Trump’s Frivolous Times Lawsuit Wasn’t Supposed to Succeed
Nobody who has come within shouting distance of law school was surprised when Florida-based U.S. District Court judge Steven Merryday dismissed
Donald Trump’s $15 billion defamation suit against the New York Times. It was widely panned as meritless the moment he filed it. But the contempt of the judge for Trump’s waste of everyone’s time was remarkable, notes CBS News:
In the ruling, U.S. District Court Judge Steven Merryday said the original 85-page complaint was “decidedly improper and impermissible” and went well beyond Rule 8 of federal rules of civil procedure, which requires that each allegation be “simple, concise and direct.” …
“Even under the most generous and lenient applications of Rule 8, the complaint is decidedly improper and impermissible,” Merryday wrote. “… The reader must endure an allegation of ‘the desperate need to defame with a partisan spear rather than report with an authentic looking glass’ and an allegation that ‘the false narrative about The Apprentice was just the tip of defendants’ melting iceberg of falsehoods.’”
NBC News has another hostile comment from the ruling:
“As every lawyer knows (or is presumed to know), a complaint is not a public forum for vituperation and invective — not a protected platform to rage against an adversary,” wrote Merryday.
Merryday is decidedly not one of those “radical left judges” the White House loves to bash. He was appointed to the federal bench by George H.W. Bush and is best known for striking down the CDC’s ban on cruise-ship operations during the COVID-19 pandemic. But he knows a frivolous lawsuit when he sees one. And he basically ordered Trump’s lawyers to cut the crap if they wanted any hearing on a defamation suit against the Times.
The timing of this angry rejection of the president’s assault on the Times’ First Amendment rights to cover his administration is interesting, to put it mildly. Trump, his vice-president, his attorney general, and many of his supporters are engaged in a systemic effort to restrict or inhibit free speech if the content of that speech displeases them or offers opportunities to smear or demonize their opponents. But the suit itself, idiotic as it was, also illustrates an important point about how Trump goes about intimidating his foes and getting his way. He understands that getting his way indirectly through public pressure and private threats is legally safer and more effective than the direct use of government power to silence pesky critics and persistent reporters. The operation to shut down Jimmy Kimmel for his comments about politicization of the Charlie Kirk assassination was textbook Trump. His FCC chairman didn’t try to directly sanction Kimmel or ABC; he complained about Kimmel on a right-wing podcast and then after an intense MAGA social-media campaign network affiliates vowed to take his show off the air, leading ABC to suspend it indefinitely. It’s a two-cushion shot providing the administration with plausible deniability.
Similarly Trump’s lawsuit against the Times was never intended to succeed in court; it didn’t even make a token effort to demonstrate the newspaper told conscious untruths with “actual malice,” the First Amendment standard for defamation suits by public figures. But by putting the broad accusation and a vast claim of damages out there, Team Trump hoped to rouse supporters to take their own actions against the Times, to put the Times on notice that worse things are to come, and perhaps to pave the way for the sort of shakedowns the president has deftly executed against CBS and ABC.
Beyond that, the Times lawsuit was a reminder that the president has for many years earned a reputation as the king of frivolous lawsuits. Back in 2016 when he was first running for president, USA Today did an inventory of lawsuits filed by Trump and his businesses and identified 4,095 of them. In a 2020 book on Trump’s incredibly long and active history of litigation, former prosecutor James D. Zirin captures his M.O. succinctly:
Trump learned how to use the law from his mentor, notorious lawyer Roy Cohn. Trump took Cohn’s scorched-earth strategy to heart.
“Trump saw litigation as being only about winning,” Zirin writes. “He sued at the drop of a hat. He sued for sport; he sued to achieve control; and he sued to make a point. He sued as a means of destroying or silencing those who crossed him. He became a plaintiff in chief.”
It was a source of bitter amusement in the legal community when Trump framed his aggressive 2025 shakedown of white-shoe law firms for free legal work as an attack on “frivolous lawsuits.” It was an incredible example of a pot calling the kettle black.
So the president won’t be the least bit deterred or dismayed by the dismissal of his giant suit against the Times or by the mockery it invited. This is who he is and what he does.