“The Late Late Show” host James Corden is firing back at Donald Trump after the former president launched a $50 million lawsuit against journalist Bob Woodward, publisher Simon & Schuster and its parent company Paramount Global.
“Trump must wake up every morning, have a stretch and think: Who should I sue today?,” Corden joked.
In addition to being the parent company of Simon & Schuster, Corden noted that Paramount also oversees CBS and his own show.
“So listen up: You come for Paramount, you’re coming for me, buddy, OK?,” Corden said. “Not just me, you’re coming for young Sheldon, old Sheldon, the middle Sheldon, every Sheldon. You don’t want the smoke.”
Trump’s fury stems from the rollout of the audiobook “The Trump Tapes: Bob Woodward’s Twenty Interviews with President Donald Trump.”
Released in October 2022, it presents full audio of the interviews done from December 2019 to August 2020 at the White House and Mar-a-Lago with Trump’s permission. The interviews were the basis of Woodward’s 2020 book “Rage,” which generated controversy as it showed the extent to which Trump downplayed the COVID-19 pandemic.
With “Rage” falling short of the commercial success of Woodward’s 2018 Trump book “Fear,” Trump is making the case in the new lawsuit that the journalist and his publisher essentially altered his words, or “conspired to, and did, collate and cobble together more than eight hours of ‘raw’ interviews” and put them out “without President Trump’s permission.”
“Paramount, SSI, and Woodward deviated from industry standard practices, did not obtain the requisite releases, misappropriated President Trump’s copyright interests, manipulated the recordings to benefit Woodward’s desired narrative while peddling the story that the recordings are ‘raw,’ and deprived President Trump of the opportunity to publish or not to publish his words, read in his voice,” the verbiage of the legal complaint reads.
In response, Woodward and publisher Simon & Schuster said that the lawsuit was meritless.
“Former President Trump’s lawsuit is without merit and we will aggressively defend against it,” they said in a statement. “All of these interviews were on the record and recorded with President Trump’s knowledge and agreement. Moreover, it is in the public interest to have this historical record in Trump’s own words. We are confident that the facts and the law are in our favor.”
Watch Corden’s full monologue in the video above.
Slav Kandyba contributed to this report.
