Trump Threatens to SUE Soros, Google, Apple and More

September 8, 2026

man in suit pointing toward the camera at an event — Photo: Evan El-Amin / Shutterstock

The fight isn’t really about crime statistics; it’s about whether data-driven criticism of government policy can be contested with defamation threats. On the evidence, the Center for American Progress’ analysis of National Guard deployments stands intact, while the legal path President Trump has floated to punish it is an uphill climb under U.S. defamation law.

The Short Version

CAP’s report concludes National Guard deployments did not measurably reduce violent crime; CAP’s leadership reaffirmed it after Trump threatened a $5 billion lawsuit.
Independent coverage and a fact-check have not produced contrary data showing the Guard changed city crime trends; they instead question Trump’s causal claims.
For a public-figure plaintiff, defamation requires proving “actual malice” about specific statements — a steep standard for empirical analysis grounded in public datasets.
This clash fits a broader pattern: powerful actors using legal threats to chill policy research — a tactic that often falters in court but can impose real costs on targets.

What CAP actually claimed — and tested

The Center for American Progress (CAP) published a July analysis examining the Trump administration’s National Guard deployments to U.S. cities. Its core finding was narrow and empirical: across multiple cities, datasets, and time windows, there was no compelling evidence that the deployments reduced homicides, violent crime, or gun violence. The paper explicitly separated questions of whether crime fell (in many places it did) from whether the Guard caused additional reductions beyond existing trends — and said the data did not show a Guard effect. CAP publicly stood by the work after a demand letter from Trump’s counsel threatened a $5 billion defamation suit and demanded retraction; the think tank declined to retract, characterizing the document as a factual report built on public data and methods.

Two details from the report frame its causal skepticism. First, several of the targeted or threatened cities had already seen double-digit declines in violent crime and murder in the period preceding federal intervention, making attribution to later Guard deployments methodologically fragile. Second, the study did not rely on a single measurement window or dataset — the author tested multiple windows and measures, varying the specification to look for a deployment-linked inflection. Those specifications did not yield a measurable crime drop associated with the Guard presence.

Trump’s counter-claim and what the data do — and don’t — support

The White House has touted a steep national decline in violent crime under President Trump, pointing to 2025 as a year of historic improvement. Nationwide crime rates did fall from pandemic-era highs, consistent with multi-year reversion observed across cities; the disagreement here is not the existence of a decline but the mechanism. Trump’s rhetoric credits administration measures, including Guard deployments, for reductions in specific cities and nationally. Independent fact-checking has pushed back, noting that the dramatic percentage drops Trump has publicly cited for Guard-policed cities do not line up with local police data and that experts dispute the Guard as the primary driver of any observed improvement. In other words, the causal chain Trump asserts remains unsubstantiated at the city-by-city level where attribution can be tested.

On that narrow question — did Guard deployments measurably reduce violent crime in the cities that got them — CAP’s position currently faces little evidence-based rebuttal. Press coverage reflects CAP’s methodological description and reiterates the same conclusion: crime may have fallen, but the deployments did not create a detectable incremental reduction when examined against preexisting trends. Even outlets sympathetic to the administration relay the CAP estimate that targeted cities were already trending down, which weakens simple before/after claims.

Why this turns on defamation law more than criminology

Defamation law is not a vehicle for resolving methodological disputes in social science. For a public official or public figure to prevail, they must prove that a challenged statement was false, defamatory, and published with “actual malice” — knowledge of falsity or reckless disregard for truth — and they must do so statement by statement. Empirical judgments drawn from disclosed data and methods are typically treated as protected opinion or as non-actionable conclusions, unless the plaintiff can show the underlying factual assertions are false and that the author knew they were false while publishing. That is a high bar, designed precisely to avoid punishing robust critique of public policy.

Practically, Trump would need to identify specific factual statements in CAP’s report that are provably false — not merely arguable — and then show CAP knew or entertained serious doubts about their falsity at the time of publication. General displeasure with the inference (“no evidence of impact”) does not suffice. Courts have long distinguished between contestable interpretations of data, which belong to public debate, and outright factual fabrications. For research organizations, transparency about sources and methods is the best defense; CAP’s public posture emphasizes exactly that.

The broader pattern: litigation as message discipline

This episode fits a larger trend: legal threats aimed at silencing or deterring critical analysis. Strategic lawsuits against public participation — SLAPPs — and similar tactics have grown more visible in recent years across sectors, with politicians and powerful interests prominent among filers. Even when defendants ultimately prevail, the cost of defense, discovery burdens, and reputational fog can chill speech. That is why many jurisdictions have adopted anti-SLAPP statutes to enable early dismissal of meritless claims and fee-shifting; even so, the median cost to beat such suits can be substantial, and exposure to broad discovery can be the point, not the prelude. In the United States, the Sullivan “actual malice” standard remains a bulwark for speech about public officials — an especially strong shield for data-driven criticism of official conduct.

Seen through that lens, the threatened suit functions as political communication as much as legal maneuver. It signals to critics that aggressive analysis may trigger expensive fights; it reassures allies that the administration contests narratives that undercut its crime-fighting brand; and it gambles that even if a case never reaches a verdict, the threat alone can move the conversation. The legal merits, however, still run through settled doctrine that favors open debate over policy efficacy.

Trump Lawsuit Against Soros-Center

Trump announced a lawsuit against the left-wing think tank Center for American Progress (CAP) after the organization reported that the National Guard being deployed to several cities had no impact on crime.https://t.co/tw30t5SU4U

— J LAF (@IemnutzJ) September 7, 2026

What to watch: evidence, not volume

Two developments would materially change the calculus. First, if the administration or independent researchers produced a city-level causal analysis — not a national aggregate — showing a discernible Guard effect that survives reasonable robustness checks, that would meet CAP’s argument on the field of evidence. Second, if a complaint identified specific false factual statements in CAP’s report and produced internal communications showing publication despite known falsity, the defamation posture would shift. Neither exists in the public record today; the administration’s claims remain global and thematic, while CAP’s are granular and methodological.

In the meantime, the prudent reading is straightforward. Crime fell broadly from its pandemic spike, driven by a mix of local enforcement, community prevention, demographic normalization, and economic stabilization. The National Guard, deployed episodically to certain cities, has not been shown to deliver an incremental reduction beyond those forces. Disagreeing with that inference is politics. Defeating it in court would require something else entirely: proof.