Time For The DNC To Sue CBS News For $20 Billion

Knives are out for Ken Martin as Democratic National Committee chair, and they probably should be. Fundraising has been anemic, spending has been questionable, and he broke a clear promise to release the committee’s post-2024 autopsy.

So Martin may not be long for the job. He may not even want the job anymore. But if he’s hanging on for dear life, I have an idea, offered for free, that he can put to the test relatively cheaply: He can sue CBS News for $20 billion (but be willing to settle for $16 million and not a penny less).

The story begins on Sunday, when Donald Trump participated in a 60 Minutes interview with Nora O’Donnell. First, observers noticed the segment seemed spliced together. Then CBS posted the full transcript of the interview, and critics confirmed that 60 Minutes producers edited a bunch of Trump’s emotionally dysregulated ranting out of the final cut.

“No, I’m not a king,” our president said. “I-- I get-- I-- I don’t laugh. I don’t-- I-- I see these No Kings, which are funded just like the Southern Law was-- funded-- you saw all that? Southern Law [sic] is financing the KKK and lots of other radical, terrible groups. And then they go out and they say, ‘Oh, we’ve gotta stop the KKK.’ And yet they give, you know, hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars. It’s a total scam run by the Democrats. It shows you that-- like Charlottesville. Charlottesville was all funded by the Southern Law [sic]. That was a Southern Law [sic] deal too. And it was done to make me look bad, and it turned out to be a total fake. It basically was-- a rigged election.”

One could reasonably argue it’s journalistic malpractice to edit stuff like this out of an interview with the sitting president. Sanewashing is the newish term of art. But the general practice—that television news magazines edit down interviews to sharpen focus on particular topics—is uncontroversial.

Except… when 60 Minutes applied that practice to its pre-election interview with Kamala Harris, Trump sued for $10 billion, then $20 billion, claiming “election interference.” He alleged, falsely, that CBS had concealed damaging portions of the interview to help Harris and thus hurt Trump and the GOP. The suit was frivolous, a loser, a p.r. stunt. But then he won the election, and CBS settled. For $16 million.

The shoe’s on the other foot in an obvious way now, but it’s of little interest to anyone in power, except as a gotcha. Democrats are weak, Trump is aggressive. They play by the old rules, he plays by his. Nothing will come of this, so it’s not worth making a fuss. Outsiders like me and others can wail about the hypocrisy—of Trump, of CBS, of its new editor Bari Weiss. Her website, The Free Press, spent months pretending to believe 60 Minutes was in the wrong for editing down its Harris interview—until Trump effectively installed her to turn CBS into a pro-regime outlet, and her misgivings vanished.

We can whine, whine, whine about their shamelessness all day. And we’re obviously right to be outraged. But this kind of limp appeal to hypocrisy is a symptom of partisan asymmetry. It’s pervasive only because everyone takes for granted (with good reason) that Democrats won’t stoop to the GOP’s level. But what if they did? What if Ken Martin were to claim CBS News interfered in the 2026 election by editing down Trump’s interview, no less than they interfered in the 2024 election by editing down Harris’s? What if he filed an angry lawsuit, if only to hold up a mirror to the perversity of the status quo? What if he insisted that nominally neutral institutions treat the parties equally? Why not let CBS decide whether it wants to settle the score, or whether it wants to be known as the network that gives money to Republicans only?

I don’t know how CBS would respond, but I suspect some rank-and-file Democratic voters, people who’ve stopped donating to the DNC, would develop strange new respect for Martin. Enough to save his job and fix the party’s fundraising problems? Again, hard to say. Probably not! But it couldn’t possibly make things worse.

Martin is in many ways a victim of the same asymmetries that leave the rest of us whining about hypocrisy while Republicans bend powerful institutions to their will. It may be that he’s uniquely unsuited to this job in this moment (I don’t know nearly enough to say) but he’s certainly in the wrong place at the wrong time. He didn’t create the crisis of confidence in the Democratic Party as an institution—people like Chuck Schumer and other long-time machine hands did that, leaving Martin holding the bag.

But of course, as DNC chair, Martin can’t blame his own woes on the weakness of the party’s congressional leadership and its reluctance to fight.

What he can do is think creatively, then lead by example. He, or whoever replaces him at DNC, could demonstrate to disaffected Democratic base voters that the party is remaking itself as one that won’t take shit lying down. That, whenever possible, it will impose penalties on Republicans and their enablers for dealing in bad faith.

It’s frustrating, because I’m basically restating what I wrote almost six years ago, just a few weeks before the 2020 election. Joe Biden was poised for victory, and it was clear to me that allowing bygones to be bygones wouldn’t just result in miscarriages of justice vis-a-vis specific crimes. It would teach Republicans that there’s no downside to operating in bad faith as a default mode. Reading back on it, as I do from time to time, is a bit painful.