In case you ever operated under the delusion that Donald Trump’s various lawsuits launched at news and social media organizations over the last few years were about anything other than bullying said outlets into positions of submission, supplication, and supine acts of, uh, “library-funding,” let the man himself disabuse you of the notion: Trump just doubled down on the largest of the still-pending suits, upping the damages he’s seeking in a CBS News case centered on 60 Minutes from $10 billion to $20 billion.
After all, the amended lawsuit claims, Trump isn’t just a political figure: He’s also a media owner, as long as you extend “media” to include Truth Social, an online platform we have literally never seen talked about in any context save being the place you have to go to to get the White House’s most capslock-abusing bouts of public policy. So, by editing answers from Kamala Harris in an October 2024 interview, CBS News somehow caused Trump’s media ventures 10 billion extra dollars of harm, allowing him to sue under the federal Lanham Act. That’s in addition to the original $10 billion suit, which was based around a Texas consumer fraud law Trump said the interview had violated. What’s that? Neither Donald Trump, nor CBS News, have anything to do with Texas? Don’t worry about it: The amended suit also adds Texas Rep. Ronny Jackson to the suit as a co-plaintiff.
None of this is subtle, because subtlety is not the point: CBS News has held out on rolling over for Trump, presumably because it thinks the basic legal argument that 60 Minutes is allowed to edit its interview for clarity and length is pretty strong, and worth defending. But the target here isn’t the legal world, anyway: It’s Paramount’s leadership, who, between this and blatant threats by the Trump government to impede a planned merger with Skydance Media, are presumably being asked to contemplate how many billions in hassle they want to deal with when they could just kneel, throw some token cash Trump’s way, and promise to keep their journalists snug and quiet.
[via Variety]
