Former President Donald Trump followed through on public threats deemed “cartoonishly vexatious” by legal experts to wage a defamation lawsuit against the Pulitzer Prize Board.
The 2024 presidential hopeful filed a complaint on Tuesday in state court in Okeechobee County, Florida and requested more than $30,000 in damages as compensation for the Board’s award of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize to the New York Times and the Washington Post for their coverage of Trump’s campaign, the Steele Dossier, and the Mueller investigation into Russian interference with the 2016 election.
Trump, of course, has filed or threatened many, many, many defamation lawsuits, with media entities usually constituting his defendants of choice. Still, even with so much experience waging (and usually failing) with defamation litigation (or even a sprawling RICO action), Trump is undeterred.
The most recent Trump filing takes an unusual legal posture: that the Pulitzer Prize is so trusted an entity that its award implies truth in reporting — and that this implication alone is enough to constitute actionable defamation.
What does Trump’s lawsuit against the Pulitzer Board actually allege?
The 30-page complaint names not just the Pulitzer Prize Board, but also its individual members as defendants. Trump begins by providing background context of his presidential candidacy whereby he casts himself as a “disruptive political adversary” to existing government and media. He claims that the resulting media...
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