A Boy Named Sue
How Trump Turned Personal Lawsuits Into a $56 Billion Political Weapon
In barely a year since he oozed back into office, Donald Trump has threatened, settled, or initiated personal lawsuits totaling more than $56 Billion – targeting news organizations, government agencies, private citizens, and even his own administration. What follows is a documented, up-to-date inventory of those actions. It records what’s happened. It does not attempt to explain what these lawsuits are for, or what they are likely designed to produce next.
That analysis will appear in the first Trumpland Briefing for subscribers.
Trump’s Sue-A-Palooza
• June: Trump threatened to sue The New York Times and CNN over “false,” “defamatory,” and “unpatriotic” reporting that the Iran missile strikes he ordered had not “completely and totally obliterated” their nuclear program, but simply set it back a few months, if they did not retract their stories (they did not). He further demanded that journalist Natasha Bertrand be fired and “thrown out like a dog.”
• July: Trump settled a lawsuit against CBS for $16 Million that he filed the previous year. In October 2024, Trump sued Paramount/CBS for $10 Billion, alleging “election interference” for airing a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris in which the broadcast version edited one of her answers about the Israel-Palestine conflict to fit in the time slot. (Harris’ full, unedited answer was published on the CBS website, plainly demonstrating they weren’t trying to hide her full answer from the public. Legal experts thought it would be an easy case for CBS to win, which made it all the more shocking when they decided to settle without a fight).
• July: Trump sued the Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones, News Corp, Rupert Murdoch, and several reporters for $10 Billion for “defamation” and “libel” for publishing the lewd birthday card he contributed to Epstein’s 2003 birthday book.
• August: Trump sued his own Justice Department and FBI for $100 Million for executing a search warrant at Mar A Lago to retrieve nearly two dozen boxes containing hundreds of stolen Classified documents the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) had been attempting to get back for 19 months. To this day, Trump has insisted it was an “illegal” raid, even falsely claiming Biden and the FBI had plans to assassinate him.
• September: Trump sued The New York Times and Penguin Random House publishing for $15 Billion for "defamatory reporting." (A judge initially dismissed the case, but Trump refiled it in October.) Among the “defamatory” claims Trump took issue with was the Times crediting creator and producer Mark Burnett (fresh off the success of Survivor) for the success of The Apprentice, rather than Trump.
• September: Trump threatened to sue ABC for “political interference,” “defamation,” and “Illegal Campaign Contributions” for bringing Jimmy Kimmel back. In a Truth* Social post, he referenced the $16 million settlement he received the prior December for a libel suit he filed against George Stephanopoulos.
• October: Trump demanded his own Department of Justice pay him $230 Million as a settlement for investigations he faced in his first term and during the Biden administration.
• December: Trump sued the BBC for $10 Billion over an edit to his Jan 6 speech in their Panorama documentary Trump: A Second Chance? The 33-page lawsuit accuses the BBC of "false, defamatory, deceptive, disparaging, inflammatory, and malicious depiction of President Trump," and accuses them of "a brazen attempt to interfere in and influence" the 2024 U.S. presidential election. (The BBC spliced together two different statements from different parts of the Jan 6 speech.) The BBC has vowed to fight the suit in court, contending that it couldn’t be considered U.S. election interference because it aired in the UK, not the U.S.
• January: Trump’s White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt threatened CBS to “sue your ass off” if they aired a Trump interview that was edited or shortened in any way.
• January: Trump sued his own IRS and Treasury Department for $10 Billion for the 2019 leak of his tax returns. According to the lawsuit, the leak—which showed Trump payed no income taxes in 10 of 15 years leading up to his first term—caused “reputational and financial harm, public embarrassment, unfairly tarnishing his reputations, portrayed him in a false light, and negatively affected President Trump’s public standing.”
• February 1: Trump threatened to sue author/journalist Michael Wolff and the Epstein estate for “conspiracy” to “damage him politically” over an account that his fallout with Epstein was due to a soured real-estate deal, not Epstein’s sexual activities. Following the release of 3 million Epstein files on Jan 30, Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One that he’d been “told by some very important people” that the new files “totally absolved him.”
• February 2: Trump announced on Truth* Social plans to sue Harvard University for $1 Billion in "damages" for "serious and heinous illegalities" without providing any explanation as to what they'd done wrong.
• February 2: Trump once again took to Truth* Social and threatened to sue Trevor Noah for "plenty of money" over an Epstein joke at the Grammy's.
NOAH’S ACTUAL JOKE: "That is a Grammy that every artist wants almost as much as Trump wants Greenland, which makes sense—because Epstein’s island is gone, he needs a new one to hang out with Bill Clinton.”
We’re only 25% of the way through Trump’s term, so you can bet the farm this list will continue to grow. Not because the underlying disputes are multiplying, but because the tactic is now established. The sheer scale of these threats and filings is the point: to raise the cost of scrutiny, to normalize retaliation, and to force institutions and individuals to decide whether resistance is worth the price. What matters most is not which of these cases succeed, settle, or fail — but what behavior they’re designed to shape next.
The first Trumpland Briefing will examine what these lawsuits have in common, why the outcomes matter less than the volume, and what to expect next.
Excellent documentation of the sue-as-intimidation playbook. The CBS settlement is what really exposes the strategy, they had a winnable case but caved anyway becuase the cost of fighting became the actual punishment. I've watched something similar with local defamation cases where even frivolous suits drain resources faster than truth can win in court.
I have to sort out my paid substacks before I can upgrade, but as someone who has spent most of my life in Trump's media market, not only did I have an immediate allergic reaction to him the first time I saw him on tv, before the Apprentice (which I never watched) days, but I can vouch for the fact that he is the king in one sense only, of the nuisance lawsuit. Back in the day, he was, as Spy Magazine once deemed him, "a short-fingered vulgarian", who lost almost all of them. This did not deter him, sadly.
Now he has taken that to new levels of absurdity, due to his appalling and undeserved acquisition of power, people take his ludicrous lawsuits seriously, and worse, cater to his infantile foot stamping and suing. As anyone familiar with anti-bullying literature used in schools knows, the worst thing one can do is try to placate a bully. Once one does, it legitimizes his preposterous terms, and he will certainly be back to take more of your lunch money. I know the man lives to punish anyone who doesn't take the knee. However, we have seen him back down when met with strong resistance, at least for a time, until his inner viper wakes up and he tries again.
I honestly don't understand why these powerful institutions and corporations don't band together and pledge to fight his destructive and let's face it, moronic shenanigans. There's safety in numbers, quislings, and what you have to lose is more precious than the tinpot, wannabe dictator's vengeance, democracy.