Yes, Donald Trump Can Create Problems For Free Speech & The First Amendment

A few weeks ago, Donald Trump's spokesperson claimed that he had "single-handedly brought back free speech." It was an odd thing to say for a variety of reasons. First, the US has really strong free speech protections and they haven't gone away (even if there are some threats to them). That is, free speech doesn't need to be "brought back" because it's already here. Second, Trump himself, just a few weeks earlier was quoted deliberately mocking free speech, claiming that people who support it are "foolish people." And then, of course, there's the fact that Trump has a very, very long and detailed history of both threatening to sue, and actually suing, over the speech of others. As Walter Olson noted:

Donald Trump has been filing and threatening lawsuits to shut up critics and adversaries over the whole course of his career. He dragged reporter Tim O’Brien through years of litigation over a relatively favorable Trump biography that assigned a lower valuation to his net worth than he thought it should have. He sued the Chicago Tribune’s architecture critic over a piece arguing that a planned Trump skyscraper in lower Manhattan would be “one of the silliest things” that could be built in the city. He used the threat of litigation to get an investment firm to fire an analyst who correctly predicted that the Taj Mahal casino would not be a financial success. He sued comedian Bill Maher over a joke.

That first case is instructive. I highly recommend reading the details. O'Brien wrote a biography of Trump which was mostly favorable to Trump, but which briefly mentioned that he might only be worth hundreds of millions of dollars, rather than billions, and Trump sued him over that claim. And as that link notes, Trump didn't just lose, he was "humiliated" by the courts. Incredibly, Trump still seems to insist that he "won" the case by basically redefining having the case totally tossed out of the courts as winning:

@julesmattsson Wrong, totally proved my case but didn't get damages because the libel laws in this Country suck!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 24, 2013

And that leaves out plenty of other threats, such as threatening to sue Rosie O'Donnell for mocking him, threatening to sue competitor Ted Cruz for challenging his political views or actually suing Univision claiming that because its President of Programming posted an Instagram picture showing Trump next to Charleston, South Carolina, shooter Dylann Roof, with the text "No comments," that was somehow "defamatory." That lawsuit was just settled a few weeks ago, which is interesting because, as John Oliver recently noted, Trump insists he refuses to settle lawsuits. Anyway, last Friday Trump made even more news, saying that if he wins he's planning to "open up" libel laws to make it even easier to sue. Given his statement in the Tweet above about how he won... except for what libel laws actually say, it's not surprising that he wants to change such laws. Here are the key points. After talking about how he hates the Washington Post, and thinks Jeff Bezos just bought it for political influence, he notes:

If I become President, oh, are they going to have problems. They're going to have such problems. ... One of the things I'm going to do if I win, and I hope we do and we're certainly leading. I'm going