Donald Trump could sue several critics out of existence

On 15 September, president Donald Trump announced a lawsuit which has the potential to drive several of his critics into bankruptcy:

NEWS: Trump has filed a $15 billion lawsuit against the New York Times, a few of their writers, and Penguin Random House, seemingly because they published things about him he didn’t like.

— MeidasTouch (@meidastouch.com) 2025-09-16T04:13:13.551Z

The New York Times has a “market cap of $9.53 Billion USD” as of September 2025.

“Historic fashion”

Trump’s latest lawsuit states:

On November 5, 2024, President 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. President Trump trounced Harris with 312 electoral votes and a sweep of all seven “battleground” states. This victory was remarkable for many historic reasons, including because President Trump had to overcome persistent election interference from the legacy media, led most notoriously by the New York Times.

Lower down, it states the following:

It came as no surprise when, shortly before the Election, the newspaper published, on the front page, highlighted in a location never seen before, its deranged endorsement of Kamala Harris with the hyperbolic opening line “[i]t is hard to imagine a candidate more unworthy to serve as president of the United States than Donald Trump.” . … The Board asserted hypocritically and without evidence that President Trump would “defy the norms and dismantle the institutions that have made our country strong.”

After entering government, Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) made wide-reaching cuts to the federal government, entirely dismantling institutions such as the the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Trump’s ‘Big, Beautiful Bill’, meanwhile, has made “deep cuts to Medicaid and Medicare” among other areas. It’s expected these cuts will lead to the closure of many rural hospitals (300 were already at “immediate risk” of closure in July this year).

This latest action follows lawsuits against ABC News and CBS. In those cases, Trump was able to negotiate out-of-court settlements worth millions.

Defamation

The suit alleges that writers knowingly generated what Trump might refer to as ‘fake news’:

The subject matter of this action—a malicious, defamatory, and disparaging book written by two of its reporters and three false, malicious, defamatory, and disparaging articles, all carefully crafted by Defendants, with actual malice, calculated to inflict maximum damage upon President Trump, and all published during the height of a Presidential Election that became the most consequential in American history—represent a new journalistic low for the hopelessly compromised and tarnished “Gray Lady.”

Trump is making his second state visit to the UK this week. Channel 4 have announced plans to mark the occasion as follows:

In a world first we will broadcast over 100 untruths back to back, with each extensively fact checked.
Donald Trump v The Truth. Wednesday 10pm. pic.twitter.com/3sSbZ1T2qm

— Channel 4 (@Channel4) September 15, 2025