Just four days after Donald Trump filed a $15 billion lawsuit against the New York Times alleging defamation, a federal judge threw out the complaint as "decidedly improper and impermissible," reminding the president along the way that lawsuits are not to be used as a "megaphone for public relations."

The brief order from Senior U.S. District Judge Steven Merryday, a George H.W. Bush appointee, struck the complaint from the docket on Friday, affording Trump and his attorney Alejandro Brito 28 days to file an amended version.

In short, the judge characterized the complaint as a rambling, self-laudatory mess that is "decidedly improper and impermissible" even "under the most generous and lenient application" of Rule 8(a) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which requires that a compla

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