In his defamation lawsuit against CNN, former President Donald Trump is doing whatever he can to ensure that everyone knows he is not Adolf Hitler. But in typical Trump, and as it happens to be true, typical Nazi-style, he’s branding journalists as liars, even to the point of filing court papers that claim — with no irony included — that “Americans are split when asked if the media is actually an enemy of democracy.”
Trump and CNN have been involved in this particular battle since October as the former president has become increasingly defensive over the Cable News Network’s increasing habit of drawing comparisons over his Make America Great Again movement and the rise of the Nazis in Germany during the 1930s, The Daily Beast [1] reports.
In the court filings, [2] attorneys for Donald Trump are trying to strengthen their case by insisting that comparing the former president to the Nazi leader was damaging to Trump’s reputation, Raw Story reports.
But here’s the scarier part about more recent court filings by Trump’s lawyers, as noted by The Daily Beast’s, Jose Paglieri: [3] They are now arguing that this is the “perfect” time to roll back First Amendment protections for American journalists. His lawyers are asking courts to review the legal precedent that was established in the 1964 New York Times v. Sullivan [4] case.
“The sustained defamation of falsely linking President Trump to Nazis provides a perfect vehicle for Supreme Court reexamination of Sullivan,” lawyers wrote in the Dec. 30 filing.
The fact that Trump detests journalists isn’t anything new. He has continually attacked reporters as “the enemy of the people.” [5] And any political scientist who’s an expert on authoritarianism will understand that Trump’s favorite insult against reporters — calling their stories “fake news” — is an almost complete translation of Lügenpresse, a derogatory term used by the Nazis to insult the “lying press.”
Paglieri notes that Hitler’s name and the term “Nazi” appear 29 times and 21 times respectively in the December 30 court filings.
And Raw Story notes:
“The new lawsuit kicks off with a quote from CNN’s Don Lemon from when he asked on-air, ‘Should we—should journalists pull out their Trump playbook in order to deal with what Elon Musk is doing at Twitter? Is it a—is it a page out of the same book?”
Trump’s lawyers then used that as the jumping-off point to insist that comparisons to the Nazi leader “…causes and did cause reputation harm.”
One of his attorneys claimed “Some CNN’s audience members have been unjustly led to believe that [sic] plaintiff literally is a fascist leader. CNN’s statements seriously attempt to falsely state that the plaintiff intentionally used a Nazi-like propaganda technique to preserve his political power.”
Well, I don’t know about you, but what do you call it when a president describes White nationalists as “very fine people?” [6] Or when a president calls in the National Guard to put down [7] a perfectly legal protest by teargassing unarmed citizens who were demonstrating against the death of George Floyd.
Doesn’t that make you think of Germany in the 1930s?