Trump isn’t first president in court

Some 110 years before Donald Trump was arraigned in a federal court in Miami, Theodore Roosevelt was running to regain the White House, too. And a smalltown newspaper absolutely hammered him.

“Roosevelt lies and curses in a most disgusting way; he gets drunk, too, and that not infrequently, and all his intimates know it,” read an October 1912 editorial in the Ishpeming (Mich.) Iron Ore, under the headline “The Roosevelt Way.”

“All who oppose him are wreckers of the country, liars, knaves and undesirables,” the Iron Ore said. “He alone is pure and entitled to a halo. Rats. For so great a fighter, self-styled, he is the poorest loser we ever knew!”

Roosevelt, who was campaigning under the Bull Moose Party, was furious and, after surviving an assassination attempt in Milwaukee, filed a libel lawsuit against the Iron Ore and its wealthy editor-owner, George A. Newett, seeking $10,000 in damages, worth more than $300,000 today. The suit — a landmark case involving a former president who became his own star witness — was filed just before the 1912 election, in which Roosevelt finished second to Democrat Woodrow Wilson and ahead of Republican incumbent William Howard Taft, an old friend he had turned against.

Roosevelt’s suit probably would be thrown out under current U.S. defamation law, which since 1964 has required proof that a defendant knowingly published or broadcast lies. And the Iron Ore was only a small weekly, with fewer than 3,000 subscribers. But Roosevelt, one of Trump’s favorite presidents, said he wanted to end once and for all widespread gossip about his drinking during his failed presidential comeback.