The assault on free speech in the United States entered an alarming new phase this week — and not only in the Trump administration’s crackdown on comments regarding the killing of Charlie Kirk.
Something else happened this week: President Trump filed suit, as an individual, against the New York Times, four journalists who work there and the world’s largest publishing house. Angered by a handful of articles and a book — “Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success,” written by two of the four journalists — Trump is seeking an astronomical $15 billion in damages. (A judge has already dismissed the case, as of Friday, but told the president he can refile.)
Trump is no stranger to filing defamation suits, or threatening them, and in this suit it’s clear that the primary focus of his ire is the New York Times — which he has sued before. (He lost that case and was forced to pay the newspaper’s legal costs.) But there’s a risk in this moment that we miss the significance of a sitting president suing Penguin Random House, the world’s largest trade book publisher, and two authors for publishing a book.
Since Trump came into office in January, his administration has targeted independent institutions and voices that have traditionally spoken truth to power, making examples out of high-profile targets in order to chill entire sectors. In going after higher education, he took on Harvard, Columbia and UCLA; in attacking the media, he has gone after CNN and CBS’ “60 Minutes.” For newspapers, it has been the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. And now, in the publishing industry, it’s Penguin Random House.
Looking across these sectors, it’s clear that the ultimate goal is to gain control over information, narratives and culture, and to muzzle independent voices, through a combination of regulatory action and litigation — whether brought by Trump as an individual or by his administration — against some, and intimidation and implicit threats against everyone else. The tactics are not surprising; they follow a playbook carried out by Viktor Orban in Hungary and Vladimir Putin in Russia, among others.
This particular lawsuit is frivolous and almost certainly won’t hold up in court, if it is refiled and allowed to proceed. But the point here isn’t to win legal cases, it’s to tar and burden those targeted, make them squirm and press them to settle (which CBS and others have seemed all too willing to do), and set a broader example that will leave other institutions fearful to publish any article or book that might stoke fury from the president. This is how authoritarianism works: You don’t have to imprison every dissident; you don’t have to sue every newspaper or publishing house. You just do enough of it so that everyone else censors themselves without having to be asked.
As an organization that champions writers facing legal threats and imprisonment for their writing around the world, we at PEN America view a U.S. president filing a suit claiming a book is “malicious, defamatory, and disparaging” as a grave warning. We are at risk of losing one of our most precious freedoms: the freedom to write.
Writers are often on the front lines of attacks on free expression and democracy. And books are already under assault in the U.S., with nearly 16,000 banned in public schools across the country over the last four years. This administration has already tried to tell us what words we can’t use — 350 and counting — and has just ordered information about slavery and Native Americans stripped from national parks. These efforts to rewrite the historical narrative, silence critics, ban books and constrain speech are a multipronged assault on free speech and a free society.
For the record, another president did once sue a newspaper. But only after he’d left office. In 1912, Theodore Roosevelt sued a small-town Michigan newspaper, the Ishpeming Iron Ore, for libel after it published an article suggesting he was a heavy drinker during his unsuccessful campaign for a third term. In a story that seems delightfully quaint today, Roosevelt summoned enough witnesses to testify to his sobriety that the publisher withdrew his claims on the stand, and Roosevelt, saying he was “content,” gladly accepted nominal damages of six cents.
No elected official in the world should be as able and willing to withstand public criticism as a president of the United States. Authoritarian leaders are notoriously thin-skinned. While U.S. presidents have not always rolled with the punches, there has largely been recognition from both parties that criticism comes with the job, and that unconstrained political speech is at the heart of democratic traditions. Freedom to critique, satirize or just plain mock and insult the president is as American as apple pie.
There’s a reason the 1st Amendment protects both speech and the press; expression isn’t as powerful without distribution. Alongside the news media, book publishers allow us to hold the powerful to account. They communicate independent thought to large audiences. And in so doing, they ensure our democracy survives. The suit against Penguin Random House may have been frivolous, but it’s not meaningless. Words on a page always matter.
Summer Lopez is interim co-CEO and chief program officer for free expression at PEN America.
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