President Trump has buried media outlets in an unprecedented avalanche of lawsuits alleging they defamed him and sullied his reputation, a move legal scholars say could strike the largest blow against media bias ever seen.
Since 2024, Mr. Trump has filed lawsuits against eight media companies, seeking an astounding $65 billion in damages. Separately, he is suing the IRS for leaking his tax returns to The New York Times. Of the nine lawsuits, two companies have settled with the president for tens of millions of dollars, while the other seven remain pending.
More lawsuits are coming.
Mr. Trump recently said he will sue comedian Trevor Noah for a joke he told during the Grammy Awards ceremony about the president’s connection to disgraced sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The president also said he plans to sue journalist Michael Wolff, alleging that emails show Mr. Wolff conspired with the now-deceased sex offender to damage him politically.
Mr. Trump did not file any lawsuits alleging media bias during his first term. While out of office, he filed four lawsuits: two against The Times and one each against CNN and The Washington Post. All were dismissed.
Historian Craig Shirley said no other president has been as litigious as Mr. Trump. In fact, he couldn’t recall a previous president ever personally filing lawsuits over perceived slights.
He said he understands why Mr. Trump took this litigious course.
“This is unprecedented because the attacks on Trump are unprecedented,” Mr. Shirley said. “Awful things have been said about presidents for years, but we’ve never seen a president attacked by the media to this level with this degree of irresponsibility.”
Legal experts say Mr. Trump’s lawsuits have the potential to put media outlets on a major course correction to improve accuracy.
“These are not Hail Marys,” said James Trusty, a former assistant U.S. attorney in Maryland. “The litigation could change the trajectory of media tribalism and media bias because they show that the media is intentionally slanting the message dramatically.”
Defamation cases are notoriously difficult for public figures to win because they must establish four key elements, including concrete damage to their reputation and that a false statement was made with malice.
Mr. Trusty said the courts have set an “impossible standard” for public figures to win in defamation and libel cases, but the evidence gathered in Mr. Trump’s lawsuits could make it easier to win future cases.
“I think what President Trump is doing is kind of chipping away at the notion of how severe the evidence has to show the malice to be,” he said. “So I think that in a lot of these cases, the risk to the media outlets is not just for Trump to meet the standard and win at trial, but that the discovery process would be really embarrassing.”
Press freedom groups condemned the lawsuits as a threat to news outlets’ First Amendment rights to report information critical of the president without retaliation. They say lawsuits are part of a broader assault on the media by Mr. Trump, which includes denying access to certain outlets and using regulatory agencies to penalize news companies.
Seth Stern, director of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, accused Mr. Trump of filing “nonsense lawsuits” to intimidate the press. He criticized Mr. Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the British Broadcasting Corp. over allegations that a news report used deceptively edited remarks he made in the run-up to the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.
“Perhaps the edit in question wasn’t the BBC’s best work. The BBC has acknowledged that. But U.S. defamation law is compensatory, not punitive. You don’t get to call out any alleged journalistic blunder and demand $10 billion,” Mr. Stern said in a statement.
He said Mr. Trump cannot argue that his reputation had been damaged by the outlet’s coverage because he was overwhelmingly reelected in 2024.
“It’s preposterous for Trump to claim those damages when he won the 2024 election and hasn’t lost a penny because of the BBC’s editing,” said Mr. Stern, calling such legal arguments “incoherent.”
On Thursday, a federal judge in Florida rejected the BBC’s bid to delay discovery in the case and set a two-week trial date for February 2027.
Media outlets have shown little evidence of making widespread changes since Mr. Trump launched his barrage of lawsuits. Even the two outlets that settled with him, CBS News and ABC News, publicly announced only minor or cosmetic changes.
Mr. Trump’s lawsuit against CBS alleged the network’s flagship news program, “60 Minutes,” deceitfully edited an interview with Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris to “tip the scales” of the 2024 election in her favor. The TV show aired one version of Ms. Harris’ answer to a question about the Gaza Strip, but a wordier, more meandering version of her answer aired on the CBS Sunday morning show “Face the Nation.” Mr. Trump’s attorneys claimed the more cogent version was edited to make Ms. Harris sound better and improve her chances of winning.
In July, Paramount Global, the parent company of CBS, agreed to pay $16 million to settle the lawsuit, with the funds covering legal fees and a donation to a future presidential library.
It was only after a second incident, involving Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, that CBS made any known changes.
Ms. Noem complained that CBS News cut 25 seconds from her comments about Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an illegal immigrant living in Maryland who was deported to El Salvador in March.
After the uproar over the edits to Mr. Noem’s remarks, CBS News announced it would air interviews only if they were conducted live or prerecorded with no cuts or edits. The network attributed the change to “audience feedback.”
ABC News agreed in December 2024 to pay $15 million toward Mr. Trump’s presidential library to settle a defamation claim after anchor George Stephanopoulos inaccurately characterized the president’s liability in the E. Jean Carroll sexual assault case.
In a March 2024 broadcast, Mr. Stephanopoulos said a jury found Mr. Trump “liable for rape.” The jury found Mr. Trump liable for sexually abusing and defaming Ms. Carroll, but not for rape, as Ms. Carroll alleged.
As part of the settlement, ABC News posted an editor’s note to the story on its website expressing regret over Mr. Stephanopoulos’ statements.
Defamation cases are notoriously difficult for public figures to win. The public figure must establish not only that a statement was false but also that it caused damage to their reputation and was made with actual malice.
Mr. Shirley said even the small steps by media outlets represent a big victory for Mr. Trump and the presidency.
“For the last 50 years, power has been moving away from the presidency and towards the national media, and with more power comes more irresponsibility; the more lawsuits that come because of that irresponsibility, the more it will move that power back,” he said.
In addition to the legal action against ABC, CBS and BBC, Mr. Trump has five lawsuits pending:
• A lawsuit against the Pulitzer Prize board alleges defamation because it refused to revoke its 2018 national reporting awards to The Times and The Post for their coverage of the now-debunked Trump-Russia collusion conspiracy.
• Mr. Trump sued the Des Moines Register and Iowa pollster Ann Selzer in December 2024 for publishing a poll three days before the 2024 election showing Mr. Trump trailing Ms. Harris in the state. The president won the state by 13 percentage points. His lawsuit alleges that the defendants breached consumer protection laws by committing “election interference” and created a deceptive narrative that Ms. Harris would win the state.
• Mr. Trump filed a defamation lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal, alleging that the newspaper misleadingly published a lewd drawing he purportedly signed and gave to Epstein for his 50th birthday in 2003. The president has insisted that the letter is a fake and that he doesn’t do drawings of women.
• In September, Mr. Trump sued The Times, four of its reporters and book publisher Penguin Random House for $15 billion for a 2024 book and several articles alleging that Mr. Trump squandered his father’s money and merely created the illusion of success.
• Jeff Mordock can be reached at jmordock@washingtontimes.com.
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