Boddiger writes: "We're living in an era in which the president of the United States is openly encouraging people to sue members of the news media and ordering the Justice Department to serve as his personal attack dog."
Brett Kavanaugh. (photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
16 September 19
e’re living in an era in which the president of the United States is openly encouraging people to sue members of the news media and ordering the Justice Department to serve as his personal attack dog. As if that weren’t bad enough, our nitwit president can’t even spell the word “libel.”
Donald Trump once knew how to spell the word, as evidenced by a search of his Twitter history. Maybe he forgot. But you’d think a guy who has been involved in over 4,000 lawsuits in the past three decades would get that one right.
On Saturday morning, Trump was perturbed by a report in The New York Times revealing newly surfaced allegations that one of his picks for the Supreme Court, Brett Kavanaugh, appears to have had a habit of dropping his pants and forcing his genitals upon non-consenting women at drunken college parties while at Yale.
Equally scandalous, this behavior was reported to the FBI during Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings in the Senate last year, yet no substantial investigation of the allegations was carried out.
Trump took to Twitter on Sunday to complain about the new report, writing, “Brett Kavanaugh should start suing people for liable, or the Justice Department should come to his rescue.”
“Liable.”
It took Trump, or someone helping him, nearly an hour to fix this typo.
It took 47 minutes for @realDonaldTrump to correct his “liable” typo. https://t.co/KemCiWls7L pic.twitter.com/hMPiaIsGwv
— Andrew Feinberg (@AndrewFeinberg) September 15, 2019
Trump has even previously threatened to sue The New York Times and others for libel! One of the times he did was back in 2016, when the newspaper published the stories of two women who said Trump had sexually assaulted them. What a coincidence.
Trump threatens to sue journalists so frequently, there’s even a website to track how much time has passed since his last threat.
And he also wants to change the country’s libel laws to make it easier for people to sue publishers and members of the news media. “Our current libel laws are a sham and a disgrace and do not represent American values or American fairness,” he said in January 2018, according to The New York Times.
OK, spell it with me now, Donald: L-I-B-E-L. Somebody get the notecards.
Good lord.
