Donald Trump Embraces the Streisand Effect

[babylonsister]

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/01/trump-streisand-effect-wolff-bannon/549659/

Donald Trump Embraces the Streisand Effect

The president’s threats to sue Steve Bannon, Michael Wolff, and a publisher over a forthcoming book are more likely to bring the book publicity than deliver him a win in court.
Carlos Barria / Reuters

David A. Graham 12:18 PM ET Politics

snip//

If a lawsuit did go forward, however, Trump would open himself up to defense lawyers poring through all sorts of information he probably doesn’t want made public. Presidents are largely immune to litigation while in office, but if Trump initiated a suit, he’d open himself up to discovery.

“It would be an opposition researcher’s dream,” Abrams said. “The sort of discovery which would result from a challenge to this book, which deals with issues as broad as the president’s intelligence, would allow enormous discovery. His college grades! It’s very hard to minimize the potentially relevant areas that discovery could go into.”

Of course, the chances of Trump going forward with the actual lawsuit are somewhere between slim and none. On the one hand, Trump is more litigious than any president before him. Yet on issues of libel and defamation, Trump has repeatedly promised to pound nemeses with lawsuits and failed to follow through. In October 2016, he threatened to sue The New York Times over a story about allegations of sexual harassment against him; no suit has emerged. (The suit against Nunberg was a notable exception, but that case was quickly dismissed.)

Trump is unlikely to sue, and if he does sue, he is unlikely to win. But threatening the lawsuits and delivering bellicose statements like the one he did about Bannon on Wednesday carries a risk of its own—as Trump’s frequent antagonist Barbra Streisand could remind him. Fifteen years ago, Streisand sued a little-known website, seeking the removal of a picture of her Malibu home from an archive of California coastline photos. Streisand’s suit was dismissed, she had to pay the defendants’ legal fees, and—worst of all, from her perspective—the suit brought exponentially more attention to the website than it had before. The phenomenon of lawsuits or threats to sue that only call more attention to something the plaintiff had sought to suppress is popularly known as the Streisand Effect.

Perhaps Trump wishes to replace her name with his own, as is his wont. Such intense presidential agitation can only bring more attention to the book, though it’s already leading bestseller lists. “Is there a place on the best-seller list that's higher than #1?” Times media critic Jim Rutenberg quipped in response to the letter to Holt and Wolff.

Since the days when he was leaking gossip about himself to New York tabloids, Trump has taken the position that all publicity is good publicity, so it wouldn’t be a great surprise for him to espouse the same view now. But what works when one is trying to build up a name is less useful when one is already president of the United States and world famous, but needs to be able to govern. The threats against Bannon, Wolff, and Holt are not only unlikely to go anywhere, but they also offer unintentional validation of the misgivings about his judgment that aides voice in the book.

[lunatica]

1. And books tend to go down in history forever

Future history researchers will see this book as the first Presidential book about Trump. I don't know if it can be called a biography.