(Reuters) – Right after the victory in the U.S. presidential election in November 2024, Donald Trump’s lawyers told a state judge in Delaware that a lawsuit filed against him by two co-founders of his social media company should be suspended, because a sitting president does not have time to deal with civil litigation.
Trump’s lawyers asked Judge Lori Will to “recognize a rule of temporary immunity that protects the Presidency from the maneuvers, distractions and harassment of state civil lawsuits.” The plaintiffs claimed they were denied the agreed payment for the successful launch of Truth Social.
But before the judge could decide on the immunity issue, Trump appeared to undermine his own argument by filing a civil suit against an Iowa newspaper, the Des Moines Register.
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Trump, who for decades has used lawsuits to retaliate against critics, later filed at least five more lawsuits in his own name, seeking tens of billions of dollars in damages.
These suits were for defamation against a book publisher, Penguin Random House, and three media outlets, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the BBC. One suit accused a bank, JPMorgan Chase, of illegally closing his accounts, and another suit accused the U.S. Internal Revenue Service of failing to prevent the disclosure of his tax returns to the press.
The media companies and JPMorgan denied any wrongdoing. The IRS did not comment on the case or mount a defense in court.
Finally, the Delaware case against Trump was dismissed by Will in September, but not for immunity reasons.
Using Trump’s argument against him
Some of the targets of his lawsuits are trying to use the Republican president’s immunity claim against him, arguing that, if Trump says he is too busy to be overwhelmed by responding to lawsuits filed against him, he should not be allowed to sue others.
“It’s like saying: ‘Let’s play baseball and only I will bat’,” said Richard Primus, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School, about Trump’s stance on immunity.
In 1997, the U.S. Supreme Court weighed in on presidential immunity in civil cases in a ruling involving then-President Democrat Bill Clinton, declaring that presidents do not possess immunity. The justices allowed a defamation and sexual harassment case brought by Paula Jones, a former Arkansas state employee, to proceed against Clinton.
In a 2024 decision involving Trump, the Supreme Court determined that presidents have broad immunity from criminal prosecutions for official acts performed while in office, though that decision did not involve civil litigation.
The latest party involved in one of Trump’s lawsuits to reframe his immunity claim against him is public opinion researcher Ann Selzer, whom he sued together with the Des Moines Register and its editors in December 2024. The suit centers on a pre-election poll that showed his Democratic rival, Kamala Harris, ahead in Iowa, a state that Trump ultimately won.
Selzer tried, unsuccessfully, to stay the case during Trump’s term.
The defendants’ lawyers argued that Trump has a history of abusing the courts for his political agenda, and that his immunity claim could give him a new weapon to use against the media. They said Trump could demand documents and private depositions, known as discovery, from the defendants in the cases he filed, but then claim immunity when those demands were made of him.
“We would have had a unilateral investigation, a one-sided probe of the press,” said the Des Moines Register’s lawyer, Nick Klinefeldt, to Judge Scott Beattie of the Iowa state court, at a hearing held on January 30.
The judge acknowledged the limits of his authority to compel the president to comply with any court order.
“I can impose a $500 fine per violation and perhaps even a six-month jail sentence,” Beattie said. “But I am almost certain there will be resistance to that.”
Alan Ostergren, Trump’s attorney, said at the hearing that the president intends to comply with all orders issued by Beattie and that the judge could dismiss Trump’s case. On Tuesday, Beattie denied Selzer’s request to stay Trump’s case.
“Defamed and Wronged”
The Trump legal team said in a Reuters statement that immunity is vital to the presidency, arguing that it is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution and supported by legal precedents.
“Furthermore, President Trump, on behalf of all Americans and with them, has the inherent constitutional right to hold those who defamed and harmed him accountable. Contrary to the wishes of radical liberals and their media allies, presidents do not relinquish that right upon taking office,” Trump’s team said.
So far, the courts have ruled in Trump’s favor.
He has been dropped as a defendant in the lawsuits involving his social media company, filed in state courts in Delaware and Florida, though those courts did not address the immunity issue in their rulings.
Besides the Iowa judge’s decision, a Florida appellate court rejected a similar request to stay a defamation suit filed by Trump in 2022 against the Pulitzer Prize Board. He brought the action after the board rejected his bid to revoke the prize jointly awarded to The Washington Post and The New York Times in 2018 for their coverage of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and its ties to his campaign.
If Trump does not have time to devote to his suit against the Pulitzer, he is free to abandon the action on his own — a step he could not take as a defendant in a lawsuit, the appellate court said.
“Donald Trump is a habitual litigator,” Primus said, and the presidency makes his lawsuits extremely coercive for the defendants he targets. “If he has a legitimate legal claim for something, he can file a suit and ask the court to stay the proceedings until he leaves office. It’s not like he needs the money before then.”
