There's an understanding that demagogue and neo-fascist Donald "COVID Donnie" Trump will do whatever it takes to remain in office, if only to avoid prosecution on numerous Federal and state charges should he leave. We looked at the prospect of his clinging to power in our post below.
In addition to creating crises in our cities by dispatching Federal paramilitary units to rough up protesters for the news cameras, Trump will be active in voter suppression by using those and other tools at his disposal come November. Before then, he's trying to smother political ads that he finds damaging through frivolous lawsuits harassing TV and radio stations that run those ads. From ProPublica today:
"This year, President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign filed defamation lawsuits against three of the country’s most prominent news outlets: The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN. Then it filed another suit against a somewhat lower-profile news organization: northern Wisconsin’s WJFW-TV, which serves the 134th-largest market in the country.Clearly, Trump and Co. want to gaslight the reality that for months he not only downplayed COVID-19, but he egged on his lackey Rethug governors to open their states up for business far too early, causing a resurgence of the virus. But why the small station in northern Wisconsin? More:
The Trump campaign sued the station over what it claims is a false and defamatory ad WJFW aired that showed Trump downplaying the threat of the coronavirus as a line tracking new COVID-19 infections ticks up and up on the screen." (our emphasis)
"Multiple media law experts told us that the suit against tiny WJFW has little chance of succeeding. Susan Seager, a media defense lawyer and adjunct professor at The University of California, Irvine, School of Law, said, 'The courts are very deferential and very protective of opinions about public figures and political issues.'Trump's history in real estate of suing subcontractors and others to get out of paying them is well known. Now, he's applying the unethical lessons he learned in his shady business to intimidating the local media. Scurrilous and anti-American, but totally Trumpian.
So if Trump isn’t likely to win, what might he be trying to do? Matthew Sanderson, who served as counsel for Sens. John McCain and Mitt Romney, said he thinks the Trump campaign is 'engaging in scare tactics.'
'The reason in my opinion that the Trump campaign is filing these types of lawsuits is not necessarily to punish the Wisconsin station — they’re not going to be successful,' Sanderson said. 'The reason they’re doing this is to send a message to the rest of the stations to be careful” about running anti-Trump ads.'" (our emphasis)
