New York Times vs. Trump: Refiled Suit, Actual Malice, and Rhetoric

President Donald Trump’s lawsuit against the New York Times is an 85-page defamation complaint filed on September 15, 2025, in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida, seeking at least $15 billion in damages from the Times, four of its reporters, and book publisher Penguin Random House. A federal judge struck the original filing four days later as improperly drafted, Trump refiled a shorter version in October, and in December 2025 the Times asked the court to dismiss the case and transfer it to New York.¹

What Trump Is Suing Over

The complaint names the New York Times Company, reporters Susanne Craig, Russ Buettner, Peter Baker, and Michael S. Schmidt, and Penguin Random House. It alleges the defendants defamed Trump, sought to undermine his 2024 presidential candidacy, and disparaged his reputation as a businessman.¹

The central target is a book, not a news article. Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success, written by Craig and Buettner and published by Penguin Random House, is described in the complaint as “false, malicious, and defamatory.” The reporters at the Times have written for years about Trump’s finances and business record, and the book grew out of that reporting.¹

The damages figure — at least $15 billion — is unusually large for a defamation case. Legal experts told CNN the suit reads as “weaponized litigation” and a “manifesto against the press,” aimed at draining the paper’s resources and chilling coverage rather than winning a judgment.²

The Judge Struck the First Complaint

On September 19, 2025, four days after the case was filed, U.S. District Judge Steven D. Merryday struck the complaint. In his order, Merryday called it a “political document rather than a serious legal filing,” describing it as “unnecessarily discursive” and “laden with ‘florid and enervating’ prose.” He held that it violated Rule 8 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which requires a “short and plain statement” of a claim.³

Merryday gave Trump’s legal team 28 days to file an amended complaint of no more than forty pages. Trump refiled within that window, on October 16, 2025.³⁴

The Times’ Response and Motions

The Times has said the lawsuit “has no merit” and “lacks any legitimate legal claims,” calling it an attempt to “stifle and discourage independent reporting” and an act of “intimidation.”⁵

On December 15, 2025, the paper filed two motions. One asks the court to transfer the case from the Middle District of Florida to the Southern District of New York. The other asks the court to dismiss the suit outright, arguing that the complaint fails to plausibly allege that the Times or Penguin Random House acted with “actual malice.”⁵

Why “Actual Malice” Decides This Case

The reason the dismissal motion turns on actual malice is that Trump, as a public official, has to clear that bar to win any defamation claim. The standard comes from New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, a 1964 Supreme Court decision that arose from an Alabama official’s libel suit against the Times over a civil rights advertisement. Under Sullivan, a public official cannot prevail unless they prove the publisher knew the statement was false or acted with reckless disregard for whether it was true.

Trump has made overturning Sullivan a consistent talking point since his first presidential campaign, and legal observers view his current wave of lawsuits as practical tests of the standard’s limits.⁶ Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch have each written separately calling for the Court to reconsider the precedent. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has publicly called for it to be overturned, and the Federalist Society has hosted debates on the question. So far, the Supreme Court has declined to take up cases designed to challenge Sullivan, and two of the three justices Trump appointed during his first term have shown no interest in revisiting it.⁷

One recent case illustrates how difficult the actual-malice standard is to clear. Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin sued the Times over a 2017 editorial that incorrectly linked her political action committee to a mass shooting. After an initial loss in 2022, an appeals court ordered a retrial. In April 2025, a second federal jury ruled in the Times’ favor after just two hours of deliberation, finding Palin had not proven actual malice.⁸

Part of a Broader Wave of Media Suits

The Times case is not an isolated action. Since November 2024, Trump has filed defamation lawsuits against multiple major news organizations, including CBS News over a 60 Minutes segment, the Des Moines Register over an election poll, and the Wall Street Journal.⁶

The complaint against the Times itself invoked earlier settlements Trump secured from Disney, the parent company of ABC News, and Paramount, the parent of CBS News, which reportedly paid $16 million each to resolve similar claims.²

The Wall Street Journal case tracks a similar procedural arc. Trump initially filed a $10 billion defamation suit against the Journal, its parent Dow Jones, News Corp CEO Robert Thomson, Rupert Murdoch, and two reporters over a 2025 article linking him to a birthday card sent to Jeffrey Epstein. U.S. District Judge Darrin Gayles dismissed the original complaint in April 2026, ruling that Trump came “nowhere close” to asserting actual malice. Trump refiled on May 27, 2026, adding an allegation that he had spoken with Murdoch on July 15, 2025, about the story and interpreted Murdoch’s response as an assurance it would not be published.⁹¹⁰

Rhetoric and Other Pressure on the Times

Alongside the litigation, Trump has continued to attack the paper publicly. In a Truth Social post on April 23, 2026, he called it “The Failing New York Times” and argued that “some of the Media is doing so poorly with Subscribers and Viewers” because “they no longer have credibility.”¹¹ He labeled Times reporting on the Iran conflict “TREASONOUS” and said the article would be added to his pending lawsuit against the paper.¹² The rhetoric echoes his first-term posts describing the Times, along with NBC, ABC, CNN, and CBS, as “the enemy of the American people.”¹³

The lawsuit also sits within a wider set of restrictions the administration has imposed on the press. On October 31, 2025, the White House prohibited journalists from entering the “Upper Press” area of the West Wing without a prior appointment, ending a decades-long practice of allowing reporters to move freely between the briefing room and communications offices. Communications director Steven Cheung accused reporters of surreptitiously recording and eavesdropping on private meetings; the White House Correspondents’ Association said it “unequivocally opposes any effort to limit journalists” from areas “that have long been open for news gathering.”¹⁴

Other measures include the White House taking control of the presidential press pool from the correspondents’ association in February 2025, barring the Associated Press from White House events that month, pulling a Wall Street Journal reporter from the press pool in July 2025 over an Epstein article, and the Pentagon requiring credentialed reporters in September 2025 to pledge not to “gather or use any information that had not been formally authorized for release.”¹⁵¹⁶

Surveillance of Times journalists predates this term. In 2020, the Trump Justice Department secretly seized phone records for four Times reporters covering January 14 to April 30, 2017, as part of a leak investigation. The seizure was not disclosed until 2021. Dean Baquet, the Times’ executive editor at the time, said it “profoundly undermines press freedom.”¹⁷

Where the Case Stands

As of December 2025, the amended complaint is on file in the Middle District of Florida and the Times’ motions to dismiss and transfer are pending. The dismissal question turns on whether Trump has plausibly alleged actual malice against the Times, its four named reporters, and Penguin Random House — the same threshold that has proven decisive in the Palin case and in Judge Gayles’ initial dismissal of the Wall Street Journal suit. The transfer motion, if granted, would move the case to New York, where the Times is headquartered and where much of the reporting at issue was produced.⁵

1
The New York Times. Trump Sues New York Times for $15 Billion
2
CNN. Trump NYT Lawsuit Meritless, Experts Say
3
Democracy Docket. Judge Strikes Trump New York Times Defamation Lawsuit
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The New York Times. Trump Refiles Defamation Lawsuit Against New York Times
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The New York Times Company. The New York Times Responds to Lawsuit Filed by President Donald Trump
6
First Amendment Encyclopedia, MTSU. The Case That Saved the Press and Why Trump Wants It Gone
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The New York Times. Can the Media’s Right to Pursue the Powerful Survive Trump’s Second Term
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The New York Times. Sarah Palin New York Times Jury Deliberations
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Reuters. Trump Refiles $10 Billion Defamation Suit Against WSJ Over Report on Epstein Ties
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Politico. Trump Slams Wall Street Journal With Refiled Defamation Suit
11
American Presidency Project. Truth Social Posts, April 23, 2026
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The Hill. Trump Slams New York Times
13
BBC. Trump and the Media: Enemy of the People
14
The New York Times. Trump White House Press Access Restrictions
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U.S. Press Freedom Tracker. White House Restricts Reporter Access to Press Secretary Staff’s Offices
16
The New York Times. Pentagon Restrictions on Reporters
17
The New York Times. Trump Administration Phone Records Times Reporters