Under normal circumstances, I would probably not write about former President Donald Trump’s defamation lawsuit against CNN. The 29-page complaint, which was filed earlier this week in a federal court in Florida, claims that the network and its commentators defamed Trump by, among other things, implicitly and explicitly comparing him to Adolf Hitler. He is seeking $475 million in damages from the network for the purported impact on his reputation and his political career.
Defamation lawsuits in the United States are usually not worth covering. I rarely write about them because they rarely succeed and they rarely affect anyone other than the parties involved. There are notable exceptions, such as the ongoing Dominion Voting Systems lawsuits against a wide array of election-fraud mythologists after the 2020 election, or the 2013 Hulk Hogan lawsuit that led to the shuttering of Gawker in 2016. But such precedent-setting examples are few and far between.
That threshold is even higher, at least for me, where Trump is concerned. He has a long history of filing superficial and legally deficient lawsuits. Trump sued Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee this summer over the 2016 election, for example, only to see that lawsuit thrown out in July. All other things being equal, his lawsuit against CNN should, theoretically, meet the same fate.
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