President Trump has threatened the Center for American Progress with a $5 billion defamation lawsuit over a report concluding that his administration's National Guard deployments to American cities have not reduced violent crime, according to a New York Times report made public last week. [1] A Freedom of the Press Foundation analysis published Thursday argues the threat represents a meaningfully different target than Trump's previous defamation lawsuits against news organizations — and a more dangerous one for how policy criticism functions in American public life.

The distinction Freedom of the Press Foundation draws is specific. Trump's lawsuits against the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times concerned his private conduct before he became president; his suit against the BBC concerned a specific statement he says was attributed to him personally. [2] The CAP threat is different in kind: it targets a statistical claim about whether a government policy — the National Guard deployments — is achieving what the administration says it achieves. "It's about whether his government's policies are as effective as the Trump administration claims they are," Freedom of the Press Foundation's Caitlin Vogus wrote. [2]

The underlying report is a three-stage statistical analysis CAP published in July, using an interrupted time-series method across citywide homicide, violent-crime and gun-victimization data in Los Angeles, Washington, Memphis and New Orleans — the cities where National Guard troops were deployed starting in June 2025. [3] The analysis found no statistically significant crime-reduction effect attributable to the deployments in any city except Memphis, where an initial drop reversed within two months, leaving the researchers to conclude the intervention may have had a crime-exacerbating effect over the full deployment period rather than a beneficial one. [3] CAP separately estimated the deployments could cost taxpayers more than $1.7 billion if extended through the end of 2026, citing a Congressional Budget Office letter that put 2025's cost alone at $496 million. [3] Violent crime and homicide rates in the targeted cities were already declining for roughly a year before the first deployment to Los Angeles in June 2025, according to CAP's analysis of the same underlying data the administration has cited as evidence of the deployments' success. [3]

Vogus's argument for why this threat matters beyond CAP itself rests on a specific legal history. The Sedition Act of 1798 criminalized "false, scandalous and malicious writing" against the government or the president, provoking what Vogus calls a furious reaction from James Madison, the First Amendment's chief author, and was used in partisan prosecutions of journalists and political opponents before being allowed to expire. [2] More than 150 years later, the Supreme Court's decision in New York Times v. Sullivan established not only the "actual malice" standard for defamation claims by public officials, but also the principle that government itself cannot bring defamation suits — and that officials cannot evade that limit simply by filing in their own personal names when the underlying claim is actually about government policy. [2] "Trump shouldn't be able to accomplish the same result by recasting that criticism as statements that defame him personally," Vogus wrote, framing CAP's report as squarely a critique of "what the Trump administration is doing," not a personal claim about Trump himself. [2]

The stakes Vogus outlines extend well past one think tank's crime-policy report. If a president can convert "your policy isn't working the way you say it is" into a viable personal defamation claim, the same theory would expose journalists analyzing government policy, op-ed writers, and academics to identical legal risk — regardless of which party holds power. Vogus poses the comparison directly: should President Biden have been able to sue the Heritage Foundation over its criticism of his immigration or voter-ID positions? "Of course not," she writes, arguing the same constitutional limit that would have protected Heritage Foundation's criticism of a Democratic president protects CAP's criticism of a Republican one. [2] Should Trump actually file suit, Vogus argues the courts should "reject it out of hand," warning that allowing it to proceed would function as "a modern-day Sedition Act, giving the government the power to silence its critics." [2]

CAP has not publicly confirmed retaining outside counsel in response to the threat, and no court filing had surfaced as of Thursday. What is already established is the shape of the argument CAP's report makes and the shape of the threat responding to it: a data-driven finding that a signature security policy isn't working, met with a nine-figure legal threat aimed not at a specific false statement about Trump the person, but at the empirical conclusion itself.

-- ANNA WEBER, Berlin