President Trump in April 2025 posted some thoughts on Truth Social about public media, in all caps: “Republicans must defund and totally disassociate themselves from NPR & PBS, the radical left ‘monsters’ that so badly hurt our country!”
This was not a watershed moment. Both in his social media posts and his off-the-cuff comments to reporters, Mr. Trump’s broadsides against traditional news outlets have become the tap water of his political rhetoric.
But they’re now haunting him in court.
Judges have cited attacks on the press by Mr. Trump and his appointees when ruling against the government in at least three court cases involving news organizations. The latest came on Tuesday, when a federal judge invoked Mr. Trump’s attacks on NPR and PBS while ruling that the president’s executive order to cut funding to the organizations was unconstitutional.
“It is difficult to conceive of clearer evidence that a government action is targeted at viewpoints that the president does not like,” Judge Randolph D. Moss, of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, wrote in his decision.
The lawsuits provide a pathway to enforcing consequences for media-bashing by government officials. In Mr. Trump’s first term — when he took to calling the news media “the enemy of the people” — journalists, pundits and politicians puzzled over how to handle the attacks, in part because the attacks themselves are protected speech. Denouncing the rhetoric became the default approach. “Seeking to delegitimize journalists is dangerous to a healthy republic,” Jeff Mason, then the president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, said in April 2017.
But when politicians punish media companies based on their reporting, they risk running afoul of the First Amendment.
“Where the rubber meets the road is where they take governmental action to try to squelch speech because they don’t like the views being expressed,” said Theodore J. Boutrous Jr., a First Amendment lawyer at Gibson Dunn who has argued several such cases, including a suit filed by The New York Times against new Pentagon press rules.
In addition to cases involving news organizations, law firms and at least one university have filed suit against the administration over the same principle. “It’s like a viewpoint discrimination festival,” Mr. Boutrous said.
Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement: “President Trump and his entire administration have repeatedly demonstrated their unwavering commitment to the First Amendment by providing unparalleled press access, restoring freedom of speech, and ending federal censorship.”
The Associated Press has taken legal action against a White House measure from early 2025 that curtailed the wire service’s access because it declined to follow an executive order that renamed the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. When asked about The A.P. kerfuffle last year, Mr. Trump criticized the news wire for being “very, very wrong on the election, on Trump and the treatment of Trump.”
Judge Trevor N. McFadden of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that the White House had been “brazen” about its viewpoint discrimination against The A.P. The government has appealed the ruling.
The Times’s suit against the Pentagon argued that the department’s media rules, adopted in October, were unconstitutional. Rather than signing the new policy, Times journalists and dozens of other reporters from legacy outlets turned in their press credentials and continued covering the military without them. At a press briefing in December, Kingsley Wilson, the Pentagon’s press secretary, commented on the departed corps. “The American people don’t trust these propagandists because they stopped telling the truth,” said Ms. Wilson, who complimented the primarily pro-Trump commentators and influencers who took the place of the departed journalists.
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Judge Paul L. Friedman of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia cited Ms. Wilson’s remarks and those of other officials when he ruled in favor of The Times last month. “The undisputed evidence reflects the policy’s true purpose and practical effect: to weed out disfavored journalists,” Judge Friedman wrote. The Pentagon said it would appeal the ruling.
Voice of America journalists last month sued Kari Lake, a Trump administration official who has worked to dismantle the media organization, accusing her of viewpoint discrimination and other First Amendment transgressions. “Rather than providing a balanced counterpart to propaganda issued by autocratic regimes across the globe,” the complaint says, current management has “sought to convert V.O.A. into a mechanism for American propaganda — more specifically, Trump administration propaganda.”
Until the Trump era, explicit statements of viewpoint discrimination were rare, Mr. Boutrous said.
But lawyers now have their pick of public statements to shore up claims of retaliatory treatment. Lee Levine, a retired media defense lawyer, said that “Trump is the gift that keeps on giving” for lawyers involved in the suits.
Case in point: At a February 2025 event, Mr. Trump commented on his access spat with The A.P., calling the outlet a “radical left organization” and remarking on a possible suit. “Maybe they’ll win — doesn’t matter. It’s just something we feel strongly about,” he said.
A few lawsuits from media organizations, to be sure, are little match for a wide-ranging anti-media campaign emanating from the White House. Mr. Trump has a history of filing frequent lawsuits of his own against outlets that disseminate unflattering coverage of him. And Brendan Carr, whom Mr. Trump chose as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, has used his position to attack what he recently called the “fake news media.”
The takeaway from all the disputes, Mr. Levine said, is that the Trump administration enjoy messing with the media.
“If I were a White House lawyer and I said, ‘You need to stop saying this because otherwise, you’ll lose these cases,’ I’d get fired,” he said.
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