douglasjfisher.com
Trump sued CNN for defamation on Monday and is demanding $475 million in punitive damages, escalating his feud with U.S. news organizations that have criticized him.
The 29-page lawsuit claims CNN engaged in a "campaign of dissuasion in the form of libel and slander" because it feared Trump would run for president again.
The complaint criticized CNN for using the terms "insurrectionist" and "racist," as well as for equating the previous president with Adolf Hitler.
Trump has a history of filing several lawsuits against media critics, albeit these actions have not often been successful.
His campaign filed libel lawsuits against The Washington Post and The New York Times in 2020 for opinion pieces that claimed the campaign was involved in Russian election meddling.
Trump's 2020 campaign also sued CNN for libel over an op-ed, but that case was eventually dismissed.
After reviewing the most recent lawsuit, Loyola Marymount University law professor Jessica Levinson declared that Trump has "no legal road ahead."
Trump's attorneys reference multiple CNN videos and stories in the lawsuit, including one from 2019 in which the singer Linda Ronstadt compared parts of his presidency to the Nazi regime in Germany.
Ronstadt "is a musician, not a historian," the lawyers claimed, and they described the interview as a "pretext to repeat CNN's message under the appearance of real'reporting'."
In the lawsuit, Trump's attorneys claim that CNN described him in a way that was "neither hyperbole nor opinion," and that the network behaved with "real hatred" to harm him.