From Trump v. CNN, decided Friday (quite correctly, I think) by Judge Raag Singhal (S.D. Fla.):
Trump alleges that CNN defamed him by making statements comparing him to Hitler and the Nazi regime …:
[a.] On January 25, 2021, CNN published an article written by Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a "frequent contributor to CNN Opinion," entitled "Trump's big lie wouldn't have worked without his thousands of little lies." Ben-Ghiat wrote: "This is Trump's 'Big Lie,' a brazen falsehood with momentous consequences." Ben-Ghiat likened the Plaintiff to an authoritarian dictator, writing:
Trump, a leader of authoritarian intentions and tendencies, had disadvantages with respect to the foreign autocrats he so admires. He had no state media, like China's Xi Jinping. He could not rule by decree, like Hungary's Viktor Orbán. He had to govern and run for reelection in an open society with a relatively robust free press. Moreover, although he succeeded in making journalists into hate objects for many of his followers, he could not revoke or destroy the First Amendment.
So Trump took a different tack, unleashing a barrage of disinformation common in authoritarian states but without precedent in the history of the American presidency. He told more than 30,000 documented lies in public (30,573 was The Washington Post's final tally), on Twitter, at rallies and in interviews. If taken as an average, it would come out to 21 lies per day over his four-year term.
[b.] On July 5, 2021, CNN published an article written by Chris Cillizza, CNN Editor-at-Large, entitled "Donald Trump just accidentally told the truth about his disinformation strategy." In this article, CNN's Editor-at-Large likens the Plaintiff to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels: "One can only hope that Trump was unaware that his quote was a near-replication of this infamous line from Nazi Joseph Goebbels: 'If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.'" {The Trump quote referenced by Cillizza was made on July 3, 2022, in Sarasota, Florida: "If you say it enough and keep saying it, they'll start to believe you."}
