The $100 Billion Victim Arrives in London

Trump sues the press for bruising his ego, threatens a Great Depression dress rehearsal, and drags Britain into the circus of his self-mythology.

Good morning from the upside-down, where a man suing the New York Times for hurting his feelings is being wafted into London on a cushion of ermine while his lawyers cite WrestleMania as evidence of statecraft. Keir Starmer, having personally slid the embossed invitation across the Resolute Desk months ago like a lovestruck page, must now stage a royal welcome for a plaintiff who says he’s worth $100 billion but needs $15 billion in emotional support damages because a newspaper suggested Mark Burnett helped invent his aura. Down the hall and to the left, indeed.

And the filing doesn’t just hum a few bars of flattery, it goes full operatic. “The value of President Trump’s one-of-a-kind, unprecedented personal brand alone is reasonably estimated to be worth at over $100,000,000,000,” his lawyers insist, adding that his business ventures “generate hundreds of millions of dollars of annual revenue for the Trump Organization.” This, mind you, from the same man who during his last term swore under oath and to the press that his net worth hovered around a mere $3–4 billion. The self-appraisal has ballooned by a factor of 25 in just a few years, apparently inflation hits hardest in Mar-a-Lago accounting. And yet, on the very next page, this titan of commerce becomes a fragile reed in the storm: “President Trump’s non-economic damages include attempted severe diminishment and tarnishing of his reputation as President and as a businessman in the eyes of the American public and around the world.”

The complaint even brands the Times guilty of “industrial-scale defamation,” as though Gray Lady reporters were working a 24-hour assembly line dedicated to hurting Donald’s feelings. His “economic losses…are enormous,” it pleads, with reputational injury “reaching billions of dollars.” The sheer chutzpah is staggering: a man who insists he “redefined what is possible in business and media” also begs the court to recognize that a few articles nearly toppled the skyscraper of his legend. WrestleMania proves the fame; the Times proves the trauma.

That’s the split-screen we’re treated to as Britain stages a royal gala for a plaintiff who can’t decide whether he’s Caesar or Job. The only thing consistent is the need to make sure every paragraph, whether flexing or fainting, is drenched in devotion.

Richard Murphy is right: this isn’t diplomacy, it’s normalization. The UK is pinning medals on a man cheerleading ethnic cleansing, vandalizing trade norms, and renaming reality by executive order. The timing could not be better for a reality check, which is why Volodymyr Zelenskyy politely removed the gloves and posted receipts. “This is Putin’s war,” he says, not Biden’s, not his, and certainly not Trump’s tango lesson. Zelenskyy will meet anywhere but Moscow because Russia is actively trying to kill him, an inconvenience you won’t find covered in Trump’s “two to tango” haiku. The contrast is obscene: one man catalogues glide bombs, dead children, and cities under nightly attack; the other runs a traveling framework factory and calls it peace. Somewhere between Churchill and “Where’s the lobby?” our standards got mugged.

Back home the competence theater continues to molt. After declaring D.C. “free and safe,” flooding it with tactical Halloween costumes, and bragging about a thousand arrests and “more than 100 legal guns,” the regime found itself repeatedly body-checked by the lowest bar in American law: grand juries. A panel reputed to indict ham sandwiches is now refusing to indict the sandwich thrower. No true bills pile up. A judge calls a stop-and-grab “without a doubt the most illegal search I’ve ever seen in my life,” adding the line that should be spray-painted on DOJ: we don’t just charge people and say “oops, my bad.” The office’s fix is not better cases but louder pressers, followed by downgrading everything to misdemeanors and blaming jurors who live in the city for not understanding the city. Stellar strategy: antagonize the very people you need to convict your enemies at trial, where unanimity is required and patience is not.

And because nothing says “we’re serious law people” like juggling chainsaws in a bouncy castle, enter Pam Bondi with a plan to “go after” hate speech that mostly sounds like a plan to criminalize rudeness to the administration’s friends. Asked whether that cudgel might be used against ABC for asking hard questions, the president mused that perhaps the hate is in John Karl’s heart. The free-speech absolutists who once warned that hate-speech laws would be wielded against conservatives have pivoted to “yes but for thee.” The principle has left the chat; only the cudgel remains.

Kash Patel showed up for his Capitol Hill audition as FBI Director in a post-truth telenovela, insisting there were no other men involved in Epstein’s trafficking, bragging about taking the Bureau’s jet to watch UFC with Mel Gibson, and shouting when asked where the files went. It was less testimony than tantrum: a curated highlight reel of grievance garnished with implausibility. Perfect week for it. Authoritarian vibes at full volume, administrative competence still on mute.

If you need a unifying theory for the chaos, the tariff case offers it in crystalline form. While Buckingham Palace polishes the silver for a man who thinks a cameo in Home Alone 2 certifies his fame, an appeals court looked at his super-legal tariffs and said, with bench-calm clarity, absolutely not. “Regulate importation” under emergency powers is not a license to turn the president into a one-man customs union; tariffs are taxes, and taxes belong to Congress. The administration responded by threatening the courts with a Great Depression pantomime: if you don’t let us keep our unprecedented, improvisational global duties, America collapses, breadlines, savings wiped out, Social Security in peril. Translation: after we spun the trade dial from 10% to 125% to 10% again by vibes and vendettas, you must now certify the vibes or the soufflé falls. The Supreme Court agreed to take a very fast look. If they uphold the appeals court, the legal Jenga tower topples; if they don’t, we’ll learn that “major questions doctrine” is something that applies to other people.

All of this is happening while the plaintiff-in-chief files an 85-page devotional in Florida that reads like a campaign brochure set in legalese. “The greatest personal and political achievement in American history,” it purrs about his 2024 win, before getting to the hard evidence of fame: a ring-side performance at WrestleMania and a concierge cameo to a lost child actor. It’s comic until you realize it’s the same template used everywhere: maximal claim, minimal law. Worth $100 billion but injured for $15 billion. Peace in 24 hours, or maybe that was sarcasm. Hate speech is free speech until the speech is about us. Grand juries are sacred until they say no. Courts are noble until they read the statute.

Which returns us to London, where the royal pageant aims to launder all of this through ceremony. Starmer, who set this up with a flourish back when it seemed like clever courtship, now has to stand beside a man whose government can’t indict a sandwich, whose FBI director auditions sound like a podcast, whose attorney general wants to police feelings, whose tariff czars are pleading apocalypse in court, and whose foreign policy is a tango metaphor interrupted by glide bombs over Odesa. Richard Murphy calls it political depravity; Zelenskyy calls it moral stupidity. I call it the week the ham sandwich became a constitutional folk hero.

There’s a reason the regime keeps trying to sue the press into silence and bludgeon dissent into “hate”: the juries keep puncturing the balloon. No-bills in a ham-sandwich world are the quietest, sharpest kind of revolt. The rest is up to us, to call the farce what it is, to refuse the velvet rope that turns authoritarianism into a gala, and to remember that history doesn’t care about motorcades or sword-arches or how many times a lawsuit says “world-renowned.” If your strongest citation is WrestleMania and your weakest link is a grand jury, the crown jewels can’t save you. The truth is down the hall and to the left.