The Lawsuit as a Weapon: How Trump Turns Courts Into Punishment

Watch what the Trump administration does with the legal system and a pattern comes into focus: litigation and legal threats are not tools for winning arguments but instruments for punishing the people who get in the way. The president sues the press that reports on him; his Justice Department leans on the workers who count votes and the states that certify them. The cases collapse. The damage is done anyway.

Start with the press. A federal judge in Florida tossed the revised version of Trump's $10 billion defamation suit against the Wall Street Journal, filed over the paper's story about a birthday card Trump allegedly sent Jeffrey Epstein more than two decades ago. In a 20-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Darrin Gayles in Miami dismissed the suit with prejudice, finding that Trump had not proven the defendants acted with actual malice. Dismissed with prejudice means it cannot be filed again — a hard stop, not a pause. The case also named Rupert Murdoch, and the dismissal landed as a defeat for Trump's repeated efforts to silence coverage he doesn't like.

A $10 billion demand against a newspaper is not a serious legal theory. It is a number designed to frighten: to tell every editor and reporter weighing a story about the president that doing their job could mean years of ruinous litigation. The suit failed on the law. But the chilling signal it sent to newsrooms was broadcast the moment it was filed, and no dismissal unsends it.

Now turn from the president-as-plaintiff to the government he runs. In Alaska, the Justice Department went to a judge and asked that ballots showing votes for a second candidate named Dan Sullivan be separated out, on the theory that voters might have been fooled into wasting their votes on a spoiler. Attorneys for the state answered that the demand was not merely wrong but mechanically impossible — that setting aside those ballots was, in their words, "not even possible." The federal government asked a court to do something that cannot be done, to a pile of votes already cast.

The same posture bears down on the people who administer elections. California election officials, in court papers, described the toll the administration's legal threats have taken on their mental health. These are not partisan combatants. They are the clerks and administrators who tabulate results, now treated as suspects by a Justice Department whose case against them rests on garbage: a list of alleged noncitizen voters so sloppy that 42% of the names weren't even on California's current rolls. The weight is the product, not a side effect.

Connect the threads and the method is plain. Against the Wall Street Journal, a lawsuit so large it reads as a threat. Against Alaska, a filing so baseless the state calls it impossible. Against California's election workers, pressure heavy enough to register as harm in sworn filings, built on a list that is mostly error. In each case the legal merit is thin to nonexistent, and in each case that hardly matters, because the goal is not a verdict. The goal is to make the act of reporting, counting and certifying feel dangerous.

The courts, so far, are holding: federal judges have repeatedly rejected the administration's efforts to wrest control over state voting processes and intimidate state and local elections officials. The judge in Miami shut the door and locked it. But the burden of all this falls on those least able to absorb it: the reporter who has to be lawyered-up to publish, the election worker losing sleep over a federal threat, the voters whose ballots a government tried to quarantine. Power is learning it can lose every case and still extract its price, so long as someone else is made to pay it.