From Columbia University to Paramount, Trump keeps getting his way as America’s 1st 'suer in chief'
Donald Trump is no stranger to lawsuits. In fact, he was involved in more than 4,000 of them before winning the White House in 2016.
Since then, Trump has made headlines mostly as a defendant — that is, the individual getting sued (for sexual abuse and defamation; for business fraud; for hush-money payments; for trying to end birthright citizenship; and so on).
But now, six months into his second presidential term, Trump is positioning himself as something new: America’s first “suer in chief.”
And the strategy seems to be working.
Late Wednesday, the Trump administration and Columbia University announced that they had settled a months-long dispute that started when the White House accused the Ivy League school of failing to protect Jewish students from discrimination during recent Gaza War protests — then froze the majority of its $1.3 billion a year in federal research grants and funding.
To end the ordeal, Columbia agreed to pay the U.S. treasury more than $200 million over the next three years while scrutinizing international students more closely and releasing data to show that admissions and hiring are based on “merit” rather than “diversity.” (An independent monitor will oversee the deal and report to the government every six months.) In return, the administration agreed to restore Columbia’s federal cash flow.
Trump’s spat with Columbia didn’t technically take the form of a lawsuit; instead, the president has been using his executive powers — launching investigations, withholding money — to pressure elite campuses to conform to his ideological preferences. (The University of Michigan, Duke University and Cornell University are negotiating with the White House as well.)
The logic, however, is the same: imposing your will through aggressive — and expensive — lawfare.
As a real-estate mogul, Trump perfected this tactic long ago under the tutelage of his pugnacious lawyer Roy Cohn. But no one else has ever really used it as president.
Here are a few of the suer in chief’s recent wins.
Paramount
In October, then-candidate Trump sued Paramount, the parent company of CBS News, over the way that 60 Minutes edited an interview with his Democratic rival, Kamala Harris. Trump’s allegation? That the program violated Texas’s Deceptive Trade Practices Act, which generally targets false advertising, by only including part of her answer to a question about the Gaza War in its main broadcast.
“The work that we have done has resulted in a number of movements in that region by Israel that were very much prompted by or a result of many things, including our advocacy for what needs to happen in the region,” Harris said in the interview. “We are not going to stop pursuing what is necessary for the United States to be clear about where we stand on the need for this war to end.”
The second part of Harris’s answer aired on 60 Minutes. The first part did not, appearing instead on CBS’s social-media accounts and in a promo that aired on another CBS program, Face the Nation.
“To paper over Kamala’s ‘word salad’ weakness, CBS used its national platform on 60 Minutes to cross the line from the exercise of judgment in reporting to deceitful, deceptive manipulation of news,” Trump’s lawsuit claimed.
In response, CBS insisted that Trump’s “repeated claims against 60 Minutes are false. The interview was not doctored and 60 Minutes did not hide any part of Vice President Harris’s answer to the question at issue. 60 Minutes fairly presented the interview to inform the audience and not to mislead it. The lawsuit Trump brought against CBS is completely without merit and we will vigorously defend against it.”
Editing for brevity is commonplace in television, and many legal experts agreed that the case was frivolous, arguing that Paramount would win in court on First Amendment grounds.
Yet on July 2, the company decided to settle with Trump and pay $16 million to his future presidential library.
Skeptics claimed that Paramount’s decision — which involves no admission of wrongdoing — had less to do with journalism than with business, insisting that what the company really wanted was for Trump’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to sign off on its proposed $8 billion mega-merger with the Hollywood studio Skydance.
On July 18, Paramount announced that it would be cancelling its long-running Late Show with host Stephen Colbert, a frequent Trump critic. The company said the decision was “purely financial.”
And then on Thursday, the FCC approved the Paramount-Skydance merger.
Trump has claimed that as part of the Paramount settlement, he “also anticipate[s] receiving $20 Million Dollars more from the new Owners, in Advertising, PSAs, or similar Programming” on CBS in the future. If the Skydance deal goes through, Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison and his son, David, will control Paramount. The elder Ellison is a Trump friend and donor.
Earlier this week, South Park kicked off its 27th season with an episode about religion in schools that skewered Paramount — just one day after signing its own $1.5 billion deal with the company.
“I didn’t want to come back and be in the school, but I had to because it was part of a lawsuit and the agreement with Paramount,” Jesus tells some reluctant South Park parents. He then urges them to settle with Trump, who has threatened to sue for $5 billion if they don’t let Jesus in.
“You guys saw what happened to CBS? Well, guess who owns CBS. Paramount,” Jesus says. “You really want to end up like Colbert? You guys got to stop being stupid. … He also has the power to sue and take bribes and he can do anything to anyone.”
At the end of the episode, the townspeople agree to pay Trump $3.5 million and create “pro-Trump messaging.”
ABC News
In a similar (though much simpler) case, Trump sued ABC News and its This Week host George Stephanopoulos last March for defamation over a segment in which Stephanopoulos repeatedly said that Trump had been found liable for “rape” in a sexual assault case brought by writer E. Jean Carroll.
Stephanopoulos’s statements were incorrect. Asked on its verdict sheet whether Carroll had proved by a preponderance of evidence that Trump had “raped” her under New York’s narrow legal definition — which requires vaginal penetration by a penis — the jury answered no.
Instead, they found Trump liable for “sexual abuse.”
At the time, the judge said that Trump’s behavior — which, according to Carroll, included yanking down her tights and shoving his hand inside her — would mean that “Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word rape.”
“Indeed,” the judge added, “the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.”
But legal experts largely agreed that Stephanopoulos should have used the phrase “sexual abuse” rather than the word rape, and in December 2024 ABC News agreed to settle the lawsuit by paying $15 million toward Trump’s future presidential library and another $1 million in legal fees.
Meta
Way back in July 2021, Trump sued Meta and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, for suspending his Facebook and Instagram accounts following the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Privately owned social media platforms are permitted under Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act to moderate their services by removing posts that violate their standards — as long as they are acting in “good faith.” Users agree to these terms of service when they sign up.
Yet Trump claimed in his suit that Meta was engaging in “illegal, shameful censorship of the American people.”
Not much happened in the case for a few years — until Trump won the 2024 election. At that point, Zuckerberg visited Trump at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida, where the incoming president “brought up the litigation and suggested they try to resolve it,” according to the Associated Press.
Two months later, in January of this year, Meta agreed to donate $22 million to Trump's presidential library and pay $3 million in legal fees.
Around the same time, Meta announced that it was ending its diversity, equity and inclusion programs and eliminating fact-checking on Facebook — both longtime priorities of Trump and his allies.
The company also made a $1 million donation to Trump’s inaugural committee, and Zuckerberg sat front and center at his swearing-in.
Law firms
In the early weeks of his second term, Trump issued executive orders targeting three prominent law firms that had pursued what he viewed as politically motivated investigations and lawsuits against him and his allies.
One was Perkins Coie, a firm that represented Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and repeatedly won election law cases in 2020 against Trump’s campaign.
Another was Covington & Burling, a firm that provided legal advice to Jack Smith, the special counsel who brought two federal indictments against Trump.
And the third was Paul Weiss — a firm whose chairman, Brad Karp, “has a long history of fund-raising for Democrats [and] sought to unite major law firms in ‘a call to arms’ to fight Mr. Trump in court on issues like his administration’s policy of separating migrant children from their parents,” according to the New York Times.
In his orders, Trump effectively sought to cripple these firms by revoking their lawyers’ security clearances — which they need to represent key clients — and limiting their access to government buildings and officials.
Again, it wasn’t a lawsuit, per se — but it was a form of lawfare.
And again, it worked. In March, Trump announced Karp had agreed to represent clients regardless of their political affiliation; to contribute $40 million in legal services to causes Trump has championed, including “the President’s Task Force to Combat Antisemitism”; and to end its internal DEI policies.
In exchange, Trump rescinded his order against Paul Weiss.
A few days later, however, the president issued a new order directing the heads of the Justice and Homeland Security departments to “seek sanctions against attorneys and law firms who engage in frivolous, unreasonable and vexatious litigation against the United States” or in matters that come before federal agencies.
Eventually, eight other firms followed Paul Weiss’s lead, committing a combined total of nearly $1 billion in pro bono legal services to initiatives supported by the Trump administration in order to avoid becoming targets themselves.
“This is certainly the biggest affront to the legal profession in my lifetime,” Samuel Buell, a longtime professor of law at Duke University and a former federal prosecutor, told the New York Times.