Trump Bullies the New York Times [Deserved?]

late on Monday night. Uh it was taken in

the state of Florida, obviously a

Republican stronghold and basically the

home of Donald Trump and his family. Now

uh and in this uh lawsuit uh Donald

Trump accuses the New York Times of

being a mouthpiece for the Democratic

party. He takes issue with a book that

was written by two New York Times

reporters as well as other articles.

It's it's a big figure, 15 billion, well

past the New York Times market cap, and

it represents the latest attempt by

Donald Trump to sue American news

organizations. We've seen similar

efforts uh when it comes to ABC, CBS,

and we saw some settlements in this case

in those cases. Um so yes, definitely a

further escalation.

>> Trump does not actually expect to win

these cases against news agencies. These

are really hard cases to win. And you

might hate the New York Times, you might

love the New York Times, it doesn't

really matter. What matters is Trump

uses the legal system to uh bully uh the

news agencies to basically be nice to

him. That's all it is. Notice how

there's never a lawsuit against Fox

because he hires people from Fox. People

who worked in his administration like

Larry Cuddlo go back to Fox. And then

you get Fox News that chills for him on

a daily basis. That's the way this game

works. Like Larry Cuddlo literally

yesterday had a recorded segment that he

played twice where he's like, you know,

is it possible now? Is it possible

tariffs might be causing some consumer

inflation? Yes. But but for the larger

grand scheme of things, that's okay for

the benefits we're getting from tariff

revenues. And should that stop the Fed

from cutting? We don't think so. We

think the Fed should lower costs for

Americans. It's literally like Trump's

mouthpiece. So like, yes, it is very

normal for Trump to do this. And so what

happened is yesterday on Truth Social,

Donald Trump announced a $15 billion

defamation and liel lawsuit against the

New York Times, which is really

difficult to bring a lawsuit of this

because you have to prove that uh the

New York Times acted with actual malice.

When you're a public figure, you can't

just say, "Hey, you said something mean

about me. I'm going to sue you cuz it

caused damages. When you're a public

figure, the standard goes way up. We

have massive first amendment protections

in the United States. That said, nobody

actually expects these cases to go

before a jury or some kind of even bench

trial. Why? Because 99% of cases settle.

It's the same thing with Colombia or

Harvard. Do they want to go through two

years of being, you know, investigated

by Trump's administration because he can

basically direct investigations or is it

better just settle with Trump? It's like

the CBS lawsuit where they paid him $15

million in a settlement and then right

after they pay him $15 million in the

settlement, the FTC approves the

Paramount deal that Paramount's been

wanting to do and Paramount owns CBS.

So, it's no surprise that there's a lot

of weaponization of basically the legal

system to get what he wants. Anyway, so

yes, he he filed in the US District

Court in Florida. He names four

reporters, Peter Barker, Susan Craig,

Michael Schmidt, and Ross Bner.

And Penguin Random House, publisher of a

2024 book about Trump. 85page complaint

alleges the book contained repundant

distortions and fabrications about

Trump, harming his business, personal

reputation and even causing a decline in

the share price of Truth Social. That's

interesting. So now he's saying, "Oh,

the reason, you know, Truth Social is

falling uh is because of this book."

Which is crazy because if you look at

Truth Social, Tru Truth Social has no

real revenues. Their revenues are

terrible. Their expenses are massive.

They pay millions of dollars in

consultation fees and operating

expenses. You can just look this up

yourself. Truth Social Investor

Relations. We'll do it together really

quick. You pull up the financials of

Truth Social. They're horrible. So, in

an attempt to pump up the Truth Social

stock price lately, the goal has been to

become a Bitcoin acquiring treasury

company, much like Michael Sailor of

Micro Strategy, because that's done well

for them. So, if that does well for

them, why why not try to copy them? Look

at their net sales. Wow, it's even worse

than the other numbers. We have net

sales of $883,000.

That's it. In 3 months, you made

$833,000 or $883,000. How much did you

spend on consultants and people that you

employ? Well, you spent $28 million on

general and administrative expenses and

you spent $13 million on research and

development. So, you guys are losing

money handover fist. $20 million in the

quarter. But, of course, it's not the

company's fault that y'all are sucking.

It's the New York Times and their book

as the reason why uh you know, DJT is

going down. So now DJT or and Trump are

looking for $15 billion in damages. Uh

now the New York Times, by the way,

they're a public company and you might

hate the New York Times, which is fine.

Uh but their stock is only moving down

2.7% on this news. That's probably

because markets don't actually see this

is going far and only pricing in some

form of a settlement potential. You

know, take 9.3 billion. So 9.38

9380 times 0.027. Markets are markets

are still taking about a $250 million

price tag off of the New York Times

valuation. That's pretty good. That's a

quarter of a billion dollars coming off

of the New York Times valuation

following some of this. Now again, I

think proving malice is going to be

crazy, but this is going to be another

tool for Donald Trump to call, as he

does, the New York Times the worst and

most degenerate newspaper that exists.

This is commonly what he does, but it's

really a rallying cry for him and

Republicans going into the 2026

midterms. the more you can villainize

these leftist papers, the more uh you

can sort of rally the base around, oh,

don't vote for Democrats, vote for

Republicans, right? Then, of course, you

have uh you know, people uh you know,

circulating commentary on on X uh

suggesting that, hey, you know, this is

good. The New York Times needs to be

held to account. Other people are like,

man, this is a straight attack on free

speech. not a surprise. Uh, and so

there's commentary on all angles. The

reality is if this went all the way to

trial, the odds are Donald Trump would

lose, but to get to trial, Donald Trump

will probably be out of office. So, in

the meantime, it's going to cost the New

York Times hundreds of thousands of

dollars in legal fees and continuously

be a point of contention throughout the

next two or three years. So, Trump

doesn't really lose. It doesn't really

cost Trump legal fees because he's

probably just using, you know, internal

White House staff anyway. So, it doesn't

really cost him anything. It gives him a

political rallying cry. It lets him

point out, well, the only reason DJT is

down is because of the fake news media.

Has nothing to do with our financials.

So, it lets him, you know, get cover on

this. And it's what he always says. It's

a tool for him to weaponize his hate for

the left. And that's what he's doing.

So, you know, personally, I think this

$15 billion lawsuit is is really nothing

more than sort of classic kind of Trump

bullying. Uh, but that's the strategy

that works for Trump and it works really

well. You know, he ends up getting

settlements. He ends up making money off

these things. So, he's got a strategy

that works and even if there's just a

bit of truth, it's enough for him to run

with. That's my take on this. So, uh,

very interesting.

Uh somebody here in the chat writes,

"We've never before seen such great

financials."

Yeah. Uh good point. Uh so uh let's see

here. The best stock we have ever seen.

None thought it was possible. Discovery

would be interesting. Well, yeah, sure.

Because what the the problem with this

though is like how do you like usually

reporters or bookw writers have

journalistic privilege where if they say

like hey we have anonymous sources that

told us something you know the public is

able to look at that and say all right

well I don't believe you're anonymous

sources but that still shields the

journalists from saying it and in order

to protect journalistic privilege in

America journalists are pretty heavily

protected in giving up their sources. So

once you give up your sources then

people might not want to be able to

might not talk to journalists anymore at

all and then it's like okay is that then

bad for society right

so uh that's very interesting to me very

very interesting so uh

hybrid universe says it's worth buying

the course the alpha report is done live

that's awesome well thank you for saying

that appreciate you saying that uh

anyway

Yeah. So, somebody says, "Where can I

find figures financials?" You know, we

did an analysis on it in the course

member liveream on the day that it

IPOed. It was actually really quiet. Not

a lot of people talked about uh about

that one. Uh but anyway, very very

interesting here. Trump uh Trump kind of

classic move here with lawsuits against

the media.

>> Why not advertise these things that you

told us here? I feel like nobody else

knows about this.

>> We'll we'll try a little advertising and

see how it goes.

>> Congratulations, man. You have done so

much. People love you. People look up to

you.

>> Kevin Papra there, financial analyst and

YouTuber. Meet Kevin. Always great to

get your take.