My sister once told me that there was nothing scarier than a white man losing his power. I think she may have been talking about the X-Men but the same applies here as former President Trump—you know, the man who still claims that the election was rigged against him—is reportedly suing his estranged niece and the New York Times over a 2018 story that explained in detail how the Trump family avoided taxes.
According to the Associated Press, the orange man with the bad hair weave has filed a lawsuit in state court in New York claiming that Mary Trump breached “a settlement agreement by disclosing tax records she received in a dispute over family patriarch Fred Trump’s estate.”
The lawsuit accuses three Times reporters—Susanne Craig, David Barstow and Russell Buettner—of relentlessly pursuing Trump’s niece and pressuring her to turn over documents all the while knowing that there was a settlement barring her from releasing those documents.
The Times story not only exposed an elaborate tax scheme that the Trumps used to avoid paying large sums of money to the government but it completely debunked Trump’s continued lie that he was a self-made man, documenting how “his father, Fred, had given him at least $413 million over the decades, including through tax avoidance schemes,” AP reports.
Not sure why, but Mary Trump identified herself as the source of the documents used to bust up the Trump’s empired and now Trump’s lawsuit claims that Mary Trump and the Times (band name alert!) “were motivated by a personal vendetta” against him and a desire to push a political agenda.
The defendants “engaged in an insidious plot to obtain confidential and highly-sensitive records which they exploited for their own benefit and utilized as a means of falsely legitimizing their publicized works,” the lawsuit said, AP notes.
When asked about the lawsuit, Mary Trump told NBC News this of her beloved uncle: “I think he is a loser, and he is going to throw anything against the wall he can. It’s desperation. The walls are closing in and he is throwing anything against the wall that he thinks will stick. As is always the case with Donald, he’ll try and change the subject.”
Craig, one of the reporter’s named in the lawsuit responded in a tweet: “I knocked on Mary Trump’s door. She opened it. I think they call that journalism.”
Trump is seeking $100 million in damages.
Good luck with that.