A New York Times editor on Trump's new $15 billion lawsuit

On Tuesday morning, President Trump sued the New York Times for $15 billion. The lawsuit alleges that during the 2024 election, the paper published "malicious, defamatory, and disparaging articles" that were "calculated to inflict maximum damage upon President Trump."

The articles in question were adapted from the book Lucky Loser, written by two New York Times investigative journalists. According to the book, Trump inherited the equivalent of hundreds of millions of dollars, consistently lost money, and was then bailed out by others. It also details how The Apprentice rebranded Trump and set the stage for his political ascent.

Trump's lawsuit spends as much time on puffery as legal argument. "President Trump secured the greatest personal and political achievement in American history," Trump's attorneys state in the lawsuit's opening passages. "All across our country, Americans from a wide array of backgrounds saw the truth about him and voted accordingly — the same truth that the New York Times refused to recognize as it continued spreading false and defamatory content about President Trump."

The action against the New York Times is the latest in a series of lawsuits that Trump has filed against media organizations over the past year. It is part of a broader campaign, spanning decades, to curtail press freedom.

To make sense of all this, Popular Information spoke with David Enrich, the deputy investigations editor for The New York Times. Enrich recently wrote a book, Murder the Truth, about how powerful individuals are using and abusing the legal system to silence reporters and protect their own interests.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Popular Information: What are the potential threats to press freedom that you detail in Murder the Truth?

David Enrich: I don't think it's potential. I think it's very real. There are two intertwined threats here, very broadly speaking. One is that there is a growing number of politicians and other powerful people who are trying to use legal actions and the threat of legal actions to shut down legitimate criticism and coverage of their activities. And that's obviously happening in this particular moment, but it's been happening increasingly, going back for at least a decade. It's happening at places like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. But it's also happening all over the country, and the places where it is having an especially pronounced effect are not major national news organizations. It is at smaller community organizations, small newspapers, independent publishers, and people like you who have a newsletter, a podcast, or a YouTube channel.

It often occurs out of public view in the form of threatening letters that lawyers are writing before publication in the hopes of dissuading someone from publishing a critical piece in the first place. And it works a lot of the time.

So that's threat one. But in doing that reporting and talking to a lot of people, I realized that a lot of the people making these threats and filing these lawsuits are the same people who are advocating for the overturning or weakening of New York Times v. Sullivan. These threats are potent, and these lawsuits are potent, and that's at a time when we have a very robust First Amendment. Then you have people who are making an argument to roll back a lot of those long-standing First Amendment protections. Increasingly, it is falling on receptive ears.

PI: A lot of your recent work has been revelatory reporting about Jeffrey Epstein. Is this work easier now because Epstein is dead and cannot hire lawyers to issue threats?

DE: That's a good question, and it's hard for me to say. If Epstein were still alive, I assume he would have been convicted, and he'd be in jail or in prison, having been found guilty of many very bad crimes. And so I think it would have been hard then for his lawyers to mount a credible legal argument that we were in any way defaming him with our coverage.

But as a general matter, we routinely get these threats. We've gotten threats about our Epstein coverage from Trump's lawyers in this case, and over the years, from other powerful players in the Epstein saga. And that definitely makes it harder and more cumbersome to do these stories.

PI: Overall, do you think that news coverage of powerful people is regularly influenced by behind-the-scenes legal threats and intimidation?

DE: 100 percent. Without any question. I've reported on many examples of that. Some of them are in the book, but others have been off the record. I've heard about numerous cases where publishers, journalists, and editors soft-pedal stuff. They are very conservative about what they publish because they are afraid of getting sued. Even short of getting sued, getting these threatening letters is terrifying for many publications and many journalists.

And rightly so. Generally, you have to hire a lawyer to defend yourself, and that is outside of the budget of a lot of places. And the rational response when facing legal threats for many publications, probably most publications, is to think twice because you risk jeopardizing your finances if you make a big mistake.

PI: One of the biggest developments since the publication of your book is that a sitting president is now filing these kinds of lawsuits. And some media organizations are paying him millions of dollars to settle.

DE: I totally agree. Until a few weeks ago, when Trump sued the Wall Street Journal over the Epstein birthday book, a sitting United States president had never sued a news organization while in office. Now he has done it again with the New York Times. This is a precedent-busting set of actions that is really quite extraordinary.

While he was a candidate, he filed lawsuits against ABC, CBS, and the Des Moines Register. And then, after Trump won the election, ABC and CBS rushed to reach settlements. I do not think it was a coincidence that they rushed to reach a settlement after Trump was elected, as opposed to before Trump was elected. I think that speaks pretty clearly to the power dynamics at play here and the fact that some major American institutions are not comfortable going up against the president.

PI: Do you think Trump is exploiting a vulnerability that's inherent in the larger corporate ownership structure of some news outlets? The parent company of CBS, for example, was trying to get a merger approved. Is Trump effectively leveraging the federal government's influence over these corporations to extract large settlements and influence ongoing news coverage?

DE: That's certainly how it looks. It seems to be the intent, and it is, I think, likely going to be the effect. It's a very different proposition, suing the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, both of which are part of bigger companies that are very committed to fundamental journalism principles. At CBS and ABC, even though the journalists are committed to journalism principles, they're part of much larger companies that are beholden and vulnerable to the federal government.

PI: How do you think this lawsuit that was filed today against the New York Times fits into Trump's overall strategy?

DE: I'm a little puzzled by what the strategy was here, since, according to the New York Times, it is really a baseless lawsuit that, on the merits, was not filed to succeed. My informed speculation about this is that it is just another attempt by the Trump administration to intimidate and harass legitimate news gathering and send a message to others that we really are going to sue you. And when we sue you, we're going to seek boatloads of money. To the New York Times, to the Wall Street Journal, to Bloomberg, to CNN, to places like that, I don't think that it is going to sway them very muc