At the top of a long list of questions surrounding President Trump’s defamation lawsuit against the publisher of The Wall Street Journal: Does he expect to win the legal battle, or did he initiate it solely as a political stunt? And what does winning exactly mean to him?
The circumstances around the filing of the lawsuit, which alleges that Trump was defamed in a report detailing a 2003 birthday letter from him to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, provide some clues. To start, it was brought in federal court in Florida rather than New York, where News Corp. is based, or Washington, D.C., where Trump resides.
If he does intend to take the case to a jury and is allowed to proceed in the Southern District of Florida because the Journal is distributed in the state, it’s a smart play. Alejandro Brito, Trump’s lawyer who also handled his defamation battle against ABC News, filed the lawsuit in the Miami division of the district, where jurors may be more likely to side-eye reporting from the Journal than those in liberal enclaves like Manhattan or D.C.
For the enterprising defamation plaintiff, it pays to be in certain states with deep red outposts. Consider a Bay County, Florida jury earlier this year awarding a U.S. Navy veteran $5 million over a 2021 CNN report portraying him as illegally exploiting Afghans by charging exorbitant fees to be evacuated in the aftermath of the U.S. military withdrawal from the country. He later brought defamation lawsuits against The Associated Press and Puck News in the same state court.
But there’s another explanation for the more conspiratorial thinker: maybe Trump wants the lawsuit to get dismissed, or at least doesn’t plan to take it all the way to the finish line before a jury. The Journal article was published on July 17. Trump sued a day later, but a Florida statute requires at least five days written notice to a publication accused of defamation. The purpose of the provision is to provide newspapers every opportunity to make a full and fair retraction.
The court could grant early dismissal of the lawsuit, if News Corp. moves to do so, under this law, which also provides for payment of legal fees. In a defamation case against The Daily Beast brought by right-wing commentator Dan Bongino over reporting about the end of his NRATV show, the court noted that insufficient notice could necessitate dismissal “with prejudice,” meaning it can’t be refiled.
Also at play: the lawsuit doesn’t present an especially strong case that Trump was defamed by the Journal’s reporting.
“The president’s suit attempts to extrapolate from the carefully written story published by the WSJ, which never asserted that Trump had written or drawn or signed the content, but rather that the card in the birthday wishes book bears what appears to be a signature of his and what is a sketch of naked woman’s body,” says Christopher Beall, a First Amendment lawyer at Recht Kornfeld LLP and former Colorado Deputy Secretary of State. “This is a classic plaintiff’s maneuver of trying to assert that the defendant said something that they did not.”
Assuming Brito, Trump’s lawyer, was under orders to immediately sue, that would lend credibility to the belief that the lawsuit’s actual goal is political or in the realm of public relations. By Trump’s thinking, does it matter if he loses the case as long as he makes a fuss that the Journal‘s reporting was false?
In this case, the last thing Trump wants is to drag out discovery, which would mean his name continuing to be splashed across headlines alongside Epstein’s. Questioning under oath likely isn’t in the cards. Six months after suing his former fixer Michael Cohen, Trump dropped the 2023 lawsuit, which was overseen by the same judge appointed to his case against the Journal, ahead of a key deposition.
Another not mutually exclusive explanation lies in the possibility of Trump planning to extract concessions from News Corp. and the Journal by way of a settlement, regardless of the merits of the case. There’s a well-worn roadmap. ABC News settled a lawsuit from Trump over its reporting for $15 million, as did CBS for $16 million despite the widespread belief that the case was frivolous. The inconvenient truth: Trump has various paths to a victory outside of a jury trial ending with a verdict that he was defamed.
The X-factor in the legal showdown between Trump and the Journal will be Rupert Murdoch. The media scion has ambitions beyond News Corp. Making an adversary out of Trump could complicate his plans to bequeath his empire to his favored son, Lachlan Murdoch, who’s more on the same page as him as far as keeping Fox a conservative media juggernaut than his other children. There’s also speculation about what would happen with a Fox sale, which could be thwarted by various regulatory agencies taking orders from Trump as seen in the FCC asserting authority over Paramount’s proposed merger with Skydance.
Everyone will talk about the uphill battle that Trump faces proving “actual malice,” requiring proof that the publication knew the article was false or acted with reckless disregard for its truth. But the reality is that Trump likely doesn’t think the lawsuit will get to that stage of litigation.