Like the besotted cowboy lovers of Brokeback Mountain, former President Donald Trump just can’t find a way to quit his obsession with the 2016 presidential election — which he won — and the alleged wrongs he seems to firmly believe were perpetrated against him therein that ultimately lead, again, to the fact that he won.
Which is why here, now, in the year 2022, Trump chose to file a massive lawsuit against pretty much anyone and everyone on his 2016 shitlist, alleging that Hillary Clinton, John Podesta, the Democratic National Committee, Christopher Steele, and others “maliciously conspired to weave a false narrative that their Republican opponent, Donald J. Trump, was colluding with a hostile foreign sovereignty.”
That sound you just heard there? Yeah, that was me, sighing so loudly that it probably registered on multiple Richter scales around the globe. That’s right folks, we’re relitigating 2016 Russian electoral meddling one! More! Time!
The suit, filed Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, goes on to demand a trial by jury to prove that Clinton and Co. engaged in “falsifying evidence, deceiving law enforcement, and exploiting access to highly-sensitive data sources” in a way that was “so outrageous, subversive and incendiary that even the events of Watergate pale in comparison.” It asks for more than $70 million in damages.
In typically Trumpian hyperbole, the suit also claims:
Defendants continue to spread their vicious lies to this day as they unabashedly publicize their thoroughly debunked falsehoods in an effort to ensure that he will never be elected again. The deception, malice, and treachery perpetrated by the Defendants has caused significant harm to the American people, and to the Plaintiff, Donald J. Trump, and they must be held accountable for their heinous acts.
While it should, ideally, go without saying that the suit is fundamentally bogus and self-aggrandizing, we unfortunately live in a world where it is necessary to make absolutely clear that the ties between Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and efforts to court and embrace Russian interference in the race have been repeatedly established by multiple investigations. Nevertheless, Trump and his enablers have seemingly concocted an alternate history in which he is the victim of a massive, unthinkably complex conspiracy by dozens of high-ranking figures to discredit and demean him for their own nefarious goals.
If this all sounds a bit familiar, it’s likely because Thursday’s filing is the culmination (at least, so far) of the same basic pity-party Trump has been throwing for himself for the past seven-ish years. And while the suit will surely slog forward on its own merits for some time before it likely goes the way of so many other abortive efforts by the former president to legally intimidate and harass anyone he deems an enemy, it will serve as one more item for Trump’s most enthusiastic supporters to add to their list of grievances perpetrated against their favorite once and future leader. It’s hard to imagine Trump won’t follow up on Thursday’s filing with a solicitation for more money leveraging his new-old crusade against Clinton and the Deep State. And it’s not hard to imagine that there are plenty of people out there who’ll be more than happy to oblige him.
