Anna Bower and Eric Columbus write:

Donald J. Trump is famously the most litigious of all American presidents. From his years as a New York real estate mogul through both terms in the White House, he has used litigation not merely as a legal tool, but as a political weapon. In 2023, a federal judge fined him and his attorney, Alina Habba, nearly $1 million, for filing a “completely frivolous” lawsuit against Hillary Clinton and 30 other defendants. The judge described Trump as “a prolific and sophisticated litigant who is repeatedly using the courts to seek revenge on political adversaries.”

During his second term alone, the Litigator-in-Chief has initiated lawsuits, or continued pursuing previously-filed lawsuits, against a lengthy roster of people and institutions he regards as political or personal adversaries. The targets have included an Iowa newspaper and pollster who showed him trailing in the state; CBS, for editing an interview with Kamala Harris; Bob Woodward, for publishing interviews with him in an audiobook; the Wall Street Journal, for alleging that he submitted a note for Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th birthday book with a drawing of a naked female; the BBC, for rearranging portions of his Jan. 6 speech in a documentary; and the Pulitzer Prize board, for declining to rescind a 2018 award to the New York Times and the Washington Post in relation to their reporting on Russian interference in the 2016 election. He has also strong-armed Twitter (now X), Meta, and YouTube into paying (after he returned to the presidency) a combined $60 million to settle his lawsuits stemming from the suspension of his social media accounts in the aftermath of the 2020 election.

Against that backdrop, perhaps it should come as no surprise that one of the most breathtakingly corrupt episodes of Trump’s second term began with a lawsuit he filed against the very government he now controls. On Jan. 29, 2026, Trump—joined by his two eldest sons and the Trump Organization—filed a suit against the IRS and the Treasury Department. They claimed that a former IRS contractor, Charles Littlejohn, had illegally disclosed Trump’s tax return information to the New York Times and other media outlets. Trump said any money he makes off of this suit would go to charity.

As it turns out, his political allies are the “charity,” and American taxpayers are the donors. [Continue reading…]