‘Loser’ Donald Trump mocked for suing niece over ‘insidious plot’ to release his tax returns

Former President Donald Trump has been mocked by liberal pundits and his own niece, after he sued the latter for her “insidious plot” to obtain and release his tax returns.

Trump sued his niece, Mary Trump, on Tuesday, with the ex-president’s lawsuit alleging that Mary, together with The New York Times and its reporters, “engaged in an insidious plot to obtain confidential and highly-sensitive records which they exploited for their own benefit and utilized as a means of falsely legitimizing their publicized works.”

The tax returns, published by the Times just over a month before last year’s election, revealed that Trump paid next to no income tax for a decade. However, Trump availed himself of carried-over tax credits to get away with such a low bill, and he insisted that he paid “a lot” of income tax. Trump accused Mary at the time of leaking his tax records to drum up publicity for a tell-all book about the family’s real estate empire. She responded by suing him for allegedly swindling her out of tens of millions of dollars worth of inheritance cash.

Trump’s lawsuit was mocked by liberals. MSNBC host Rachel Maddow jeered at a grammar mistake on its first page, in which the former president’s lawyers argue that Mary’s actions “cannot be understated.”

“I think he is a f**king loser, and he is going to throw anything against the wall he can,” Mary Trump herself said of the lawsuit. “It’s desperation. The walls are closing in and he is throwing anything against the wall that will stick. As is always the case with Donald, he’ll try and change the subject.”

The lawsuit alleges that Trump’s niece and the Times’ reporters acted out of “actual malice” toward Trump, and states that the reporters “relentlessly” hounded Mary for the tax documents and “convinced her to smuggle the records out of her attorney’s office.” 

This much is backed up by Mary herself, who told Daily Beast editor Molly Jong-Fast last year that Times reporter Susanne Craig “effectively and tenaciously” talked her into handing over the records. “I knocked on Mary Trump’s door. She opened it. I think they call that journalism,” Craig responded on Tuesday.

Aside from the aforementioned “malice,” Trump’s suit claims that the Times’ staff released the records for “monetary gain, fame, acclaim, [and] notoriety.” Trump is seeking damages of $100 million.

Whether the suit will eventually get its day in court remains to be seen, as doing so would likely require Trump to turn over his full tax returns and result in even more media attention on his finances. And while news reports suggest that Trump is looking to get back into the national spotlight after his social media ban and ahead of a potential 2024 run, a bitter courtroom battle is probably not the kind of attention the former president has in mind.

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