If Nick Sandmann hasn’t already been invited to the White House, it’s looking like only a matter of time: On Wednesday morning, President Donald Trump cheered the Covington Catholic High School teenager after he and his parents filed a lawsuit against the Washington Post.
Trump, no stranger to threats of seeing people in court, tweeted a portion of Sandmann’s lawsuit alleging that the Post “ignored basic journalistic standards” to push an anti-Trump agenda.
“Go get them Nick. Fake News!” Trump also said.
Perhaps—but not likely—coincidentally, this is the same exact excerpt of the Sandmann lawsuit that Fox & Friends quoted on their show this morning.
The Sandmanns’ suit, filed by some very loud Twitter accounts attempting to garner sympathy for Sandmann, alleges the Post “wrongfully targeted and bullied” the teenager when they reported on the video recording of him and his peers taunting Native American elder Nathan Phillips last month. In the law firm’s statement on the suit, they accuse the paper of targeting Sandmann “because he was the white, Catholic student wearing a red ‘Make America Great Again’ souvenir cap” at an anti-abortion rally. They’re suing for $250 million.
While this first suit was a long time coming, it may not be the last. Attorneys Lin Wood and Todd V. McMurtry have spent the last few weeks tweeting threats of legal action against people and publications for their commentary or news coverage of Sandmann and Phillips, among them Bill Maher, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, CNN, the Associated Press, and, of course, the Post and owner Jeff Bezos.
On Tuesday, Post spokeswoman Kristine Coratti Kelly told Reuters the paper is “reviewing a copy of the lawsuit, and we plan to mount a vigorous defense.”