Is President Donald Trump a liar or just an exaggerator? That was the question for U.S. District Judge S. James Otero, who on Monday dismissed Stormy Daniels’ (aka Stephanie Clifford’s) defamation suit against the president. Otero ruled that Trump’s tweet — which read: “A sketch years later about a nonexistent man. A total con job, playing the Fake News Media for Fools (but they know it)!” — was just “rhetorical hyperbole,” according to The Washington Post.
Daniels sued Trump for lying, specifically for saying Daniels organized a “con job.” Trump’s tweet claimed the individual, who Daniels said threatened her after she sold a story of her affair with Trump to a magazine, did not exist and that Daniels was purposefully misinforming journalists about the incident.
Otero’s ruling against Daniels is emblematic of the crumbling American standard of truth in political discourse. When it was once a glaring scandal for public servants to be caught fudging the truth, people now expect lies from U.S. politicians. This is unsurprising. The president does not seem to take a day off from making false statements. Most of the statements are demonstrably false, such as the size of crowds at the president’s inauguration. Trump even claimed that former President Barack Obama tapped his phones, as if Obama didn’t have better things to do than listen in on Trump’s incoherent rants to foreign leaders.
In fact, during the 2016 campaign, 70 percent of Trump’s statements reviewed by PolitiFact were false, according to Time.
So which of the statements are outright lies and which are “rhetorical hyperbole”? At what point can the president, once a paragon of integrity and honesty, be held responsible for knowingly making a false statement and injuring another person’s reputation? If we extend the logic from Otero’s ruling, the president is fairly insulated from defamation suits because in the course of his job, he frequently makes brash political statements. Otero narrowed his ruling specifically to public figures suing each other for defamation, as Daniels presented herself as a political adversary to Trump in the public eye. Otero reasoned that if the president were prevented from engaging with political adversaries in this way, it would “severely hamper” his ability to govern.
Otero’s ruling does not account for a future suit against Trump wherein the claimants to allege defamation against him may not be public figures. They may come forward with damning information on Trump and be sucked into the ensuing political firestorm, becoming public figures only after the fact, unlike Daniels who was a celebrity in the adult film industry prior to the tweet. When Trump disparages their character, they should be able to bring a claim against him. The office of the president should not insulate the officeholder from defamation suits because all of his hyperbolic, deceptive statements are made pursuant to legitimate political goals.
The president has the ability and the duty to maintain truth’s sacred place in discourse. While politics usually involves some degree of dishonesty, outright lies aimed to deceive and misinform are unusual. Trump’s tweet was not just unreasonable or over-the-top. It was not a mere exaggeration. It was an outright lie he published on one of the world’s most viewed Twitter accounts. Voters depend on the president as their source of news — 72 percent of Republicans trust the president more than the media, according to The Washington Post. As long as Trump has the ability to commit character assassination with impunity, so long as he does so in a manner that is especially and flagrantly untrue, fewer will come forward with evidence of his wrongdoing.
The compelling interest considered by Otero should not have been Trump’s necessity to fight off political adversaries with hyperbole; it should have been our country’s desperate need for truthful speech from the White House and the ability of accusers to come forward without incurring irreparable damage to their reputation.
