Trump says his class-action lawsuits are a victory for free speech
Former President Donald Trump on Sunday expressed optimism that his legal action against social media companies will be a victory for the Constitution.
“They are immune so many different things, but they're not immune from the lawsuit,” he said of Silicon Valley during a conspiracy-laden interview on “Sunday Morning Futures With Maria Bartiromo” on the Fox News Channel.
“What they have done is such a violation of the Constitution,” he said, “a violation like we've never seen before. They take me down, they take all conservative voices down or most of them. They find them and they take them down. It's a disgrace.”
The former president filed a series of class-action lawsuits Wednesday accusing leading social media companies of illegally censoring him.
Experts in free-speech law have expressed skepticism that Trump’s legal actions will succeed under current law, a notion Trump rejected. "A lot of legal scholars are saying it’s about time," he said.
In his interview Sunday, Trump blamed the actions of Facebook, Twitter and others on efforts to destroy him and his supporters.
“They work with Democrats within government and, frankly, outside of government. They work with the Democrats,” adding: “It should be a campaign contribution, the largest ever made.”
Feeding off Bartiromo’s sympathetic questions, Trump repeatedly and emphatically reiterated his oft-stated notion that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him (“a terrible blot on our country”), spouting baseless theories about Georgia, Arizona and New Hampshire and other states he lost. He also defended his behavior related to the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol — and praised his supporters and their conduct that day.
“These were peaceful people, these were great people,” he said, echoing his rhetoric about participants at the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va.
inflating the crowd figures from the rally Jan. 6 that preceded the attack on the Capitol, Trump said: “There was such love at that rally, you had over a million people. They were there for one reason, the rigged election."
At the end of the interview, Trump declined to say whether he will run for president in 2024.