Late Wednesday, the Trump administration and Columbia University announced that they had settled a months-long dispute that started when the White House accused the Ivy League school of failing to protect Jewish students from discrimination during recent Gaza War protests — then froze the majority of its $1.3 billion a year in federal research grants and funding.
To end the ordeal, Columbia agreed to pay the U.S. treasury more than $200 million over the next three years while scrutinizing international students more closely and releasing data to show that admissions and hiring are based on “merit” rather than “diversity.” (An independent monitor will oversee the deal and report to the government every six months.) In return, the administration agreed to restore Columbia’s federal cash flow.
Trump’s spat with Columbia didn’t technically take the form of a lawsuit; instead, the president has been using his executive powers — launching investigations, withholding money — to pressure elite campuses to conform to his ideological preferences. (The University of Michigan, Duke University and Cornell University are negotiating with the White House as well.)
The logic, however, is the same: imposing your will through aggressive — and expensive — lawfare.
As a real-estate mogul, Trump perfected this tactic long ago under the tutelage of his pugnacious lawyer Roy Cohn. But no one else has ever really used it as president.
Here are a few of the suer in chief’s recent wins.
Paramount
In October, then-candidate Trump sued Paramount, the parent company of CBS News, over the way that 60 Minutes edited an interview with his Democratic rival, Kamala Harris. Trump’s allegation? That the program violated Texas’s Deceptive Trade Practices Act, which generally targets false advertising, by only including part of her answer to a question about the Gaza War in its main broadcast.
ABC News
In a similar (though much simpler) case, Trump sued ABC News and its This Week host George Stephanopoulos last March for defamation over a segment in which Stephanopoulos repeatedly said that Trump had been found liable for “rape” in a sexual assault case brought by writer E. Jean Carroll.
Meta
Way back in July 2021, Trump sued Meta and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, for suspending his Facebook and Instagram accounts following the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Law firms
In the early weeks of his second term, Trump issued executive orders targeting three prominent law firms that had pursued what he viewed as politically motivated investigations and lawsuits against him and his allies.
One was Perkins Coie, a firm that represented Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and repeatedly won election law cases in 2020 against Trump’s campaign.
Another was Covington & Burling, a firm that provided legal advice to Jack Smith, the special counsel who brought two federal indictments against Trump.
And the third was Paul Weiss — a firm whose chairman, Brad Karp, “has a long history of fund-raising for Democrats [and] sought to unite major law firms in ‘a call to arms’ to fight Mr. Trump in court on issues like his administration’s policy of separating migrant children from their parents,” according to the New York Times.
