What did Donald Trump do today?

He suffered "mental anguish," at least according to his lawyers.

Trump refused to sit for an interview with the CBS news program 60 Minutes during the campaign season last fall. His opponent, Vice-President Kamala Harris, did. During the Harris interview, Bill Whitaker asked Harris about how the United States could keep Israel's war on Gaza from getting further out of control. Harris's answer was lengthy, and was edited for time in the version that broadcast. A different, longer excerpt was shown as a preview on the CBS show Face the Nation.

As CBS pointed out at the time, interviews like this are almost always edited, and their treatment of Harris's answer did not change its meaning or conceal anything she had said. In fact, the interview won an Emmy for Best Edited Interview—a longstanding category in the TV industry awards—earlier this month. Trump himself has sat for edited interviews since.

Trump then sued the parent company of CBS for twenty billion dollars.

Today's filing revealed more about why Trump believes he is entitled to the median annual income of 248,000 American households (or about 620,000 people—roughly the entire gross pay of every single person in Memphis, TN) over the editing of an interview he didn't even take part in. 

In short, Trump claims that he suffered "mental anguish."

Trump also claims that other "consumers" also suffered similar "mental anguish"—but only he would get paid if he prevailed in the suit.

Trump's emotional state has been much in the news lately, as it was during his first term. Earlier this week, the Putin regime mocked Trump's frustration at his inability to force a ceasefire in the Russia-Ukraine war by saying that he was having an "emotional overload." Yesterday, Trump became visibly furious when a reporter asked him about the Wall Street slang term "TACO trade." That is an acronym for "Trump Always Chickens Out," meaning investments made on the safe assumption that Trump will never actually impose meaningful tariffs and will always back down in short order—which is exactly what has happened over and over again since he tried to relaunch his trade war.

Trump did not comment on his ongoing mental anguish today, or whether he has needed the services of psychological or spiritual counselors to help him work through it—which is the sort of evidence that courts usually look for in emotional distress claims. But he did bang out a 505-word super-tweet to his boutique microblogging site in which he lashed out at an ultra-conservative legal activist who he now believes took advantage of his naïveté when he was a young and innocent first-term president of 70.
 

Why does this matter?

• If Trump is telling the truth about his "anguish" over something he saw on TV, he is far too emotionally fragile to serve as president—or even control his own affairs without the help of a legal guardian.

• If he's lying, then it's merely pathetic.