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Ah, sweet justice. Donald Trump has just won a massive victory against the far-left propaganda factory that masquerades as the news media, and patriots all across the land can hope, for the sake of our freedom and our future, that this is just the first victory of many. Will this herald an end to the left’s relentless efforts to mischaracterize, misrepresent, and misreport the words and deeds of patriots, so as to get as many people as possible to turn against them? That’s unlikely in the extreme. But it sure helps.

Technically it’s a settlement, but it’s very clear which side came out on top. Fox News Digital, which broke this story first, reported Saturday that “ABC News and their top anchor George Stephanopoulos have reached a settlement with Donald Trump in his defamation suit, which will result in the news network paying the president-elect $15 million.” This settlement precludes Trump’s suit from going to trial, which shows that ABC’s top dogs understood how weak their case really was: they’re happy to fork over $15 million to make this thing go away rather than have a trial reveal just how far from actual journalism they have allowed themselves to stray.

And so now “Stephanopoulos and ABC News will issue statements of ‘regret’ as an editor’s note at the bottom of a March 10, 2024, online article, about comments made earlier this year that prompted Trump to file a defamation lawsuit.” The statement says: “ABC News and George Stephanopoulos regret statements regarding President Donald J. Trump made during an interview by George Stephanopoulos with Rep. Nancy Mace on ABC’s This Week on March 10, 2024.”

This is outrageously mild in comparison to how Stephanopoulos defamed Trump, but the $15 million takes a bit of the sting out of that. Trump, according to Fox, “filed a defamation suit against Stephanopoulos after he asserted that Trump was found ‘liable for rape’ in a civil case during a contentious interview with Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., last March.”

The far-left former Clinton apparatchik Stephanopoulos was played “a clip of Mace discussing being a victim of rape,” and then asked her, “How do you square your endorsement of Donald Trump with the testimony we just saw?” The rabidly partisan and viciously biased pseudo-journalist continued: “You’ve endorsed Donald Trump for president. Judges and two separate juries have found him liable for rape and for defaming the victim of that rape.”

Stephanopoulos was, of course, referring to fantasist E. Jean Carroll’s claim that Trump raped her many years ago in a Bergdorf Goodman’s dressing room. Back in September, Trump’s attorney Will Scharf dissected Carroll’s claim, making it clear yet again that no sentient human being should have taken her story seriously. Scharf pointed out the obvious fact that Carroll’s story “at its heart is an utterly implausible, he said she said story.”

Serious allegations of this kind are supposed to be established on the basis of evidence and witnesses, but Scharf noted that in this case, there was “no corroboration for anything” that Carroll claimed about what went on between her and Trump. Carroll’s attorneys never produced any “corroborating witnesses” or “confirmatory DNA.” She filed no police report at the time of the supposed rape, and “was unable to identify when this incident occurred until quite recently. No surveillance evidence or witnesses have ever been found or come forward confirming any asked of E Jean Carroll’s story.”

Nevertheless, Stephanopoulos repeated his claim that Trump was found “liable for rape” ten times during his interview with Mace. The jury in the Carroll case actually held Trump liable for “sexual abuse.” Fox explains that “sexual abuse” has a distinct definition under New York law, and is not the same thing as rape. Despite that fact, Stephanopoulos was initially “defiant in the face of Trump’s lawsuit, telling CBS late-night host Stephen Colbert that he wouldn’t be ‘cowed out of doing my job because of a threat.’” Stephanopoulos told Colbert: “Trump sued me because I used the word ‘rape,’ even though a judge said that’s in fact what did happen. We filed a motion to dismiss.”

The judge didn’t actually say that. Judge Lewis Kaplan wrote that Carroll did not prove that Trump had raped her “within the meaning of the New York Penal Law,” but that didn’t mean “that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.’” This establishes that Kaplan hates Trump as much as Stephanopoulos does, but it doesn’t actually establish that he was found “liable for rape.” In fact, Kaplan stated just the opposite, albeit with regret.

One particularly delicious aspect of the settlement is that ABC News has now become a major underwriter of the future Trump Presidential Library. The settlement stipulates that ABC News will give the $15 million as a “charitable contribution” to a “Presidential foundation and museum to be established by or for Plaintiff, as Presidents of the United States of America have established in the past.” The far-left hate network will also chip in a million bucks for Trump’s attorney fees.