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. . . There are many amusing anecdotes in the book that tend to confirm the worst suspicions of the administration’s critics. Wolff writes of Kellyanne Conway’s maneuvering on Election Day, expecting a resounding loss but hoping to parlay her work into a lucrative Fox News contract. There are cabinet secretaries such as Rex Tillerson and quondam allies such as Rupert Murdoch who dismiss the president as an imbecile surrounded by dilettantes, opportunists, and con artists. Trump’s children maneuver fecklessly, and he himself retreats into a cocoon of fast food and cable news. It is the sort of thing that those who take an uncharitable view of the president — and no one takes a more uncharitable view than I do — would have expected.The president, through his lawyers, insists that these things are not true, and that they constitute libel. Wolff has been criticized as an overly free practitioner of what used to be known as the New Journalism, liberally applying literary techniques to recreate (some of his critics would say to simply create) scenes and interactions to which he was not directly privy. (Another lupine journalist, the unparalleled Tom Wolfe, is most closely associated with that style of writing.) But Wolff did enjoy remarkable access to the Trump team for a year, and he says that he has recordings to back up his version of events.If the Trump administration is telling the truth, and Wolff is telling tales (selling wolf tickets, as it were), then Trump should sue him and sue his publishers, Henry Holt & Company, a division of Macmillan and part of the giant Holtzbrinck Publishing Group.And by that I mean: Trump should actually sue Wolff and Henry Holt, rather than simply send a cease-and-desist letter, as he has done . . .. . . To have committed libel, Wolff and his publishers must have printed a claim of fact that is: 1. false; 2. defamatory, meaning that it did some kind of damage to Trump; 3. published with actual malice, meaning Wolff knew it was false or acted with reckless disregard as to whether it was. There is a popular misconception that it is all but impossible for a public figure such as Trump to win a libel claim, but meeting those three criteria should not be that difficult in this case if what Trump’s people say is true. Establishing that the claim is false is a straightforward enough matter. Given that most of Trump’s net worth is tied up in his “brand,†which is another way of saying his public persona, establishing damages should not be very difficult, either, if only modest ones. As for the actual malice, if Wolff has indeed manufactured quotations or events, that would go a long way toward establishing that he knew he was publishing falsehoods.The problem, of course, is that a lawsuit would lead to discovery, meaning that the president and the people around him would be questioned under penalty of perjury. One thing Steve Bannon and President Trump have in common is that each lies habitually, even in circumstances in which the lie serves no obvious purpose. But the courtroom has a sobering effect, even on habitual liars. One wonders what either man would actually say under questioning, to say nothing of what might be said by a Jared Kushner or a Kellyanne Conway . . .
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Topic: If Trump Has Been Defamed, He Should Sue (Read 282 times)
