It is exceedingly difficult to win a defamation case as a “famous person” in the United States, and it jumps another level of difficulty if you are famous because you are a politician. Politicians are supposed to accept the fact that they’re going to get ripped from head to toe, and that’s just one of those “things” you accept when you accept the job, especially as president of the United States. To win a case as a famous politician, a publication would have to publish something it knew or should have known was false (“Trump beat up a four year old”). It published the piece to hurt Trump. People read the piece, and it did hurt Trump. Trump can prove a reasonable amount (in money) that it hurt him.

That doesn’t sound like the case in Trump’s suit against CNN, and that’s why CNN is moving for summary judgment now, a motion that asks the judge to throw the case out because there are no facts for a jury to consider, both sides have done discovery and Trump cannot possibly win because he has no facts pertaining to at least one of those elements.

From Law and Crime:

CNN has struck back at Donald Trump over the former president’s defamation complaint against the network. In a motion filed Tuesday, CNN asked U.S. District Judge Anuraag Singhal to dismiss the Trump’s lawsuit.

Trump claimed that the network’s “persistent association” of Trump to Adolf Hitler and Hitler’s “Big Lie” — that Jews were the source of Germany’s problems — amounts to defamation.

As to Trump’s claim that portions of a Jan. 25, 2021 op-ed piece by Prof. Ruth Ben-Ghait, a CNN contributor, is defamatory, CNN argues that her use of the phrase “Big Lie” is “rhetorical hyperbole” and “does not refer to Hitler or Nazism.”

Trump believes that constant references to “The Big Lie” equate to calling him Hitler because Hitler is known for a big lie in blaming Germany’s problems on Jews? No wonder CNN has chosen now to file to dismiss.

One gets the sense that Trump never thought he would win the case. He just wanted to announce that he was suing CNN for hundreds of millions and then hope that his base forgot that he filed the lawsuit.

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[email protected], @JasonMiciak, with Nicole Hickman