‘Emotionally Undisciplined’: Why Trump Sued George Stephanopoulos

If Donald Trump collected Starbucks loyalty points every time he filed a lawsuit or had one filed against him, he could come close to filling a backyard pool with free pumpkin spice lattes. And if Trump could collect points for every time he’s sued the press, as he did this week with a defamation suit against ABC News and its host George Stephanopoulos for calling him a rapist of writer E. Jean Carroll on the air, he could start topping off a kiddie pool.

Although Trump loves a judicial workout almost as much as he does a round of golf, he appears to take special glee in suing and menacing the press. During the 2016 presidential campaign, he vowed to “open up” the libel laws so that when The New York Times or The Washington Post “writes a hit piece, we can sue them and win money instead of having no chance of winning because they’re totally protected.” Because libel laws are largely a function of state courts, not federal, Trump’s campaign promise was fairly empty. But emptiness has not kept him from filing a steady stream of libel suits against the press for peeving him.

Why does Trump persist in bringing libel and defamation proceedings and other cases against the press, even though he almost never prevails?

He sued comedian Bill Maher in 2013 (and then withdrew the suit) when Maher promised him $5 million if he could prove his father wasn’t an orangutan. In 2020, Trump sued CNN for an opinion piece about the Mueller investigation. The suit was soon dismissed. In March 2020, the Trump campaign sued both The Washington Post and The New York Times for publishing 2019 opinion columns about alleged Russian election interference. In 2021, he sued the The New York Times for its 2018 investigation of his finances. The case was tossed, and Trump was ordered to pay the paper $400,000 to cover its legal costs. In 2023, Trump sued journalist Bob Woodward for publishing interviews he said violated his copyright, and his Truth Social platform filed a suit against The Washington Post over coverage of the company’s finances. (Famously in the mid-1980s, Trump sued the Chicago Tribune and its architecture critic for criticizing his plan to build the world’s tallest building in Manhattan. The suit was naturally dismissed.)

Obviously, Trump has an inalienable right to use the courts and to protect his reputation and property. But his passion for legal action has less to do with reputation and property than intimidation and kicks, according to former federal prosecutor James D. Zirin, author of the 2019 book Plaintiff in Chief: A Portrait of Donald Trump in 3,500 Lawsuits.

“Trump saw litigation as being only about winning,” Zirin wrote in his book. “He sued at the drop of a hat. He sued for sport; he sued to achieve control; and he sued to make a point. He sued as a means of destroying or silencing those who crossed him. He became a plaintiff in chief.”

In a 2020 interview with the ABA Journal, Zirin expanded on Trump’s litigiousness, saying that he had learned his courtside methods from his one-time attorney, Roy Cohn.

“Cohn’s recipe was fight, and he taught Trump the tools he used. No. 1 is if you’re charged with anything, counterattack. Rule No. 2 is if you’re charged with anything, try to undermine your adversary. Rule No. 3 is work the press. Rule No. 4 is lie. It doesn’t matter how tall a tale it is, but repeat it again and again. Rule No. 5 is settle the case, claim victory and go home,” Zirin said.

Libel suits bake the Cohn cake to perfection. If you gain a reputation for being quick to file libel, reporters and editors might wonder if it’s worth it to publish a critical story even if they prevail against a libel suit.

Media attorney Theodore J. Boutrous Jr., who represents Mary Trump in Donald Trump’s action against The New York Times articles about his finances, says in an interview that Trump’s suits are “a classic abuse of the judicial system,” designed to “chill and deter news coverage of him.”

“He is misusing these frivolous lawsuits as a political tool to try to whip up his supporters by attacking the press and his critics and to change the negative narratives that constantly swirl around him,” Boutrous adds.

Timothy L. O’Brien, the executive editor of Bloomberg Opinion, got a lifetime lesson in Trumpology in 2006 when he found himself on the receiving end of a Trump libel suit for asserting in his book TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald that Trump was not a billionaire. To little surprise, the suit was eventually dismissed, causing Trump to pout, “The libel laws in this country have never been fair.” He’s been pouting ever since.

O’Brien tells me that he seconds Zirin’s Cohn observations but there’s more.

“He revels in it for a number of reasons. One of them is that he’s a media addict. And he wants to be in the press. But he is so insecure and thin-skinned that he cannot bear anything but laudatory coverage,” O’Brien says. “He’s just emotionally undisciplined.”

Trump’s complaint against ABC News and Stephanopoulos will have to navigate some turbulent legal waters in order to succeed. Matt Ford of the New Republic thinks Trump has a shot, but court filings might complicate that. On air, Stephanopoulos said Trump had been found “liable for rape” when a federal jury found him liable in a civil proceeding for sexual abuse, not rape. But in a subsequent ruling from last summer, the judge in the case wrote, “The finding that Ms. Carroll failed to prove that she was ‘raped’ within the meaning of the New York Penal Law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.’ Indeed, as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.”

O’Brien doubts that the suit will keep people from calling Trump a rapist when he’s being called that all over social media.

“By litigating this, he keeps resurfacing this issue. Maybe it’s okay with his base that he’s a sexual predator and not a rapist. But that’s not the voters that are going to matter — the moderate voters and independents,” O’Brien says. “I don’t think he actually wins any points in the court of public opinion by trying to get people to adhere more closely to the language of a ruling.”

The law of averages says that if Trump keeps suing, he will eventually win. But first, he’ll have to find a case more solid than this one. Until then, the kiddie pool has only gotten a little deeper.

In 2020, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kusher threatened to sue the anti-Trump Lincoln Project for posting Times Square billboards accusing them of botching the response to Covid. Put up a billboard and send it to Shafer.Politico@gmail.com. No new email alert subscriptions are being honored at this time. My Twitter account defames my Threads account every day. My dead RSS doesn’t believe in libel laws.