President Donald Trump’s diatribes against the news media and Big Tech are more than a major plank in his MAGA platform. They’ve also been highly lucrative.
A 2025 financial disclosure filing released Tuesday by the U.S. Office of Government Ethics revealed that Trump earned $86.5 million from legal settlements with media and tech companies he had sued.
The scale of presidential income is unprecedented, as are the lawsuits that led to the settlements. Many presidents have criticized the news media over coverage they disliked, but until Trump, no sitting president had ever sued a media outlet for defamation — or collected millions of dollars to dismiss such a claim.
Trump has done so repeatedly. He has never won a defamation case in court, despite filing more than 30 such lawsuits against news organizations or journalists since the 1980s. To the contrary, Trump has lost many defamation cases, both as a plaintiff and a defendant. The most notable may be the 2023 finding — which the Supreme Court recently let stand — that he was liable for sexual assault and defaming writer E. Jean Carroll, with a jury awarding her $5 million. Legal experts say that Trump faces nearly insurmountable odds to win a defamation case at trial.
But once Trump won a second term, the implicit threat of presidential punishment loomed. Suddenly, Trump’s ability to extract large payments without going into court increased markedly.
He has never won a defamation case in court, despite filing more than 30 such lawsuits against news organizations or journalists since the 1980s.
The settlements — part of some $2 billion in presidential revenue, most of it from cryptocurrency earnings — stem from lawsuits Trump filed against media and tech companies between 2021 and 2024. All were resolved after Election Day 2024.
Among them are settlements that attracted widespread attention, including a $15 million payment from ABC News’ parent company, Disney, to resolve Trump’s 2024 lawsuit against anchor George Stephanopoulos. There is also Paramount Global’s $16 million payment last year to settle Trump’s 2024 lawsuit against Paramount-owned CBS News and “60 Minutes.” Barely three weeks after the latter settlement, federal regulators approved Skydance Media’s buyout of Paramount.
On the tech side, Trump received a collective $59 million from the parent companies of YouTube, Facebook and X last year to settle his objections to the suspension of his social media accounts after the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riots. The companies briefly removed him from their platforms, citing policies against inciting violence, but restored him long before agreeing to terms.
The settlements went to the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library Foundation Inc., the document said.
The key question about these payments to the Trumps (according to the disclosure, the first lady received $10.71 million from Amazon, which spent $75 million to acquire and market a documentary about her) is whether Trump has used the power of the presidency, or the threat of his power, to extract money from companies subject to his administration’s decisions. The White House did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this article. When previously asked about allegations of corruption or conflicts of interest, spokespeople have said that “Neither the President nor his family has ever engaged — or will ever engage — in conflicts of interest.”
In the wake of Trump’s settlement with Paramount, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and fellow House and Senate Democrats introduced legislation to close loopholes involving financial contributions to presidential library funds. The proposed Presidential Library Anti-Corruption Act would delay fundraising for libraries until after a president leaves office, establish a cap on contributions and ban conversion of donations for personal use, among other provisions. Congress has yet to act on it.
“The story here isn’t the amount [of the settlements]. It’s that this guy can’t win a case in court on the merits,” said Bob Corn-Revere, chief counsel of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that defends First Amendment rights. “He has to use the regulatory agencies to put pressure on companies to settle.”
Corn-Revere and FIRE represent former Des Moines Register pollster J. Ann Selzer, whom Trump sued in late 2024 over a pre-election poll indicating Trump would lose the state by a wide margin (he later won it). Selzer and the Register continue to contest the case, Corn-Revere said, because they believe they can win on the merits and because newspapers aren’t subject to the kind of regulatory leverage that other media companies face.
“Many of these settlements and payouts were made by corporate media owners more interested in doing deals under the Trump administration than they are in standing up for the First Amendment rights of their newsrooms,” said Tim Karr, a spokesman for Free Press, a media reform and press advocacy organization.
“To them, payments for Trump’s presidential library — some would call them bribes — are necessary to grease the regulatory skids for future deal approval. They see payments as the cost of doing business under Trump 2.0. They are simply fulfilling their fiduciary obligation to shareholders; their moral obligation to defend free-speech rights isn’t a part of the calculus.”
Trump has several defamation lawsuits pending against news organizations and reporters, with damage demands running into the tens of billions. Targets include The New York Times (over articles about his tax returns); The Wall Street Journal (over an article about a birthday card he allegedly sent to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein); and the BBC (over a 2024 documentary about the Capitol riot that allegedly used deceptive editing).
Press experts and free-speech advocates have viewed Trump’s broadsides against the news media with alarm, citing his lawsuits as part of a larger array of administration threats and actions to limit or punish reporters, such as defunding public broadcasting, dismantling the federally funded Voice of America news agency and restricting reporters’ access to the Pentagon. Trump’s appointee at the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, has been a key ally and has threatened late-night TV hosts critical of Trump while launching investigations into the president’s perceived media adversaries.
Trump’s chances of prevailing in court remain low. A judge initially dismissed Trump’s suit against The Wall Street Journal, for instance, saying he had not shown the paper had published with “actual malice,” though Trump’s legal team has refiled. U.S. law requires plaintiffs to prove not just that a publication reported inaccurately but that it knew its reporting was false before publication. But while Trump has never been able to meet that standard in court, his financial disclosure suggests he doesn’t have to. As president, he has other ways to make media pay.
Paul Farhi is a former media reporter for The Washington Post, where he was a staff writer for more than 35 years. He writes about the media industry for The Atlantic, The Daily Beast and Columbia Journalism Review, among other outlets.
