Former President Donald Trump has now been dealt a federal lawsuit from a civil rights organization called the Chinese Americans Civil Rights Coalition over his obsessive insistence on referring to COVID-19 as the “China Virus.” Referring to the pandemic-causing pathogen as the “China Virus” is, of course, crude and inaccurate, falsely singling out people of Chinese origin as somehow connected to the disease that has swept the world.
The group which has now sued Trump over his usage of the term says in their case that the former president’s “extreme and outrageous conduct was carried out throughout the pandemic with reckless disregard of whether such conduct would cause Chinese Americans to suffer emotional distress.” There’s another issue too — incidents of physical violence against the Asian American and Pacific Islander community have grown recently, right as Trump and his fellow ignorant racists have targeted the group.
Jason Miller, a top adviser to Trump, whined that the new lawsuit against the former president is “insane and idiotic.” The civil rights group — which is seeking nearly $23 million in damages that it says it would use to create a museum dedicated to the Asian American and Pacific Islander community — is undeterred.
As the lawsuit put it:
‘The truth matters, words have consequences… especially from those in powerful and influential positions. [Trump] intentionally repeated those defamatory words to serve his own personal and political interest with astonishing level of actual malice and negligence, hence severely injuring the Chinese/Asian Americans communities in the process.’
This case is far from the only legal trouble that Trump is facing. He has also been sued over his incitement of the January riot at the Capitol, with plaintiffs in those cases claiming that the former president violated what’s known as the Ku Klux Klan Act, which prohibits political intimidation. The law specifically allows for lawsuits from victims of political intimidation against those who perpetrated it. The riot at the Capitol was meant, in short, to violently suppress the voices of the tens of millions of Americans who voted against Trump. The mob that gathered there that day was attempting to forcibly stop the formal Congressional certification of Biden’s election victory.
