President Donald Trump escalated his long-running battle with the press Monday night, announcing a massive $15 billion lawsuit against The New York Times. The case, filed in Florida, marks Trump’s most aggressive legal offensive yet against the newspaper he has repeatedly branded as “fake news.”
In a blistering post on Truth Social, Trump accused the Times of being “a fullthroated mouthpiece of the Democrat Party” and claimed the institution had “engaged in a decades-long method of lying about your Favorite President (ME!), my family, business, the America First Movement, MAGA, and our Nation as a whole.”
“The New York Times has been allowed to freely lie, smear, and defame me for far too long, and that stops, NOW!” he declared.
The lawsuit names not only the Times Company itself but also four prominent reporters—Susanne Craig, Russ Buettner, Peter Baker, and Michael S. Schmidt. It also includes Penguin Random House, which published Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success, a book co-authored by Craig and Buettner. Trump’s attorneys allege the book is “false, malicious, and defamatory.”
According to the filing, the Times’ reporting and related publications inflicted “reputational injury” and harmed Trump’s “unique brand” by undermining confidence in his businesses and even affecting his media company’s stock price. His legal team claims damages total in the billions.
The lawsuit comes just a week after Trump threatened to sue the Times over reporting that he authored a sexually suggestive note in 2003 to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, who later died by suicide in a New York jail. Trump has vehemently denied the allegation.
In response, The New York Times issued a statement dismissing the lawsuit as baseless. “This suit has no merit,” the paper said, “and is an attempt to stifle and discourage independent reporting.”
The move is the latest salvo in Trump’s broader campaign of litigation against media outlets. In recent years, he has targeted The Wall Street Journal, ABC, and Paramount—the parent company of CBS News—for what he called defamatory coverage. In July, Paramount agreed to settle a $20 billion lawsuit filed by Trump over a 60 Minutes interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris, paying him $16 million.
By targeting the Times—widely regarded as one of his fiercest media critics—Trump appears intent on both punishing past reporting and intimidating future coverage as his administration grapples with mounting scandals and political crises.
Whether the lawsuit succeeds remains to be seen. But the $15 billion claim, the direct naming of reporters, and the inclusion of Penguin Random House highlight Trump’s willingness to expand his war on the press from rhetoric to aggressive litigation—framing himself not as a public official accountable to scrutiny, but as a businessman fighting to protect his “brand.”