Last summer, The Wall Street Journal reported on Donald Trump’s alleged 2003 birthday message to Jeffrey Epstein, which generated the wrong kind of attention for the president. The article highlighted Trump’s apparent note, typed within a sketched outline of a naked woman and signed in the pubic area.

“Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret,” the note to Epstein concluded.

The president not only denied having written the message, he also responded with unsubtle threats. “President Trump will be suing The Wall Street Journal, NewsCorp, and Mr. Murdoch, shortly,” he wrote online, referring to himself in the third person for reasons unknown. The Republican added soon after, “The Wall Street Journal printed a FAKE letter, supposedly to Epstein. … I told Rupert Murdoch it was a Scam, that he shouldn’t print this Fake Story. But he did, and now I’m going to sue his ass off, and that of his third rate newspaper.”

In mid-July, the president did, in fact, file the defamation suit, seeking a jury trial and a judgment of at least $10 billion. In the spring, the case flopped when a federal judge dismissed it.

Team Trump refiled the case soon after. It then flopped again. MS NOW reported:

A federal judge on Saturday dismissed President Donald Trump’s lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal and Rupert Murdoch over the paper’s reporting on his ties to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

U.S. District Judge Darrin Gayles tossed the suit in a Saturday afternoon order, saying the president failed to prove that The Journal had “acted with actual malice.”

The rejection of the case came roughly five weeks after a judge in Iowa dismissed Trump’s lawsuit against The Des Moines Register and its former pollster, Ann Selzer, whom the president had sued in response to a public opinion poll he didn’t like.

Characterizing the case as extraordinary, Iowa District Judge Scott Beattie said that allowing the lawsuit and its “faulty” claims could have a chilling effect that could “discourage others from reporting on and debating public affairs.”

Time will tell whether the Republican’s lawyers pursue appeals, but in the meantime, I’m struck by the frequency with which the incumbent president and his team pick legal fights with major independent news organizations, only to lose in the end.

For example, it was earlier this year when the Trump Media & Technology Group sued The Washington Post, accusing the newspaper of a “years-long crusade” and of being part of a “conspiracy” to harm the company, and seeking $3.8 billion in damages. A federal judge threw out the case, concluding that Trump Media had failed to produce credible evidence.

Similarly, the Trump campaign’s 2020 case against CNN failed. Trump’s 2021 case against The New York Times failed. Trump’s 2023 case against journalist Bob Woodward failed. The Trump campaign’s case against the Post failed. Trump’s class-action lawsuit against social media giants also failed.

Let’s also not forget that last year, Trump filed a $15 billion civil suit against The New York Times, which was thrown out four days later, not because it lacked merit, but because a federal judge found that the president’s lawyers’ court filing was simply too ridiculous. Two months later, Trump’s media company also lost a defamation suit against The Guardian.

He hasn’t yet lost his $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the BBC, though the case isn’t exactly going well for him.

The pattern is hardly subtle.

As for the larger context, let’s not miss the lesson on the importance of pushback. When Trump filed a dubious case against ABC News, the network and its corporate parent agreed to a highly controversial $16 million settlement. When he filed an even weaker case against CBS News, its owner, Paramount, also struck a contentious $16 million deal.

In the weeks and months that followed, Trump repeatedly pointed to these controversial settlement agreements as evidence of his targets’ guilt, even as those networks denied any wrongdoing.

Meanwhile, news organizations that have stood up for themselves and resisted outlandish attempts at intimidation have prevailed.

Let this be a lesson to the larger political world: Resistance is far more successful than appeasement. It’s true when it comes to law firms; it’s true when it comes to higher education; and it’s true in his court fights against independent news organizations.

This post updates our related earlier coverage.

The post Trump keeps facing off against news organizations in court. He also keeps losing. appeared first on MS NOW.

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From MS Now.