President Trump is suing the New York Times for defamation, demanding $15 billion in damages over the "degenerate" newspaper's reporting on his life and political career.
The lawsuit names the paper and Peter Baker, Russ Buettner, Susanne Craig, and Michael Schmidt as defendants, as well as Penguin Random House, the publisher of Buettner and Craig's book Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success.
"Today, I have the Great Honor of bringing a $15 Billion Dollar Defamation and Libel Lawsuit against The New York Times, one of the worst and most degenerate newspapers in the History of our Country, becoming a virtual 'mouthpiece' for the Radical Left Democrat Party," Trump wrote on Truth Social.
The lawsuit is just Trump's latest strike against the left-wing legacy media, after he previously settled eight-figure lawsuits with CBS News and ABC.
The New York Times dismissed Trump's lawsuit as a meritless intimidation tactic.
Trump accuses the New York Times of trying to maliciously damage his reputation and weaken his chances of victory in the 2024 presidential election.
The lawsuit cites three articles and Lucky Loser, which were all published "at the height of election season to inflict maximum electoral damage against President Trump."
According to the lawsuit, the Times and its reporters falsely credited the producers of The Apprentice with making Trump a star and propelling him to the White House.
"Thanks solely to President Trump’s sui generis charisma and unique business acumen, 'The Apprentice' generated hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, and remained on television for over thirteen years, with nearly 200 episodes. ‘The Apprentice’ represented the cultural magnitude of President Trump’s singular brilliance, which captured the zeitgeist of our time," the lawsuit states.
Trump's lawsuit says the Times and its reporters "baselessly hate President Trump in a deranged way," also pointing to the newspaper's blistering attack on Trump in its front-page endorsement of Kamala Harris last fall.
The Times has long been a leading enemy of Trump and an influential source of left-wing disinformation. One of the defendants in Trump's lawsuit, Michael Schmidt, won a Pulitzer Prize for a 2017 article that triggered Robert Mueller's baseless "Russian collusion" probe. Schmidt's article was based on leaked memos from former FBI director James Comey, who admitted to leaking the memos to trigger an investigation into Trump.
Trump's lawsuit against the Times cites an October 2024 article from Schmidt that painted Trump as an aspiring dictator.
Inflammatory rhetoric against the right is being called out after the brutal assassination of Charlie Kirk by a radical leftist who hates "fascists."
One of the defendants in Trump's lawsuit against the Times, chief White House correspondent Peter Baker, suggested that Kirk somehow provoked his attacker by getting people "riled up" with his words.
The New York Times’ Peter Baker says Charlie Kirk intentionally tried to get people “riled up” over issues “about race, about gender, about affirmative action and Islam”
He says that Kirk being assassinated turned him into “a symbol of the of the toxic culture that we’re in” pic.twitter.com/JjIpq5oAne
— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) September 14, 2025
