Tag Archives: lawsuit

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Trump Pursuing a New Tactic to Build His Presidential Library: Lawsuits.

Meta Platforms has agreed to pay about $25 million to settle a lawsuit Trump brought against the company after the social-media platform suspended his accounts following the attacks on the U.S. Capitol that year.

$22 million of the payment will go toward a fund for Trump’s presidential library,. Meta won’t admit wrongdoing under an agreement Trump signed in the Oval Office on Jan. 29.

This follows a Dec. 14 announcement that ABC News would pay $15 million to settle a defamation lawsuit brought by Trump is discouraging. Even more discouraging, however, is word that under the terms of the settlement ABC News will donate the $15 million to Trump’s future presidential foundation and museum.

And now The New York Times reports many executives at CBS’s parent company, Paramount, believe that settling an absurd $10 billion lawsuit against CBS filed before the Nov. 2024 election would increase the odds that the Trump administration does not block or delay their planned multibillion-dollar merger with Skydance. Trump accused CBS of deceptively editing a “60 Minutes” interview with Vice President Kamala Harris. 

“A settlement would be an extraordinary concession by a major U.S. media company to a sitting president, especially in a case in which there is no evidence that the network got facts wrong or damaged the plaintiff’s reputation,” the Times reported on Jan. 30. 

“We once held the office of president, as well as its occupant, in high regard,” Anthony Clark wrote in The Last Campaign: How Presidents Rewrite History, Run for Posterity, and Enshrine Their Legacies. “As we have lowered our opinions of both, presidential libraries, consequently, have grown larger and more powerful—and, not incidentally, less truthful.” As Clark wrote in Salon, presidential centers tend to be “proud, defensive, and a little self-absorbed” and eventually become theme parks with declining numbers of visitors.

The Donald J. Trump Presidential Library Fund Inc. was incorporated in Florida on Dec. 20, six days after it was revealed that ABC News had agreed to donate the $15 million to Trump’s future presidential foundation and museum.

The Wall Street Journal’s Annie Linskey and Rebecca Ballhaus reported “Serious talks about the suit, which had seen little activity since the fall of 2023, began after Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg flew to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida to dine with him in November, according to the people familiar with the discussions. The dinner was one of several efforts by Zuckerberg and Meta to soften the relationship with Trump and the incoming administration. Meta also donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund. Last year, Trump warned that Zuckerberg could go to prison if he tried to rig the election against him. Toward the end of the November dinner, Trump raised the matter of the lawsuit, the people said. The president signaled that the litigation had to be resolved before Zuckerberg could be ‘brought into the tent,’ one of the people said.”

Knowing Donald Trump’s tendency toward grandiosity, he will likely want a supercalifragilisticexpialidocious billion dollar Presidential Monument. The Washington Post reported back in January 2021 that a top Trump fundraiser said the president had told supporters he wanted to raise $2 billion for his presidential library and museum and thought he could collect it in small-dollar donations from his grass-roots supporters. A satirical website was subsequently created showing the contents of a potential Donald J. Trump Presidential Library, with images of “The Wall of Criminality” and the “Alt Right Auditorium”. 

The way we’re headed, presidential centers will surpass Egypt’s pyramids as monuments to the egos of leaders. But as I’ve observed in previous posts, if Donald Trump goes forward with his museum plans, his  former, current and future advisors may have reason to be concerned. Many of the Egyptian pyramids entombed not only the deceased, but also the deceased’s servants.

Source: Putnam Museum

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America’s Elites Showcase TikTok, National Interests Be Damned.

Supporting Tik Tok is chic. 

At least that’s the message I get from the decision by Vogue’s Anna Wintour to choose Shou Chow, TikTok’s chief executive, as an Honorary Chair of this year’s over-the-top Met Gala in New York City tonight. 

TikTok declined to reveal to The New York Times its financial contribution to the Met Gala, but sponsors in previous years are known to have each kicked in roughly $5 million (TikTok and China are probably delighting in how cheaply the glitterati can be bought off).

The New York Times even took note of Chow’s high profile at the Met Gala with an article in Sunday’s paper, “TikTok’s Boss Takes On a Flashy Gig”.

All the official co-chairs of the splashy event – Zendaya, Jennifer Lopez, Bad Bunny and Chris Hemsworth – are likely on board, too, caring less about matters of substance than celebrity visibility.

All this at the same time as Washington, D.C. is focused on TikTok’s corrosive influence in the United States, its massive collection of potentially sensitive user information and its ownership by the Chinese company ByteDance. Those concerns have prompted the U.S. government to pass legislation banning the social media platform unless it is sold to a government-approved buyer.

China has criticized the congressional action, saying it undermines US claims of support for free speech, an ironic assertion since speech is tightly controlled in China, where the government maintains a vise-like grip on media, the internet, and personal expression and any dissent can result in arrest, torture and imprisonment. Moreover, American platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and X (formerly Twitter) have been banned in China for years.

(TikTok filed a federal lawsuit on May 7, 2024 challenging the constitutionality of the new law. The lawsuit accuses the government of trampling on TikTok’s First Amendment rights—as well as the free-speech rights of Americans—under the banner of national security)

Still, the style elite seem perfectly happy to help TikTok elevate its presence and influence, national interests be damned.

It may be because in their jaded eyes they see moral equivalence between the United States and authoritarian countries such as China, even though the evidence is clear that, as Douglas Murray, a British political commentator, wrote in The Free Press, “We have enormous moral authority, and…there is an oceanic gulf separating the many failures and shortcomings of the United States and the intentional and wanton taking of human life that is all too common in more authoritarian climes.”

It brings to mind Donald Trump’s admiration of authoritarian leaders. In a 2023 interview with Tucker Carlson on Fox, Carlson asked, “How smart is [Xi]? Could you tell?” “Top of the line,” Trump replied. “President Xi is a brilliant man. If you went all over Hollywood to look for somebody to play the role of President Xi, you couldn’t find [them], there’s nobody like that: the look, the brain, the whole thing.”

You may think that elites elevating questionable or authoritarian figures shouldn’t be of any concern. But people who enable dark forces, and even cheer them on, are ignoring the threat that China poses to democracy and rule of law around the world. 

China’s abdication of its responsibilities under the 1985 Sino-British Joint Declaration, where China promised to preserve the judicial system, legislative and executive autonomy, and all the key freedoms to which Hong Kong people had become accustomed, is hard evidence of China’s intentions.

The fact is that dismissal of China’s threat is naive. China is seeking to displace the United States and restore China to its rightful place. Lionizing people like Shou Chow ignores that reality.