The Trump political movement has long had a truth problem. That has now manifested itself as a very expensive defamation problem. For the second time in eight months, a top Donald Trump ally has declined to try to prove they didn’t defame an election worker. Arizona Senate candidate Kari Lake (R) has joined former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani in that distinction. The news comes even as 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.
Throw in the $787.5 million Fox News agreed to pay a voting machine company over bogus theories 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.
The latest big news is Lake’s declining to defend her statements about Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer (R), whom she repeatedly accused of deliberately sabotaging her narrow 2022 loss for Arizona governor. (Courts have repeatedly rejected that argument and upheld Lake’s defeat.)
As well as anything, these defamation cases lay bare just how careless and demagogic the MAGA movement has become. The Trump political movement has long had a truth problem. That has now manifested itself as a very expensive defamation problem.
Both Lake and Giuliani tried to put a good face on their capitulations. Lake has cited the cost of pressing forward and insisted that she’s not giving up. She also gamely insisted that defending her statements “would only serve to legitimize this perversion of our legal system.”
But it’s worth emphasizing that moving directly to the damages phase spares a defendant a fraught discovery process, in which their claims and their private deliberations could be put under a microscope. Fox’s historic settlement with Dominion Voting Systems came only after a robust discovery phase that proved hugely embarrassing for the network. The evidence showed that Fox executives and hosts understood the claims they chose to air were bogus but that they pressed forward anyway. Repeatedly, they cited a desire to toe Trump’s line and avoid alienating his supporters.
The judge in Giuliani’s case suggested that Giuliani was deliberately shirking his discovery obligations to insulate himself from other civil and criminal cases. Giuliani has also been indicted alongside Trump in the Fulton County, Ga., election-subversion case. Lake’s move is a far cry from her previous commentary. In January, she noted that “discovery goes both ways,” adding: “I TRULY look forward to that. I stand by everything I’ve said. I’ve always been truthful when I’ve talked about elections.”
Lake’s January comment is a telling one. Repeatedly, Trump-aligned defendants in these cases have hailed the discovery process as one in which they would not only be vindicated but could prove the veracity of their stolen-election claims. If Lake truly believes Richer rigged the election against her, what better way than to unearth his private communications? At least one high-profile Trump backer is criticizing Lake for giving up in that quest.
But as with the many voter-fraud lawsuits that have failed, it’s become clear that election-deniers simply don’t have the evidence to back up their claims. And at worst, the process involves risks demonstrating how craven they were in spreading these claims in the first place.
What’s also important to note here is that, while these cases involve only a handful of stolen-election claims, they are among the signature ones. The idea that Georgia election workers planted thousands of ballots was everywhere, because it was an easily consumable example of purported mass voter fraud. So, too, the theories that voting machines rigged the election. Lake’s claims about Maricopa County in many ways kept the election-denial movement going in 2022, after the GOP began sh