The “Morning Joe” team has been reporting and disseminating Donald Trump news for years now. So it’s heartening to see that they can still find surprise — and humor — in the embattled former president’s day-to-day developments.
Breaking down a federal judge’s weekend decision to throw out Trump’s $475 million defamation lawsuit against CNN on Monday morning, cohost Jonathan Lemire couldn’t stop himself from laughing at Trump’s assertion that CNN’s actions have “hurt his reputation and political career” — as if he wasn’t responsible for doing that all by himself.
“OK,” Lemire said, stifling a chuckle, before reading from the judge’s decision.
The “Morning Joe” segment began Monday with Lemire detailing that “Trump has been handed yet another loss” after Judge Raag Singhal’s dismissal of the twice-impeached, twice-indicted former president’s lawsuit against CNN. The suit regarded the news network’s coinage of “the Big Lie” in reference to rhetoric and actions surrounding the Jan. 6 insurrection on the Capitol.
“Trump claimed the network’s use of the term ‘the Big Lie’ was equivalent to comparing him to Adolf Hitler,” Lemire explained, before breaking into a laugh upon saying that “the lawsuit also argued the references hurt his reputation and political career.”
“But the judge — who was, we should note, appointed by Donald Trump — ruled CNN’s statements don’t meet the standard of defamation,” Lemire continued, “writing this: ‘CNN’s use of the phrase “the Big Lie” in connection with Trump’s election challenges does not give rise to a plausible inference that Trump advocates the persecution and genocide of Jews or any other group of people. No reasonable viewer could (or should) plausibly make that reference.’”
The former president, who was found liable for defamation himself back in May, first brought his nearly $500 million lawsuit against CNN back in October of 2022 and claimed that “the Big Lie… wrongly links Trump with the Hitler regime in the public eye.”
The Trump-appointed Judge Singhal disagreed, ruling that “this is a stacking of inferences that cannot support a finding of falsehood” and “being ‘Hitler-like’ is not a verifiable statement of fact that would support a defamation claim.”
Watch the “Morning Joe” clip in the video above.
Andi Ortiz contributed to this post.
