by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, January 15, 2018

Any speech from the top can be difficult to synthesize: President Trump recently said he wants to take a deep look at libel laws.

“You can’t say things that are false -- knowingly false -- and be able to smile as money pours into your bank account,” Trump said Wednesday, in reference to changing libel laws. Agreed. Let’s look at those bank accounts, and we'll start at the top.

A few days later, in a meeting with some U.S. Senators, he then uttered some abhorrent remarks about Haiti and some African countries he didn't like. This was confirmed by Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), who was at the meeting. Reports say he called some nations “shithole countries.”

The truth is that there is no way Donald Trump can change the libel laws -- even if he got Congress on his side, according to experts. Libel laws are a state concern. Those laws govern the crime of publishing deliberately false statements about someone with the intent of damaging that person.

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Richard Roth, litigator and founder of the Roth Law Firm, told CNBC.com: "Libel and slander are state court causes of action, not federal laws. So there actually is no federal statute that Trump could try to get Congress to rewrite."

People who voted for Trump love his so-called “honest” talk. But who measures the veracity of this honesty? Should Twitter do this?

According to The Washington Post, Trump has now made 2,001 false or misleading claims in his first 355 days in office.

Trump has been involved in speech-related legal matters. We don’t know how many. Overall, he has been party to a whopping 4,000 lawsuits over the last 30 years by some estimates. Recently, he threatened legal action against the Michael Wolff book Fire and Fury for what was written about the Trump Administration. It offers a frightening portrait of Trump and his fitness for office.



At the same time, on TV recently, there has been an ad campaign urging U.S. citizens to offer him gratitude. One spot asks voters to call and leave a message “thanking” President Trump for all that he has done so far.

The “Thank you, President Trump” commercial -- paid for by the super PAC called America First Policies -- has aired 29 times on national TV networks to date, with a estimated overall spend of $294,574, according to iSpot.tv.

Honest advertising, honest tweets and honest presidential-distributed news. What can I say? Thank you.