Donald Trump announced on Monday that he is filing a $15 billion lawsuit against The New York Times, accusing the newspaper of defamation and libel.
Writing on his Truth Social platform, the US president declared that the Times had “lied and smeared” him for years, insisting that “it ends now.”
He criticized the paper for endorsing Kamala Harris during the 2024 presidential race, alleging it had effectively become a propaganda outlet for the Democratic Party’s left wing.
Trump said the case would be pursued in Florida, a state where Republicans hold significant influence.
Donald Trump has repeatedly voiced anger at media outlets he describes as left-leaning and hostile to his presidency.
In a late-Monday post, he criticized The New York Times for endorsing Kamala Harris in the 2024 election, calling the paper’s decision to feature the endorsement prominently on its front page “unprecedented.” He also accused various broadcasters and programs of deliberately tarnishing his image through what he claimed was “a highly sophisticated system of document and visual manipulation.”
Trump has recently secured multimillion-dollar settlements from ABC News and Paramount’s CBS News after suing them for defamation. He has also filed a separate case against The Wall Street Journal over its reporting on the Epstein scandal.
This is not his first battle with The New York Times. In 2023, a judge dismissed a $100m lawsuit Trump filed against the paper and his niece, Mary Trump, alleging a scheme to obtain and publish his tax records. That case, which stemmed from a Pulitzer Prize-winning series on his finances, was rejected on constitutional grounds.
The same year, Trump lost another high-profile defamation suit after attempting to sue CNN for $475m, arguing the network had defamed him by comparing him to Adolf Hitler. A federal judge threw out the case.
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