{"id":51266,"date":"2021-11-18T10:10:23","date_gmt":"2021-11-18T18:10:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newscorpse.com\/ncWP\/?p=51266"},"modified":"2022-07-19T08:48:02","modified_gmt":"2022-07-19T15:48:02","slug":"srsly-trump-threatens-to-sue-pulitzers-to-revoke-awards-for-factual-russian-collusion-stories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newscorpse.com\/ncWP\/?p=51266","title":{"rendered":"SRSLY? Trump Threatens to Sue Pulitzers to Revoke Awards for Factual Russian Collusion Stories"},"content":{"rendered":"

Being the reigning heavyweight champion of the World of Whining<\/a><\/strong>, Donald Trump bears the burden of defending his title every day. And he wrestles with this responsibility as furiously as one would expect of a bona fide malignant narcissist. He wakes every morning with a commitment to feeding his insatiable ego.<\/p>\n

\"Donald<\/p>\n

Among the most demanding tasks Trump faces is his obsession with the fallacy that he won the presidential election in 2016 all on his own. Never mind that he actually lost the popular vote by more than seven million votes. Trump is still fixated on the verified charges that Russia aided and abetted his campaign. Those charges were documented by exhaustively investigated stories in both the Washington Post and the New York times. Both papers won Pulitzer Awards for their reporting.<\/p>\n

Recently Trump has been expressing his notoriously unhinged outrage<\/a><\/strong> at the Pulitzer Committee’s decision to honor the journalists whose work revealed how deeply the interests of Trump and his campaign were intertwined with those of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Putin, when asked directly at a press conference with Trump standing next to him, admitted that he wanted Trump to win<\/a><\/strong> and helped him do so.<\/p>\n

On Wednesday Trump sent a letter<\/a><\/strong> to the Pulitzer Committee demanding that they revoke the awards given to the Post and the Times. His request was triggered by reports that some of the material in the infamous Steele Dossier was provided by sources who were just indicted for lying to the FBI. Setting aside the fact that no one has been convicted, those indictments do not address nor refute the vast majority of what was reported in the Pulitzer winning articles. But that didn’t stop Trump from asserting a series of flagrant falsehoods in his letter to the Pulitzers. For instance, Trump’s letter began by stating that…<\/p>\n

“…it has recently become apparent that the subject articles were based on incontrovertibly false information provided by dubious sources who were maliciously attempting to mislead the public and tarnish our client\u2019s reputation.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There’s a lot of wrong in that sentence. First of all, the articles were not “based on”<\/em> the Steele Dossier. In fact, they were hardly mentioned. In the twenty articles<\/a><\/strong> that made up the series of awarded reporting, the Dossier was referenced in only two of them. And in both of those it was characterized as “unproved”<\/em> and included Trump’s denials. One article<\/a><\/strong> noted that…<\/p>\n

“…the [Steele] dossier produced last year alleged, among other things, that associates of Trump colluded with the Kremlin on cyberattacks on Democrats and that the Russians held compromising material about the Republican nominee. These and other explosive claims have not been verified, and they have been vigorously denied by Trump and his allies.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The article also made clear the that Steele Dossier was not a significant source, saying that…<\/p>\n

“U.S. officials took pains to stress that his report was not a U.S. government product and that it had not influenced their broader conclusions that the Russian government had hacked the emails of Democratic officials and released those emails with the intention of helping Trump win the presidency.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The same is true for the other article<\/a><\/strong> that referenced the Dossier. It reported that…<\/p>\n

“…the dossier had not been corroborated and that its contents had not influenced the intelligence community\u2019s findings.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Consequently, there are no grounds for defamation as alleged in Trump’s letter to the Pulitzers. For one thing, the Pulitzer Committee didn’t make any of the allegations that Trump is whining about. Those allegations were in the articles, and they were responsibly and factually reported. Nevertheless, Trump’s letter included his false assertion that the Pulitzers were somehow liable, and an impotent demand for redress, saying that…<\/p>\n

“The Pulitzer Prize Board is actively advancing the false narrative contained therein and promoting defamatory statements against our client. […] it is hereby demanded that the Pulitzer Prize Board take immediate steps to strip the New York Times and The Washington Post of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting. Pulitzer Prize Board\u2019s failure to do so will result in prompt legal action being taken against it.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Trump’s legal assault on the Pulitzer Committee is purely a function of his bruised ego and thirst for revenge against the media that he regards in Stalinist terms as “the enemy of the people.”<\/em> It has no legal merit whatsoever, particularly since it is aimed at the awards committee, rather than the journalists. Trump is just exhibiting his raging jealously at never having received any of the awards that he craves, whether they be Pulitzers or Nobels or Emmys or the cover of Sports Illustrated’s annual swimsuit edition. [Editor’s Note: Apologies in advance for that visual]<\/em> However, he does like making up phony awards and giving them to himself…<\/p>\n