By Nate Raymond and Jan Wolfe

Aug 4 - U.S. President Donald Trump repeatedly campaigned for his second term as a champion of free expression, vowing in his January 2025 inaugural address to stop what he described as years of "government censorship." 

Since then, a wave of court rulings has concluded his administration has done the opposite. Reuters identified 75 federal-judge rulings finding Trump’s government infringed on First-Amendment rights including freedoms of speech, religion, and the press.

The unprecedented pushback on constitutional grounds has included repeated findings that the administration chilled or squelched the speech of citizens and groups opposing the Republican's agenda.

"The President's palpable misunderstanding that the government simply cannot seek retribution for speech he disdains poses a great threat to Americans’ freedom of speech," Boston-based U.S. District Judge William Young wrote.

The judge, appointed by Republican President Ronald Reagan, ruled in September that the administration illegally detained, deported and revoked visas of foreign students and faculty because of their pro-Palestinian advocacy. Other judges found federal agencies terminated grants awarded to universities including Harvard for refusing to align with his ideological agenda; retaliated against law firms based on their legal advocacy; and used excessive force at protests. 

Trump administration officials have repeatedly called federal judges ruling against them "activists" who are interfering with the president's executive authority. White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson criticized the First-Amendment rulings in a statement, saying "the federal judiciary has repeatedly endangered and obstructed the election choices of the American people with its unlawful rulings."

LOSING STREAK

The 75 cases that produced lower-court rulings against the Trump administration were among 93 total cases during his second term in which judges addressed First-Amendment arguments, Reuters found. Trump's losing streak mostly came from judges appointed by Democratic presidents, but Republican appointees delivered decisions in 10 cases.

By comparison, during Democratic President Joe Biden's presidential term, Reuters identified just 27 cases in which lower-court judges weighed First-Amendment challenges to his agenda. Judges ruled against his administration in 13 of those. Most of the lower-court rulings against the Biden administration involved its vaccine mandates, which were challenged on religious-freedom grounds.

Reuters tallied the First-Amendment cases by searching federal court records and Westlaw, a legal research service. Both Reuters and Westlaw are owned by Thomson Reuters. When similar lawsuits were consolidated by a court or when a judge issued multiple rulings in the same lawsuit, Reuters counted them as one case. The review focused on civil lawsuits filed against the Trump administration and excluded cases by self-represented litigants.

Some of the rulings are preliminary, meaning that the judge acted on a request for speedy action before hearing the full merits of the case.

The lawsuits were frequently filed by Trump’s ideological foes or by media organizations, such as when the New York Times and Associated Press asked judges to halt restrictions on their ability to cover the White House or the Pentagon. The AP and the New York Times won at the lower court level, though some of the rulings are on hold pending appeal.

The Trump administration launched appeals in about two-thirds of the cases while electing to let other rulings stand. It chose not to challenge rulings that, for instance, prevented it from interfering with what academics can discuss in classrooms and from slashing longstanding grants awarded to legal and medical organizations that have opposed the administration’s agenda.

In appeals of 15 of the 75 rulings that went against Trump, his administration successfully persuaded courts either to put a district court judge's First-Amendment ruling on hold or overturn it entirely.

In significant victories for the administration, two appeals courts this year have overturned lower-court rulings that had led to the ​release of pro-Palestinian campus activists who had attended Columbia University, Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi. The appellate judges found the lower courts had no jurisdiction to hear those cases, without ruling on the lawsuits’ merits. Khalil's lawyers have said he plans to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. 

In one appeal the administration did win on the merits, the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in February overturned a ruling that had blocked the Trump administration from stripping hundreds of thousands of federal workers of the ability to engage in union bargaining with U.S. agencies.

The unions argued that Trump took that action in order to retaliate against them challenging his administration's policies, in violation of the First Amendment. But a three-judge panel said Trump would have taken the same action whether or not he intended to punish unions for their advocacy.

Other appeals courts have been less receptive. In May, the 9th Circuit agreed with a lower-court judge that terminating federal grants awarded to University of California researchers – as part of Trump's  anti-DEI push – constituted viewpoint discrimination.

RAILING AGAINST 'CENSORSHIP'

Trump rode to his second-term win after railing against an "online censorship regime" that he said the Biden administration imposed when it required media companies to suppress alleged misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic and after the 2020 election. He echoed themes from his first presidential campaign, including opposition to what he called "cancel culture," as some conservatives complained that social and professional pressures discouraged the expression of their political views. 

Hours after his 2025 inauguration, Trump signed an executive order titled "Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship," which directed that no federal agency or employee would unconstitutionally abridge Americans' speech rights.

Critics say that promise was almost immediately undercut by a flurry of other executive orders and policies seeking to exact retribution against foes or targeting viewpoints the president opposed.

Among those early orders were those directing an end to federal funding his administration deemed as supporting "gender ideology" or diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), two subjects at the heart of many of the lawsuits alleging First-Amendment violations by the administration.

Timothy Zick, a professor at William & Mary Law School and author of a book titled "Trump 2.0: Executive Power and the First Amendment," said no president has taken such sweeping action to suppress speech since President Woodrow Wilson, early last century, oversaw the thousands of deportations and arrests during the First Red Scare, a period of anti-communist and anti-immigrant fervor.

At that time, Zick said, court precedents were far less clear on whether the First Amendment protects speech critical of the government. "Trump is operating in this situation where the First Amendment's boundaries are very clear," he said.

A Washington federal appeals court appears poised based on arguments it heard in May to uphold lower courts' decisions that Trump's campaign against law firms and lawyers infringed upon free speech. 

Among those decisions was a May 2025 ruling by U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell, an appointee of Democratic President Barack Obama, who castigated Trump for targeting the law firm Perkins Coie through an executive order that suspended its lawyers' security clearances and barred them from entering federal buildings based on its past work for his political opponents.

"Settling personal vendettas by targeting a disliked business or individual for punitive government action is not a legitimate use of the powers of the U.S. government or an American President," Howell wrote.

(Reporting by Jan Wolfe and Nate Raymond; editing by Amy Stevens and Anna Driver)

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(Reporting by Jan Wolfe and Nate Raymond; editing by Amy Stevens and Anna Driver)

President Donald Trump has again raged at the U.S. Supreme Court over its rulings against his administration, complaining – without evidence – that the justices’ judgements had cost the nation “trillions and trillions of dollars.”

Posting on Truth Social late Wednesday, the president asked: “Does anybody have any idea how much Money and Prestige the United States Supreme Court has cost our Nation with their negative Rulings on Birthright Citizenship and TARIFFS? The answer, TRILLIONS AND TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS!”

The highest court voted against Trump in cases challenging both of the policies he mentioned, in each instance by a 6-3 majority in which two conservative justices the president himself nominated to the bench sided against him, inspiring his obvious frustration.

In the birthright citizenship case, the court ruled against him on June 30, concluding that his attempt to deny automatic citizenship to people born on U.S. soil to parents who are in the country illegally was unconstitutional.

The justices – including Trump appointees Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh – endorsed the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause, which states that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.”

The Supreme Court has found the definition to apply to all children born in the U.S. for more than 100 years and Congress codified the Constitution’s phrasing into law in 1952, hence the rejection of Trump’s contentious executive order seeking to revise it.

Chief Justice John Roberts, writing in the majority opinion, said there was “scant evidence” to support the administration’s “dramatically revisionist view” of the amendment.

In the tariffs case, the court overturned the president’s signature economic strategy on February 20, concluding that the “reciprocal” levies he had placed on foreign trading partners had been unlawfully imposed via the International Emergency Economic Powers Act 1977.

Barrett and another Trump appointee, Neil Gorsuch, opposed the tariffs, leading the president to deliver a furious press conference in which he rebuked the justices by saying: “I’m ashamed of certain members of the court, absolutely ashamed. For not having the courage to do what’s right for the country.

“They’re against anything that makes America strong, healthy and great again. They are also frankly a disgrace to our nation, those justices. They’re very unpatriotic and disloyal to our Constitution.”

The administration has already been forced to pay back more than $81 billion of the money it raked in under the tax strategy.

Contrary to the president’s claims in his latest post, Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, concluded on April 2 – the one-year anniversary of “Liberation Day,” on which Trump first announced the policy – that it had backfired and done “significant damage to the economy.”

Also on Truth Social Wednesday, the president singled out Barrett for criticism by reposting a breakdown of her voting record on which right-wing podcaster Tim Pool had commented: “Amy Coney Barrett is clearly terrified of the left.”

Barrett told a House of Representatives subcommittee earlier this month that the threat level to her and other federal judges is currently “really high” given the highly-charged political atmosphere of the moment, a danger Trump’s attacks risk exacerbating.

Despite the president’s anger with the Supreme Court, he continues to appeal to it to resolve his problems, asking it Wednesday to throw out the $83.3 million defamation verdict won by writer E Jean Carroll from a New York City court in January 2024.

Carroll accused Trump in her 2019 memoir of sexually assaulting her in a dressing room at the Bergdorf Goodman department store in Manhattan in the mid-1990s.

While lower courts have upheld the 2024 verdict, the payout has been paused while the Supreme Court considers whether to hear the president’s appeal, which is based around the argument that he cannot be held personally liable for statements he made while serving in the White House.

The court declined in June to hear Trump’s appeal of a separate $5 million verdict in Carroll’s favor.

Trump has repeatedly denied all the allegations made against him.

(Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP photo)

President Donald Trump raged against the Supreme Court in a Truth Social tirade on Wednesday evening, saying that recent rulings on his tariffs and birthright citizenship have cost America “TRILLIONS AND TRILLIONS.”

“Does anybody have any idea how much Money and Prestige the United States Supreme Court has cost our Nation with their negative Rulings on Birthright Citizenship and TARIFFS?” the president asked in his post just after 6 p.m. ET.

“The answer, TRILLIONS AND TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS!”

In a 6-3 ruling back in February, the Supreme Court ruled that Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs are illegal, a decision Trump called a “disgrace” at the time.

In June, the court essentially upheldthe nation’s 14th Amendment, which guarantees citizenship for those “born or naturalized” in the United States.

The ruling was a serious blow to Trump, who declared in an executive order on the first day of his second term that children born to illegal immigrants, or those in the country temporarily, are not U.S. citizens.

The post Trump Blows His Top at Supreme Court Over ‘Negative’ Rulings: Cost US ‘TRILLIONS AND TRILLIONS!’ first appeared on Mediaite.

President Donald Trump is again asking the Supreme Court to intervene in his yearslong legal battle with writer E. Jean Carroll, this time arguing that he should not have to pay an $83.3 million jury award on the grounds of presidential immunity.

Lawyers for Trump urged the high court to review the case and consider overturning the jury’s ruling in 2024 that found he defamed Carroll after he repeatedly denied that he sexually abused her in a dressing room in 1996.

“This is the first case in our Nation’s history in which a court has imposed damages liability on a President for his conduct in office,” Trump’s lawyers wrote in the filing, calling the $83.3 million award “exorbitant.”

“If left standing, the decision below will cause significant damage, not only to this President and future Presidents, but also to ‘the Nation that the Presidency was designed to serve,’” they wrote.

Carroll sued Trump in 2019 over allegations that he defamed her during his first term in office, including when he said she made up the allegations of sexual abuse to sell more copies of her upcoming book.

Trump’s lawyers argued Tuesday that under the Westfall Act, a federal statute that protects government employees from certain lawsuits while they are engaged in their official duties, Trump should be able to swap out his name as the defendant in the case and replace it with the U.S. government.

If it is applied, the act would essentially nullify Carroll’s case, since the U.S. government cannot be sued for defamation.

“Here, the president of the United States has been ordered to pay nearly $100 million in damages ... for issuing a press release and answering reporters’ questions, from the White House, defending against attacks on his fitness for office,” the filing said.

Trump’s lawyers argued that the “threat of even a single damages judgment based on official acts will render all Presidents ‘unable to boldly and fearlessly carry out [their] duties for fear that [they] may be next.’”

Trump asked a federal appeals court to consider his argument for presidential immunity in the case in April when his lawyers requested a rehearing before a full bench of judges.

The appeals court denied the request, as did a three-judge panel that rejected an appeal from Trump in September that was based on presidential immunity.

Trump’s lawyers pushed back against the appeals court’s ruling in the filing Tuesday, citing the Supreme Court’s 2024 decision on presidential immunity.

The filing said the appeals court “refused to apply Presidential immunity even after this Court recognized that ‘most of a President’s public communications are likely to fall comfortably within’ that protection.”

Carroll’s legal team declined to comment on the petition Tuesday evening.

The Supreme Court denied Trump’s request last month to review a separate successful defamation lawsuit filed by Carroll.

That case, which was filed in 2022 after her initial lawsuit was delayed by legal questions, focused on the sexual abuse itself and on claims that Trump defamed her after he left office. A jury awarded Carroll $5 million in the second case in 2023.

Carroll collected the award from that judgment this month after Trump tried repeatedly to block the payment in court. Trump has denied all wrongdoing in both cases.

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com