Turnabout name-calling is fair play
President Donald Trump can’t be more thrilled about his victory against Stephanie Clifford (aka Stormy Daniels) in the defamation suit she brought against him. After she issued an artist’s sketch of a man she claims approached her in a parking lot in 2011 and tried to intimidate her into keeping quiet about her alleged affair with Mr. Trump, he tweeted that she was conning the media into writing about a “nonexistent man.”
She sued for defamation, and this week California federal Judge S. James Otero tossed the case based on an anti-SLAPP (strategic lawsuit against public participation) statute. Essentially, Otero ruled the president’s rhetoric was well within the bounds of American law and tradition when it comes to political discourse, which is protected “to provide assurance that public debate will not suffer for lack of imaginative expression or rhetorical hyperbole which has traditionally added much to the discourse in the United States.”
We very much appreciate the principle that Judge Otero articulated and which President Trump so revels in. The same legal framework that gives him a right to call her “a total con job” protects our right to call him any number of unflattering things, all of which are backed up by far more conclusive evidence than his insistence that Ms. Clifford is lying about the man in the parking lot.
We could call him a tax cheat.
Trump may claim to have found the New York Times’ analysis of the many ways in which his father, Fred Trump, transferred millions to him and his siblings to be a “very old, boring” hit piece, but to the rest of us, it was an illuminating lesson in how creative the future president was in finding ways to avoid paying taxes.
We could call him a serial sexual abuser.
One need only listen to the infamous Access Hollywood tape in which he bragged about forcing himself on women and grabbing their genitalia, acts he claimed he could get away with because he was rich and famous.
We could call him a wannabe fascist.
Nothing encapsulates it quite so perfectly as his abiding desire to host a grand Soviet-style military parade down Pennsylvania Avenue.
We could call him a profiteer.
Amid the many outrages and notorious presidential firsts that have come since Trump was elected, let’s not forget one of the first: his refusal to make any meaningful effort to divest from his far-flung business empire. Rather than seeking to assure the American people that he would avoid conflating his public duties with his private interest, he and his family have shown every willingness to use their time in office for personal gain.
Case in point, the recent questions about whether his business ties with Saudia Arabia are prompting his gentle and credulous treatment of the kingdom’s leaders over the disappearance and presumed death of journalist Jamal Kashoggi. Trump insisted on Twitter that he has no business interests in Saudi Arabia, but as the Washington Post has documented, he’s done plenty of business with that country’s ruling elite, including a recent $270,000 tab the Saudi government racked up at the Trump International Hotel in Washington.
Indeed, one of the great things about this country is the broad right all of us have to free speech, particularly in relation to politics. Thanks for reminding us, President Trump.