Trump Campaign SLAPPs Voters

This week, a liberal PAC issued a rather stark political ad attacking President Trump, using his own words. The “Exponential Growth” ad is from “Priorities USA”.

As a response, the Trump presidential campaigned threatened TV stations airing the ad in a cease-and-desist letter. Among the threats is the possibility of revoking stations FCC license to broadcast. Here is a Reuters news report on the situation:



Yikes! Is this the End of Democracy as We Know It?

Not really. This is not as scary as it seems. PAC political attack ads are not fair and balanced commentary, although this one pretty directly uses Trump’s words against him. The sources of the quotes are detailed in this article by Politifact.org. A cease-and-desist letter is a threat of a possible future legal action—it’s not a court order and has no legal authority.

So, you need to calm down. But not too much. Because the campaign’s response to this ad says nothing good about the authoritarian tendencies of our most incompetent president.

For one thing, this ad, biased as it may be, is clearly not beyond the pale. It’s political opinion that’s fair to express. Conservatives who promoted “Hillary the Movie” and supported Citizens United have no standing whatsoever to try to shut it down. I don’t know that “rough” political commentary sets the right tone right now as our nation should unite to fight a pandemic, but the Trump campaign threatening broadcast licenses over this particular ad fits into a rather scary, systematic attack on political discourse that Trump has waged.

The president himself last week blasted an NBC reporter for a softball question—the reporter asked what words of comfort the president had for the American people. The bombastic Trump did not offer any, but instead lashed out, calling the reporter “terrible.”

It fits a pattern, described in this Slate article. Trump’s campaign has filed frivolous libel suits against pretty much every major media outlet over stories or commentary that it doesn’t like. The strategy of filing such doomed lawsuits has a name—they are known as “Strategic Lawsuits Against Political Participation,” or SLAPP suits, and have been used in the past by certain groups, such as the Church of Scientology, against negative media coverage.

Because defending yourself against a libel suit is expensive—and the whole point of a SLAPP suit is not to win a lawsuit, but to slience critics.

Sure, every American president plays hardball. Politics is a vicious game. But this president is special in his disregard for any political norms and the harshness of the attacks he makes against perceived media enemies. And he fits into a cultural pattern of anti-science, anti-knowledge, anti-education and anti-discourse that is the political virus running globally amok right now, as recent years have seen a resurgence of right-wing authoritarianism.

Think of Trump’s threat to “open up the libel laws” during the 2016 campaign because he was unhappy with negative media coverage.

So now we are faced with a real existential threat. Whether it’s from the short-term economic slowdown caused by social isolation or a deeper, longer economic, spiritual, emotional and physical hit caused by pandemic deaths, 2020 is bound to be a year full of challenges caused by COVID-19.

And we have an election going on. To me, it’s pathetically sad that President Trump may yet be re-elected—in fact he stands a decent chance. He’s mishandled this pandemic from day one and the “it’s only the flu” crowd loves him for it.

His right-wing media machine and campaign can’t stand criticism of this president, especially criticism that uses his record against him. Yet, we all heard the quotes that the Priorities USA ad used. Ignorance and amnesia are not promoted by effective leaders who understand how a democratic republic or open marketplace of ideas are supposed to function.

So maybe this letter from the Trump campaign to TV stations is not, by itself, all that scary. It, however, fits into a very scary pattern: Trash the media, attack the media, sue the media—not for their lies, but to get them to stick to your version of truth.

I don’t have the heart for divisive politics at the moment. It is, however, important to all of us that critics of the president are free to say what they want. TV stations should be free to air this ad—it’s not beyond what the FCC should allow. After all, right-wing nonsense is a regular feature of the daily Trump Show.

No, I am not calling to censor the president, He should be more choosy in what he says, but he is free to say it. And we should be free to quote him and criticize him, even during a pandemic. And the Trump campaign, like Donald Trump himself, is once again revealing itself as a threat to democracy.

I do feel that we need to join together in this trying time. This ad doesn’t help. But what helps least of all is an incompetent, anti-democratic president and his sleazy re-election campaign.

So, share the ad. Make them mad. We are sitting on our couches and can't go anywhere--so let's make some virtual noise. The ad is already going viral, which is delicious under the circumstances.

Boost the signal. It's something we can do right now.