Trump’s Relentless Assault On Free Press And Justice
Yesterday, the Supreme Court refused to take up a bid by Trump crony, sexual predator and casino billionaire Steve Wynn to roll back defamation protections established in the case New York Times v. Sullivan in his fight with the Associated Press and Nevada’s top court. Trump and the far right of the judicial establishment have been trying to get the 1964 landmark decision overturned for decades
The way the law stands now— and what the billionaire class objects to— is that the standard for winning a libel suit requires a public figure to prove the offending statement was made with “actual malice,” meaning with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard as to whether it was false. Wynn, notorious for molesting women and then paying them off, denies all the allegations that the Associated Press reported on. The Nevada court ruled he was unable to show any actual malice in their reporting.
Law suit crazed billionaires— Trump first and foremost— are always insisting that New York Times v. Sullivan is too protective of the media and unfair to billionaires and celebrities. Trump has never raped or molested any women who he didn’t subsequently lie about and whose testimonies he didn’t label “fake news.” It eventually led him to label the media “the enemy of the American people,” confusing himself— as he always does— with the American people.
Needless to say, Señor T and his billionaire cronies like Wynn don’t just want to weaken libel protections out of some abstract commitment to justice. They want to make it easier to punish journalists for telling the truth about them. The goal is clear: to weaponize the courts against a press that exposes their corruption, their crimes and their casual disregard for the laws that apply to everyone else. In their ideal world, the First Amendment exists only to protect their propaganda outlets— Fox News, Newsmax, Breitbart— while any journalist with the courage to report on their misdeeds faces financial ruin in court.
I know I don’t have to remind you that this is the same billionaire class that buys politicians, rigs the economy and funds the right-wing judges who would eagerly undo half a century of legal precedent if it meant shielding the ultra-rich from scrutiny. Whether it's Trump trying to rewrite history around his sexual assault convictions, Wynn trying to bury reports of his abuses, or Musk throwing tantrums about journalists who expose his failures, the playbook is always the same: silence criticism, criminalize dissent, and gaslight the public into believing that the real victims are the powerful. If they had their way, American courts would become just another tool of billionaire impunity— one more step toward a world where justice is for sale and the truth is whatever they decide it should be.
In a column yesterday, The Judiciary’s Last Stand, Tom Nichols noted that “Trump is at war with the rule of law in the United States. His assault is already the most hostile and sustained political attack on America’s legal and law-enforcement institutions since the Civil War. It is a war he declared before he began his first term, and one he pursued with tenacity once in office. It even had its own call to arms on January 6, 2021, or so many of his supporters believed. Exiled temporarily from the White House, Trump spent four years vowing to continue this war if he were reelected, and he has made good on that promise, targeting the foundations of almost every institution of law and justice within his reach as the chief executive.
As the former federal judge J. Michael Luttig, a well-known conservative jurist, said recently, Trump has “launched a full-frontal assault on the Constitution, the rule of law, our system of justice, and the entire legal profession.”
Trump has made great progress in this offensive in only a matter of weeks. Day by day, he has shown Americans what unraveling the rule of law actually looks like: He has issued trollish and almost certainly unconstitutional executive orders, unleashed verbal fusillades against jurists (as well as various law-enforcement officials and prosecutors), and forced government lawyers to stand tongue-tied as they struggled to answer simple questions from judges. He has sent his minions, including the vice president of the United States, out in public to argue that a president has the right to ignore court orders, making an eventual showdown with the federal bench practically inevitable.
Worse, Trump supporters have stepped up physical threats and various other forms of harassment against judges and their families. As the New York Times editorialized this weekend, the president is encouraging “a campaign of menace” against jurists, leading his allies to “then try to dehumanize the judges with whom they disagree and make them fear for their safety.”
Trump has used this authoritarian approach, undergirded by his legendary shamelessness, to break through every line of constitutional and moral defense— impeachment, elections, even the humiliation of arrest and conviction— that would otherwise restrain a rogue president (or, for that matter, any ordinary American felon). The center is not holding, and the flanks are collapsing. Congress is fleeing the field. The voters, many of whom long ago became inured to warnings about Trump’s contempt for the law, may be anxious about his behavior, but millions are sticking with him.
The president and his lieutenants still face one more set of defenses obstructing their march: the courts. If he can overcome the federal judicial system, then America’s worst modern constitutional confrontation will be over and Trump will be its victor.
Trump’s intentions in this barrage against the rule of law are clear, especially after he decided to go to the Great Hall of the Department of Justice earlier this month and shout them triumphantly from behind the presidential seal. He celebrated his pardons of insurrectionists and seditionists. He gloated about stripping loyal citizens of their security clearances. He reeled through the names of Americans whom he called “thugs” and “bad people, really bad people,” who “tried to turn America into a corrupt Communist and Third World country.” He unloaded a series of stories and accusations, several of them exaggerations or outright lies. Trump, for example, referred to the “Biden crime family” and said that Joe Biden was not prosecuted because he was mentally incompetent; he claimed that the previous administration intentionally “imported” murderers and other criminals to America; he referred (yet again) to the duly convicted January 6 insurrectionists as “hostages” and claimed that the FBI had sent SWAT teams in after harmless grandmothers.
… [Trump has long loathed any institution that threatens him or his interests, and since entering politics, he has engaged in constant public harangues against the judicial system and individual judges. These propagandistic assaults are a way of acclimating the public to the idea that judges are robed political saboteurs and their decisions and orders are little more than partisan blather— and that therefore their rulings may be ignored or defied at will.
…Trump has also sought to impugn entire courts, particularly the venues where he’s lost cases. He has a special animus for the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, one of the most liberal federal courts. When he lost a case there in 2018 over his immigration policies, Trump reportedly turned to Kirstjen Nielsen, then his secretary of Homeland Security, and said, referring to the court: “Let’s just cancel it.” According to a book by the journalists Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, he told Nielsen to write a bill, if necessary, to “get rid of the fucking judges” and send it off to the then-GOP-controlled Congress.
Last week, Trump set his sights on another federal judge, James Boasberg. When Boasberg ordered a halt to some of the administration’s deportation flights, Trump called him “a Radical Left Lunatic”— one of his favorite insults— and “a troublemaker and agitator who was sadly appointed by Barack Hussein Obama.” (Although Obama elevated Boasberg to the federal district court, the judge was first appointed to the D.C. superior court by George W. Bush.) Trump soon called for Boasberg to be impeached, prompting an unusual public comment from Chief Justice John Roberts, who said that “impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision.”
When asked about Roberts’s rebuke, Trump responded with the non sequitur that Roberts did not mention Trump by name, as if that rendered the chief justice’s concerns irrelevant.
In his first term, Trump had to content himself with barking at judges and adjusting to the losses in court. But he and the people around him seem to have learned important lessons from their previous years in the White House. Within days of the election, the incoming administration began planning to seize the institutions capable of exercising legal and physical force against citizens— the Russians call them “the power ministries”— such as the Defense Department, the national-intelligence agencies, the Justice Department, and the FBI.
…The dismantling of America’s constitutional government is under way. The United States in 2025 no longer has an independently led national law-enforcement organization. It no longer has a Department of Justice whose leadership is following the mission to serve the American nation and its Constitution. The immense power of the Defense Department is in the hands of a talk-show culture warrior who intends to purge the officer corps of generals and admirals suspected of ideological unreliability. The Congress is dominated by men and women who either agree with this authoritarian project or are too scared to oppose it. The judges now stand alone— but their courage may not be enough to stop Trump.
William Kristol: “Among those who might be expected to stand up against Donald Trump’s authoritarianism, the hills are alive with the sound of excuses… [T]o fight now? Bad idea. That would simply play into Trump’s hands. After all, Trump and his allies are good at fighting. If you try to do something, there’s a risk they’ll turn it against you. Whereas if you say nothing, nothing can be used against you… And anyway, there’s a better plan. That plan is that, eventually, Trump will become less popular. Then, the public will rise up. And then you can speak up. It all works out… The excuses offered by our elites for not standing up to authoritarianism have the effect of helping the authoritarians gain further ground. But not to fear! One day— some day— our leaders will surely discover a hill worth fighting on. Won’t they? Won’t they?”
And Chuck Schumer is still, unchallenged, the leader of the Senate Democrats. The billionaire class, their bought-and-paid-for politicians, like Schumer, and their propagandists want us to believe that the real threat to democracy isn’t their war on the truth, but the journalists, judges, and citizens who dare to stand in their way. They will gaslight, intimidate, and litigate their way toward absolute impunity— unless they are stopped. The courts remain one of the last institutions holding the line, but they will not hold forever if left to stand alone. This is a fight for the very concept of accountability, for the idea that power should not be an escape hatch from justice. If Trump and his allies succeed in dismantling these last guardrails, the next time they face consequences for their crimes, there may be no judges left to rule against them— only enforcers eager to carry out their will.
The fight to preserve the rule of law isn’t just about keeping Trump in check— it’s about preventing the rise of a system where billionaires wield the courts as weapons, journalists fear career-ending ruin for reporting the truth and justice is reduced to a privilege of the wealthy. The Supreme Court’s decision to reject Wynn’s bid is a temporary win, but the war isn’t over. If Trump and his allies get their way, the next time a billionaire predator sues to silence the press, they might just have a court stacked in their favor. And then, it will be the truth that’s on trial.
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