Trump declares war on “frivolous” lawsuits

Late Friday night, the White House released the latest tranche of Trump executive actions and directives aimed at further kneecapping some of the nation’s most famous lawyers and law firms the president believes are obstructing his agenda or have tangled with him in the past.

One of the late-night directives is entitled “Preventing Abuses of the Legal System and the Federal Court.” Both terrifying and hilarious given its author, the memo instructs Attorney General Pam Bondi and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to aggressively pursue court sanctions and disciplinary actions against lawyers and law firms that engage in “grossly unethical misconduct,” which it mainly seems to define as lawyers and lawsuits Trump doesn’t like. Singled out for persecution are immigration lawyers and “Big Law” firms with pro bono practices that represent immigrants or litigate against the federal government, as well as Democratic Party lawyer Marc Elias.

The memo then states:

“I hereby direct the Attorney General to seek sanctions against attorneys and law firms who engage in frivolous, unreasonable, and vexatious litigation against the United States or in matters before executive departments and agencies of the United States.”

Trump launching a war on “frivolous” lawsuits is pretty rich given his long misuse of the legal system. As a private citizen, Trump was involved in more than 4,000 lawsuits, many of which involved his refusing to pay people for work they did for him.

For instance, ahead of his 2005 wedding to Melania, Trump ordered two crystal chandeliers for the ballroom at Mar-a-Lago from an 82-year-old Latvian immigrant in West Palm Beach who specialized in making replicas of chandeliers that hung in Versailles. He then allegedly stiffed the man on most of the bill, and when the owner complained to the local paper, Trump sued him claiming the installation work was shoddy.

The businessman ended up having to settle for only a third of what he was owed. “My client [was] just a small businessman. No big corporation. He just didn’t have the money to fight Mr. Trump,” his lawyer told Mother Jones in 2016, adding that Trump’s behavior in the chandelier case is apparently “his modus operandi.”

Or consider the time in 1984 when Trump sued the Chicago Tribune for $500 million because its architecture critic made fun of his plan to try to build the world’s tallest tower in New York City, calling it “aesthetically lousy.” (The case was dismissed, but it still cost the paper $60,000 in legal fees.)

Trump’s litigiousness didn’t end after he became president. In 2023, he filed a $475 million defamation lawsuit against CNN for using the term “the Big Lie” to describe his false claims that he won the 2020 election. (It was dismissed.) That same year, a federal judge ordered Trump and his lawyer Alina Habba to pay the defendants nearly $1 million for filing a frivolous suit against Hillary Clinton, a handful of FBI officials, and the Democratic Party alleging that their claims of Russian interference in the 2016 election had hurt his campaign.

“Mr. Trump is a prolific and sophisticated litigant who is repeatedly using the courts to seek revenge on political adversaries,” the judge wrote in his order tossing the case. “He is the mastermind of strategic abuse of the judicial process, and he cannot be seen as a litigant blindly following the advice of a lawyer.”

That’s one thing to be said for the expertise behind his new memo: Trump certainly knows a frivolous suit when he files one.