Papers they win all the time in these suits, too. And, more relevant here, when writing about litigious people (or potentially litigious people), like Trump, they tend to write their articles in such a way as to be lawsuit-proof.
Any litigation based on the Daily Beast article would fail. There is no cause of action for slander, or anything else, in that article.
Also, the threshold of proof to make slander accusations stick is higher with public figures than with John Q. Private Citizen.
Donald makes himself public like this... he should expect this sort of thing, and to show that it cannot bait him (”this is all unfounded allegation and I’m simply not talking about it any more”) is to reflect a greater strength.
And there would be a lot of classy ways to refute such trash. The “power” in the Beast article is not even in what it alleges Trump may have done, but in the false moral equivalencing behind it. Suppose he forced himself on his unwilling but legal wife... oh, we wish this is the worst that illegales did, “rape” wise!
Someone like Cruz could make moral mincemeat of the Beast. For Trump to rage, inadvertently reinforces the moral equivalencing.
There doesn’t have to be. They can put it in the courts for years and dry out the DB’s bank accounts anyway. $100,000 for Trump is nothing, but no journalist can withstand that in lawyer’s fees. Trump can win by losing.