell out what they did using terms like actual malice. If you see the phrase actual malice in a defamation lawsuit, it's a pretty good indication that either the lawyer thinks the suit is so weak that he has to reiterate the point that the facts cannot speak for themselves. Or you just got somebody who's like fresh outta law school and has never done this and thinks that you're supposed to say that the facts of the case should speak for themselves when laid out in the filing. You shouldn't have to say they acted with actual malice.

You should be able to show here's what they did. And somebody reading, it'll say, holy, that's actual malice. So in order to have a defamation lawsuit, you do have to have the actual malice, which means they knew what they were doing was false. They did it anyway because they didn't care. You also have to prove that the intent was to harm the subject, subject being Donald Trump, you also have to prove that they either did it to financially hurt the individual, or to financially enrich themselves a point that you will never be able to make against the Pulitzer Committee. You're not gonna reach any of the standards, by the way.