Trump's $15 Billion Lawsuit Against The New York Times Is His Craziest One Yet
The complaint suggests the Times showed "actual malice" because its reporters hated him. That's not how that works.
President Donald Trump is no stranger to filing defamation lawsuits against media companies, with varying degrees of merit. This week, he added to that list, filing a lawsuit more ridiculous and meritless than any of the others so far.
"Today, I have the Great Honor of bringing a $15 Billion Dollar Defamation and Libel Lawsuit against The New York Times, one of the worst and most degenerate newspapers in the History of our Country," Trump wrote Tuesday on Truth Social. "The 'Times' has engaged in a decades long method of lying about your Favorite President (ME!), my family, business, the America First Movement, MAGA, and our Nation as a whole. I am PROUD to hold this once respected 'rag' responsible."
The complaint nominally lists claims about Trump, made during the 2024 campaign in Times articles and the book Lucky Loser, that have caused him "reputational and economic harm"—for example, that he inherited and squandered his father's fortune, and that he only rehabilitated his image as a successful businessman by hosting the reality show The Apprentice.
But rather than straightforwardly listing the facts of the case, the complaint spends dozens of pages histrionically detailing how great Trump is and how terrible The New York Times is. It reads less like a formal legal document than one of Trump's social media posts, calling the Times a "full-throated mouthpiece of the Democrat Party" engaging in "wrong and partisan criticism."
"This lawsuit has no merit," the Times said in a statement. "It lacks any legitimate legal claims and instead is an attempt to stifle and discourage independent reporting."
In its very first statements of fact, the lawsuit brags that Trump "won the 2024 Presidential Election over Vice President Kamala Harris in historic fashion, emerging victorious in both the Electoral College and the popular vote, and securing a resounding mandate from the American people," which it calls "the greatest personal and political achievement in American history." It even includes a screenshot of the election results. (During his first term, Trump often passed out copies of the 2016 election map to visitors.)
Much of the complaint reads this way, like a breathless hagiography any attorney should be embarrassed to file. In a lawsuit nominally making the case that the country's most prestigious newspaper intentionally defamed Trump and harmed his reputation, the complaint lists more than two dozen of his film and TV credits. This is presented as proof that he had "masterfully applied his eminence in real estate and business to worldwide publicity," which "bolster[ed] his sterling reputation…as evidenced by his appearances and speaking parts in numerous well-known movies, television shows, and beauty pageants."
To the allegation that The Apprentice saved him irrelevance, Trump says it was the other way around. The filing counters that while the series was "one of the top-rated shows of all time and a trailblazer in American television," its success was "thanks solely to President Trump's sui generis charisma and unique business acumen….'The Apprentice' represented the cultural magnitude of President Trump's singular brilliance, which captured the zeitgeist of our time."
Again, this is presented as evidence that Trump is owed billions of dollars in restitution for being defamed by a newspaper.
The lawsuit seeks "compensatory damages" of at least $15 billion—suggesting Trump suffered at least that amount in harm or loss—plus unspecified punitive damages. It's hard to imagine he suffered any harm from the book or articles: For one thing, most of the claims were well-trod territory, but also, he won the election.
Trump arrives at this number, deciding he has suffered $15 billion worth of harm, through some fanciful accounting. "The value of President Trump's one-of-a-kind, unprecedented personal brand alone is reasonably estimated to be worth at over $100,000,000,000," the lawsuit claims, incredibly. (In May 2025, Bloomberg estimated Trump's net worth at $5.4 billion.)
Of course, if the lawsuit survives a motion to dismiss, Trump is extremely unlikely to prevail on the merits. As a public figure, he faces a tougher hurdle to prove defamation. According to the U.S. Supreme Court's 1964 decision New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, defamation of a public figure requires proving "actual malice."
Trump's lawsuit tries to do this in a novel way. "Defendants each desire for President Trump [to] fail politically and financially," it claims. "Each feels actual malice towards President Trump in the colloquial sense….Put bluntly, Defendants baselessly hate President Trump in a deranged way."
Points for creativity, but that's not how any of this works. Sullivan defines actual malice as "knowledge that statements are false or in reckless disregard of the truth." Even if what the reporters wrote was not true and actually hurt his reputation, Trump must prove either that they knew the information was false when they printed it, or that they were so careless with the truth that they should have known better. It has nothing to do with whether the speaker hates the person they're talking about. The complaint even seems to understand this, claiming the defendants showed malice "in the colloquial sense"—i.e., not in the legal sense.
Since March 2024, Trump has sued ABC and CBS, extracting $15 million and $16 million settlements for similarly questionable allegations. More recently, he sued The Wall Street Journal for reporting on the existence of a birthday card he reportedly wrote in the early 2000s to Jeffrey Epstein, the financier later convicted of sex trafficking young girls. Trump called it a "fake story" and implied the note did not exist, though Democrats on the House Oversight Committee later released a copy purportedly obtained through a subpoena of Epstein's estate. That case is ongoing.
And yet this latest lawsuit is somehow Trump's craziest one yet. Over 85 pages, the complaint makes little effort to quantify any actual harm to Trump's reputation, instead simply claiming he is the greatest man to ever walk the Earth and that any information to the contrary is not just inaccurate but malicious.
"The complaint is frivolous on its face, seeking to transform protected First Amendment speech—including investigative reporting about Trump's business practices, family wealth, and celebrity status—into actionable defamation claims," Katie Fallow, deputy litigation director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, said in a statement. "The complaint is full of bluster but short on any allegations of specific false statements of fact that would meet the rigorous standards for defamation claims brought by public figures."
"Like Trump's numerous past (and ongoing) lawsuits, the complaint reads like a childish gripe about people being mean to him that arguably doesn't raise even barely plausible claims—let alone meet the exceedingly high bar the First Amendment erects to defamation claims from public figures like Trump," Ari Cohn, lead counsel for tech policy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), told Reason in a statement. "This lawsuit is yet another extortion racket, wrapped in a perverse, antidemocratic commodification of votes and political support as a form of damages. The courts will most likely see right through it, but as with all the president's legal endeavors, winning isn't the point—the process is the punishment."
Indeed, winning these cases seems less important than inflicting pain on media companies Trump doesn't like.
"This humiliating settlement starkly illustrates how the powers of the presidency can be abused to punish news outlets for constitutionally protected speech," Reason's Jacob Sullum wrote after the Paramount settlement. "It does not bode well for freedom of the press under a president who has no compunction about weaponizing the government against journalists who irk him."
And just weeks later, Trump filed his most meritless case yet.
