https://www.virginiamercury.com/2020/04/27/as-campaign-2020-shifts-into-high-gear-trumps-defamation-suits-pose-a-chilling-prospect-for-the-press/
Let's see how these defamation suits wind their way through the courts this summer. The reporters on Q's list must be crapping their pants.
"In the long and dubious history of nasty presidential politics, the anti-Trump attack ad that the pro-Democrat super PAC Priorities USA paid NBC affiliate WJFW-TV in Rhinelander, Wisconsin, to televise in America’s 134th largest market seemed tame enough.
The 30-second spot uses rapid-fire audio snippets of Trump dismissing the seriousness of the nascent but fast-growing COVID-19 outbreak from late January through late March while an on-screen graph ticks increasingly upward as U.S. cases exponentially multiply. In one snippet, Trump appears to dismiss the virus as “a hoax.”
Evidently that hit too close to home for Trump’s campaign. It sued the tiny northern Wisconsin station for defamation on April 13, claiming that the ad distorted Trump’s actual “hoax” comments from a February campaign rally in South Carolina.
At the rally, Trump was stoking the crowd’s anger at congressional Democrats who had impeached him over a scandal that he called a hoax. Then he said that the Democrats’ claims that he was downplaying the deadly contagion was “their new hoax.” The Washington Post, hardly a bashful Trump critic, vetted the claim that Trump had literally called the virus a hoax and gave it the paper’s strongest rebuff – four Pinoccios."