Tommy Vitor

And especially in a defamation suit against a public figure, not just a public figure, maybe the highest public figure when it comes to sort of like the political milieu. No, obviously the highest, the president of the United States, the incoming president. You were supposed to have a lot more wiggle room when you're talking about that person.

You have to prove there was actual malice in what you said. And George made a mistake. He said that Trump had been found liable for rape when it was actually sexual abuse. Do you offer context?

Yeah. And also with a public figure, this should not be a hard case. It signals it's very chilling. It signals that there's some momentum behind all these cases. It signals that there is this, I don't know, there's this evidence, like we're seeing all these pieces of evidence that CEOs and corporations are preemptively bowing down to Trump.

It's Mark Zuckerberg cutting a million dollar check to the inauguration of Tim Cook having dinner with Donald Trump.

Yeah. And look, I think, you know, I think this is probably gonna have a lot of news outlets worried. And this would be unthinkable outside of this context that a news outlet would settle for $15 million, given the context we just talked about how what Stephanopoulos said was completely defensible and how Trump is a public figure. It's very worrisome.

The question is why? And was it because they did their own kind of internal digging and they found something in a discovery process in an email or in a document or somewhere that they thought, okay, we do not want this to go to a deposition and have George sit down and have this come out in a court filing? Is it because...

ABC or Disney is thinking, let's just patch this up and fix our relationship with Trump now and not get iced out for the next few years. We don't know.

Want to go for the Pulitzer Organization? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, that's right. What are we talking about here?

Expensive bit.

I would like to sue the New York Times needle. I would like to sue Steve Kornacki's khakis. I'd love one of the Nates.

For the outcome.

So the SoftBank thing is funny. The Wall Street Journal pointed out that SoftBank only has $30 billion on hand. So it's not clear how they're going to invest $100 billion. I guess they're going to go to the Saudis hat in hand again and try to raise another round.

That's not going to be easy because the SoftBank Vision Fund, too, included WeWork and a bunch of other companies that basically went bust.

I was shocked. Biden has never been in the Army Navy game as president. That really surprised me because it's very fun. I went to one. It was a blast. We went to one and Joe Biden was there. Yeah, Joe Biden. It also was just down the road in Maryland. As the vice president. Obama, yeah. He won his VP with Obama in 2011, but not as president.

I mean, I think Trump generally is very good at using social events to show off this kind of pageantry and trappings of the presidency. He does it better than I think any president in our lifetime, better than Obama, better than Biden. Sports are sometimes part of it. There was the ultimate fighting thing. He did recently with like Elon and the goon squad of like Speaker Johnson and those guys.

He went to college football games. But like Army, Navy, it's like football wrapped in the military. And it just it's like an obvious winner for him, which is why it's so odd that Biden wouldn't go for his last one when it's just down the road. But I get like you said, they did it in a smart way. They brought Pete Hegseth, which kind of showed the world that he's still behind that nomination.

He brought together congressional leaders like they had Speaker Johnson and John Thune in the same box with Trump, I think.

Well, it's also really funny. Remember 2016 when people were all worked up about the Logan Act and unauthorized diplomacy by American citizens? And now you got Trump. Trump went to Paris. He went to Notre Dame. He met with Zelensky. He's taken calls from foreign leaders. Justin Trudeau flew down to Mar-a-Lago for dinner.

His emissaries are over in Israel right now meeting with Netanyahu talking about Gaza.

We can't tell. Yeah. Yeah. I think on the staff level, like they're just shoving money out the door from the CHIPS Act and the IRA and trying to get as much of that spent as they can. So Trump can't peel it back. They're also doing that with Ukraine. And they just pushed out a huge loan to the Ukrainians that's basically paid for by seized Russian assets, like the interest on those assets.