Former President Donald Trump and his allies have racked up an enormous sum in defamation suit losses, wrote Aaron Blake for The Washington Post on Wednesday — and that could add yet another headache to their 2024 challenges.
This comes as Kari Lake, the failed gubernatorial candidate now running for Senate in Arizona, opted to skip her own defense in the defamation suit brought against her by Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer for her claims he helped rig the 2022 election against her, and asked a judge to go ahead and assess whether she owes damages.
On top of this, "Trump owes more than $86 million after losing a pair of defamation cases against a woman, E. Jean Carroll, whom he has arguably continued to defame," wrote Blake. "Throw in the $787.5 million Fox News agreed to pay a voting machine company over bogus theories that it aired bolstering Trump’s stolen-election claims and the $148 million judgment against Giuliani, and the combined bill is north of $1 billion — and potentially growing, thanks to Lake’s capitulation and other lawsuits."
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This staggering amount of money highlights "just how careless and demagogic the MAGA movement has become," Blake added.
Trump managed to get something of a reprieve this week when an appellate court in New York reduced his bond to appeal his more than $450 million civil fraud judgment — but he still has to produce $175 million, and will be on the hook for the whole amount if his appeal fails.
At a certain point, Blake wrote, all of this is going to limit the ability of the MAGA movement to raise and spend money for campaigns in the first place.
"Stolen-election claims have been everywhere, but they’ve rarely led a specific entity to be targeted by Trump backers. When they have, the record for election deniers is ugly," concluded Blake. "Politics has always involved stretching the truth about your political opponents. But it tends to be done with a deft touch and plausible deniability ... The sum total: Serial defamers could figure heavily into the Republican Party’s hopes of retaking both the presidency and the Senate."
