If you didn’t catch President-elect Donald Trump’s Monday press conference from Mar-a-Lago, you missed one humdinger of a media event. The purpose of the event, as covered by RedState’s Ward Clark, was to announce a $100 billion investment by the Japanese technology firm SoftBank, a move that is expected to create more than 100,000 American jobs.
Once that triumphant announcement was made, Trump did what Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have long been afraid to do — he took questions from the assembled media without having the answers written down for him. It was a thing to behold; it was Trump at his best, easily handling the questions being thrown at him and putting hostile reporters in their places.
No topic was off limits, and a lot of ground was covered, from drones and deportations to border wall sell-offs and CEO murders. One topic that elicited a long answer from the president-elect was in reply to a question about his big $15 million win against ABC, which he sued for defamation. RedState’s Bonchie had the details on that big Trump win:
Donald Trump has won again. ABC News and George Stephanopoulos have settled the defamation lawsuit brought by the incoming president, with the news network agreeing to pay $15 million in damages while also issuing an apology.
The lawsuit was first filed after Stephanopoulos claimed as a matter of fact that Trump had “raped” E. Jean Carroll. The comment came during an interview with Rep. Nancy Mace.
A reporter at Mar-a-Lago asked Trump if he intended to keep pursuing lawsuits against media outlets — whether it be newspapers, cable networks, or social media influencers — once he’s back in the White House.
Trump’s answer? “I think you have to do it because they’re very dishonest.”
He continued:
“You need fair elections, you need borders and you need a fair press. I have a few others [lawsuits] that I’m doing. I’m not doing this because I want to, I’m doing this because I feel I have an obligation to.”
One person he apparently has in his sights is pollster Ann Selzer and her newspaper, The Des Moines Register. Although he didn’t name Selzer specifically, Trump called foul on her extremely faulty polling that showed Kamala Harris with a very surprising lead in Iowa going into Election Day, saying, “In my opinion, it was fraud and it was election interference.” Per the president-elect, “We’ll probably be filing a major lawsuit against them today or tomorrow.”
It gets better. CBS News’ very rotten, no good, horrible year is about to get that much worse.
“We’re filing one on “60 Minutes,” you know about that. They took Kamala’s answer, which was a crazy answer, a horrible answer, and they took the whole answer out and they replaced it with something else she said later on in the interview. Which wasn’t a great answer, but it wasn’t like the first one. The first one was grossly incompetent. It was weird.”
Pure Gold: Trump Deftly Puts Reporter in His Place for Ridiculous Question During Presser
Trump said the “60 Minutes” edit scandal was “fraud and election interference.”
But, wait, there’s more.
“We’re involved in one that has been going on for awhile, and very successfully, against Bob Woodward where he didn’t quote me properly from the tapes and then, on top of everything else, he sold the tapes, which he wasn’t allowed to do. He could only use them for reporting purposes, not for sale purposes and he admits that and I think we’ll be successful on that one.”
It’s definitely worth a watch:
The best part about all of this is that Trump said it in front of a roomful of media, essentially putting each and every one of them on notice that he has had enough of the lying. He noted that he shouldn’t have to be doing the suing, saying that should be the job of the Justice Department, but that he would in order to “straighten out the press.”
Trump ended his remarks on future defamation lawsuits, correctly concluding, “Our press is very corrupt, almost as corrupt as our elections.”
