Real Teeth

Something’s up. The Trump people are disappearing. But they haven’t changed their minds about their man. They simply have a problem with the law:

Fox Business has canceled “Lou Dobbs Tonight” one day after the host was named in a multibillion-dollar defamation lawsuit against the network and its parent company.

Dobbs, 75, was among the most ardent pro-Trump voices on air. He held influence over Trump administration policy – particularly on trade and immigration – and relentlessly promoted the former president’s false claims of election fraud late last year. His nightly program, which a person close to Dobbs said aired its final episode Friday, was by far the highest-rated on Fox Business…

Dobbs will be unlikely to return to air, although he still has a contract with Fox News Media…

Fox News Media cut him loose. He had become a major financial liability. But they wouldn’t admit that:

Election technology company Smartmatic filed a $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit Thursday against Fox News, its parent company Fox Corp. and several on-air commentators, including Dobbs.

The network, however, said Dobbs’ cancellation had already been in the works.

“As we said in October, Fox News Media regularly considers programming changes and plans have been in place to launch new formats as appropriate post-election, including on Fox Business – this is part of those planned changes,” a Fox News Media spokesperson said in an email. “A new 5 p.m. program will be announced in the near future.”

Reached via text message on Friday night, Dobbs told The Washington Post, “Thanks, but I have no comment at this time.”

In short, no one believed any of that:

Smartmatic’s nearly 300-page complaint alleges the network and hosts such as Dobbs “decimated” the company’s future earnings by falsely accusing it of helping to rig the election in favor of then-Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.

It cited several examples of Dobbs promoting baseless claims of voter fraud, including a Nov. 12 episode in which President Donald’s personal attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani claimed that Smartmatic was founded by Venezuelans close to former dictator Hugo Chávez “in order to fix elections.” Dobbs thanked Giuliani for being “on the case,” which the host said “has the feeling of a coverup in certain places.”

A Fox Business staffer said employees were surprised by the cancellation and presumed that it was connected to the lawsuit. The person spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. The network has not announced any changes to the shows of two other hosts named in the complaint: Maria Bartiromo and Jeanine Pirro.

But that’s coming. They’re next. But really, Fox should have known better:

Dobbs started his career in local television, joined CNN at its inception in 1980 and became one of the network’s stars, best known for hosting “Moneyline with Lou Dobbs.” Amid reports of clashes with network executives, he left CNN in 1999 to start the astronomy news website Space.com.

He eventually returned to CNN but left again in 2009 as hardline views on immigration became a bigger part of his personality. He was an early proponent of the “birther” conspiracy theory, which falsely held that President Barack Obama had not been born in the United States and was thus ineligible for the role.

He was an angry screaming Birther by then. He’s from Kenya, I say, from Kenya!

CNN couldn’t calm him down so they fired him, but he quickly found a home where angry screaming is rewarded:

Dobbs landed on Fox Business in 2010, and over the years became must-watch TV for Trump. The two men spoke regularly, sometimes daily…

Dobbs’ views on immigration influenced the president’s policies. He was among a cohort of Fox personalities who became something of a shadow Cabinet for Trump. During an annual get-together with the Council of Economic Advisers in 2019, Trump placed a call to Dobbs to consult him, much to the surprise of the attendees.

Even before he began peddling election fraud claims, Dobbs was a reliable cheerleader for Trump’s reelection efforts. A friend of Dobbs told The Washington Post in 2019 that the host was aware his program had turned into “Trump 2020 TV” but “doesn’t care. He’s at the end of his career, and he’s going to do what he wants to do.”

But he’s going to do what he wants to do somewhere else now, with a glowing recommendation from the boss:

Trump responded to the news of the cancellation in a statement Friday evening: “Lou Dobbs is and was great. Nobody loves America more than Lou. He had a large and loyal following that will be watching closely for his next move, and that following includes me.”

And none of that will help Fox News:

Dobbs’ departure from the air comes as Fox is grappling with an identity crisis following Trump’s departure from office. Trump elevated the network during his presidency by citing the network’s hosts and programming frequently from his Twitter account, and in Cabinet meetings.

And now Trump is gone. Now what do they do? But they did do this. The New York Times adds more detail:

A person familiar with Fox’s decision said the network’s concerns about Mr. Dobbs predated this week’s filing of the Smartmatic lawsuit. But the person, who requested anonymity to describe private personnel matters, conceded that Mr. Dobbs’ extreme and unrepentant endorsements of Mr. Trump’s false election claims had imperiled his position, as did other moments. For instance, on the day of siege at the U.S. Capitol, Mr. Dobbs described protesters as merely “walking between the rope lines.”

The old hands at CNN must be laughing their asses off now. You hired THIS guy? He really is trouble:

As recently as Thursday, his final day on Fox Business, Mr. Dobbs spoke disparagingly of Republican Party leaders for, in his view, showing insufficient loyalty to Mr. Trump. He described Senator Mitch McConnell and Representative Kevin McCarthy, the Republican leaders in Congress, as “toadies for the Democratic Party.”

Fox News might have had to apologize to McConnell and McCarthy for that, but firing Dobbs fixed that problem, and it might have fixed the bigger problem:

Don Herzog, who teaches First Amendment and defamation law at the University of Michigan, said it was possible that canceling Mr. Dobbs could aid Fox in its defense of the lawsuit. If Mr. Dobbs had continued to discuss Smartmatic or promote election fraud on his program, the network could have been liable for each new claim, Mr. Herzog said.

Fox officials could also argue that the lawsuit made them aware of untruths that Mr. Dobbs had helped spread. And in a trial atmosphere, the cancellation of Mr. Dobbs’ program might help persuade jurors that the network was acting in good faith.

But that won’t work:

Mr. Herzog said a responsible judge would counter that sentiment: “A judge should instruct a jury that what Fox does later to try to show they’re acting in good faith doesn’t settle the question of whether they were acting in good faith at some earlier time.”

Yes, logic is their enemy, against this:

Smartmatic, the voting software company that Donald Trump’s lawyers falsely accused of manipulating vote counts in the 2020 presidential election, has filed a $2.7-billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News and three of its on-air hosts – Maria Bartiromo, Lou Dobbs and Jeanine Pirro – who presented the disinformation on their programs. The suit filed Thursday in New York State Supreme Court also names Trump’s lawyers Sidney Powell and Rudolph Giuliani, who were frequent guests on Fox News programs in the weeks after the November election…

The company’s reputation for providing transparent, auditable, and secure election technology and software was irreparably harmed, the suit said. “Overnight, Smartmatic went from an under-the-radar election technology and software company with a track record of success to the villain in [the] Defendants’ disinformation campaign.”

And they have a point:

“This is the definition of defamation.”

That’s what CNN senior legal analyst Laura Coates told Erin Burnett Thursday night when discussing Smartmatic’s $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News, three of the network’s hosts (Lou Dobbs, Maria Bartiromo, and Jeanine Pirro), Rudy Giuliani, and Sidney Powell.

“When you are making statements that are knowingly false, and you make them with malice, and you actually tarnish reputations and it has a financial consequence — that’s why you have defamation lawsuits in the first place,” Coates said, explaining the seriousness of the lawsuit.

Coates is not alone in believing Smartmatic’s suit poses real threat to Fox. University of Georgia media law professor Jonathan Peters noted on Twitter that “libel law makes it difficult to prevail where the plaintiff is a public figure and/or where the speech involved a matter of public concern. In various ways, these will be key issues in litigation.” But Peters added that he believed the “smart money” is on Smartmatic…

Despite Fox describing the suit as “meritless,” Powell calling it a “political maneuver,” and Giuliani saying he looked forward to discovery, most legal experts believed it to have some bite. “This lawsuit is a legitimate threat – a real threat,” CNN legal analyst Ellie Honig said. “There are real teeth to this.”

The Trump people will be disappearing, but the New York Times’ television critic, James Poniewozik, wonders about that other guy:

TV’s latest, most outrageously paranoid conspiracy-thriller has arrived. It has everything: cyberespionage, evil vote-stealing machines, wicked media cabals. And it aired Friday on One America News Network.

It is “Absolute Proof,” a two-hour-plus disinfomercial made and hosted by Mike Lindell, the chief executive of the MyPillow company and a fervent advocate of the myth that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald J. Trump and handed to President Biden. Mr. Lindell paid OANN to air it multiple times starting Friday.

In it, Mr. Lindell sits behind a news desk stamped with the seal of “WVW Broadcast Network.” He interviews a lineup of guests featured in the months-long effort to discredit and overturn the legitimate election, whose wild charges he punctuates with a hearty “Wow!” He claims that Mr. Trump not only won the election but won by such a margin that he “broke the algorithm” of voting machines.

No, he cannot say that:

Even OANN, which has courted election truthers, seemed to realize that “Absolute Proof” was volatile content. A mammoth disclaimer before the broadcast emphasized that Mr. Lindell purchased the airtime and that “the statements and claims expressed in this program are presented at this time as opinions only.”

The message is not so much “Don’t try this at home” as “Don’t try us in court.”

That outraged Lindell but the show must go on:

He promises to expose “all the evil in our country, all the criminals in the country, all the ones that tried to suppress this.” He complains of his suspension by Twitter and his treatment by OANN’s competitor Newsmax, which cut off an interview with him this week when he launched into an accusation of fraud by voting machines that the network had disavowed under pain of legal action. He grouses about the stores that will no longer sell his pillows.

His monologues are the sort that people will change subway cars to avoid. “They’re suppressing, cancel culture, they’re trying to cancel us all out,” he says. “I’ve just seen churches, the Christian churches, they’re being attacked right now, people on social media, anyone that speaks up, they’re going, ‘You can’t say that, pfft, you’re gone.’”

All while a cartoon rubber stamp slaps “CANCELED” on the screen.

Whatever. Poniewozik sums things up:

The whole chintzy production has the feel of a man, and a movement, unraveling. But its existence also says something about the larger conservative-media landscape postelection.

Every right-wing outlet has had to decide how much to indulge the lies about the election popular with a large chunk of its audience. OANN and Newsmax seized an opportunity to outflank Fox News, some of whose commentators have played footsie with election fraud conspiracies but whose news operation committed the heresy of acknowledging that Mr. Biden won an election that he won.

But all the “rigging” talk has also raised the existential threat of enormous lawsuits from the election-machine companies that conspiracists have impugned. On Newsmax, which had sought to out-Trump Fox, the anchor who cut off Mr. Lindell read a statement that included the lines: “The election results in every state were certified. Newsmax accepts the results as legal and final.”

Now, it seems, it was Newsmax’s turn to be insufficiently MAGA. Mr. Lindell’s paid vanity-cast may have given OANN the opportunity to court dead-ender Trumpists…

But that was just sad:

For hours on end, Mr. Lindell spun that audience the story it craved, then implored it to help him spread that story through social media. Onscreen, a graphic showed a smartphone bubbling out the logos of social-media platforms, including, for some reason, the online-payment system Venmo and Google Plus, which shut down in 2019.

It’s tempting just to laugh at all this. And make no mistake, you should laugh at all this! It is a healthy sign that after years of alternative facts, you have still retained some sense of reality and the absurd.

But you should also cry, a little. Because it’s not hard to imagine an audience who wants to believe, seeing the world maps with menacing lines purporting to show “hacking,” hearing the talk of “cyberforensics,” and concluding, still, that there must be something to all this.

In fact, you don’t need to imagine them. Just look at pictures from the Capitol on Jan. 6.

And that’s really sad:

A fiery Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) declared Friday that the House’s decision to remove her from her committee assignments has liberated her to build a political network aimed at supporting former president Donald Trump and pushing the GOP further to the right.

Greene’s comments during a 20-minute news conference outside the U.S. Capitol demonstrated that – far from being cowed by the uproar over the various extremist remarks she made in the years leading up to her election in November – she has only been emboldened in her social-media-fueled campaign against Democrats, the media and those whom she portrays as elites.

“Going forward, I’ve been freed,” she said.

And that’s the problem:

Greene is part of a growing strain of Republican lawmakers who view legislating as a less important task than communications, focusing their messages on right-wing media while largely ignoring the more traditional local media outlets with which most new members of Congress have tended to interact in the past.

Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.), also first elected in November, recently told lawmakers that he “built my staff around comms rather than legislation,” according to a Time magazine report last month. Just one month into office, Cawthorn’s communications focus has made him a regular on Fox News.

They are following a path blazed by Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), first elected in 2016, who has focused his energy on political theatrics that command attention on cable news and social media. Last week, as conservatives erupted over Rep. Liz Cheney’s vote to impeach Trump, Gaetz flew to her state of Wyoming to attend a rally of her opponents.

This focus has left centrist lawmakers bewildered.

They don’t know what to make of these legislators who think legislating is a waste of time. They want to be, not do.

That was what Trump was about all along. He didn’t “do” things. His job was to “be” Trump. Fine, but there’s a way to deal with that:

President Biden said on Friday that he would bar his predecessor, Donald J. Trump, from receiving intelligence briefings traditionally given to former presidents, saying that Mr. Trump could not be trusted because of his “erratic behavior” even before the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

The move was the first time that a former president had been cut out of the briefings, which are provided partly as a courtesy and partly for the moments when a sitting president reaches out for advice. Currently, the briefings are offered on a regular basis to Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

Mr. Biden, speaking to Norah O’Donnell of CBS News, said Mr. Trump’s behavior worried him “unrelated to the insurrection” that gave rise to the second impeachment of Mr. Trump.

“I just think that there is no need for him to have the intelligence briefings,” Mr. Biden said.

“What value is giving him an intelligence briefing?” Mr. Biden added. “What impact does he have at all, other than the fact he might slip and say something?”

That had been a constant problem. He didn’t want to do things and solve problems. He just wanted to be way cool:

The question of how Mr. Trump handles intelligence came up several times during his presidency. Shortly after he fired the F.B.I. director James B. Comey in 2017, Mr. Trump told the Russian foreign minister and the Russian ambassador about a highly classified piece of intelligence about the Islamic State that came from Israel. The Israelis were outraged.

Later in his presidency, Mr. Trump took a photograph with his phone of a classified satellite image showing an explosion at a missile launchpad in Iran. Some of the markings were blacked out first, but the revelation gave adversaries information – which they may have had, anyway – about the abilities of American surveillance satellites.

Maybe that was cool, but there’s no need to help him work on his awesome image:

The former president has talked openly about the possibility of running for the White House again, perhaps under the banner of a third party. The fear was that he would use, or twist, intelligence to fit his political agenda, something he was often accused of in office.

Biden will take that tool away from him. That stuff is for those who “do” the work of the world. This is their time now. It’s lawsuits for everyone else. And those have real teeth.