Lawyers for President Donald Trump are threatening a $5 billion defamation lawsuit against a progressive think tank unless it retracts a report analyzing the administration’s National Guard deployments across the country, which reported no measurable impact on violent crime rates. The president lashed out at the Center for American Progress and one of its employees who appeared on C-SPAN to discuss the report earlier this month. The analysis determined that the president’s decision to send federalized troops into American cities was largely ineffective at a cost of roughly $1.7 billion.
Trump’s personal lawyer Alexander Brito sent a letter to the group on Monday warning that the president will file a defamation claim unless the think tank pulled last month’s report. He gave the organization until 5 p.m. Friday to retract the report and apologize to the president.
Center for American Progress CEO Neera Tanden — a former adviser to Joe Biden — defended the analysis in a Friday statement, stating that the group’s work “is grounded in rigorous, evidence-based research and analysis” and has studied the impacts of government policies in both Democratic and Republican administrations. A lawsuit is a transparent attempt to silence us. We will neither cower nor bend in the face of it.” The president has spent the last decade raging against a free press he calls “fake news” and the “enemy of the people” while waging a legal war against the media in courtrooms across the country.
He has repeatedly threatened to revoke broadcast licenses for news networks over critical coverage or stories he doesn’t like and has unsuccessfully sued top networks and newspapers for defamation. He even tried to sue The Des Moines Register newspaper by arguing that an unfavorable poll that was published before the 2024 election amounted to fraud and election interference. Trump’s Federal Communications Commission’s chair Brendan Carr has also launched probes into public broadcasting services NPR and PBS and revived complaints into ABC, CBS and NBC.
Many of these threats have failed in court under judicial scrutiny; Brito himself faces potential disciplinary proceedings after a judge determined that he filed a dubious lawsuit on Trump’s behalf against his own IRS for the sole purpose of forcing a settlement that bailed him out from tax investigations. Efforts to silence independent research because its findings are unwelcome by an administration or president should alarm every American.” The group’s lengthy report determined that, while Trump tries to take credit for plunging violent crime rates across the country, the trend started well before he entered office, and he is using those historic declines “to justify expanding policies that are unpopular, ineffective and costly.” On average, the 11 cities where Trump deployed or threatened to deploy the National Guard saw a 14 percent decrease in violent crime and a 22 percent decrease in their murder rates from June 2024 to June 2025 — before the National Guard was first deployed to Los Angeles, according to the report. In a Truth Social rant earlier this month, Trump targeted Chandler Hall, an associate director for public safety at the Center for American Progress.
He called the report “another Radical Left SCAM” and threatened to sue the organization and several of its prominent backers, including the liberal philanthropist George Soros. Their stated course is anything to hate or demean ‘TRUMP.’ This will be met with a lawsuit, which is being drawn now.” He said he is “strongly considering adding some of the contributors to this Fake Organization” to the list of defendants. Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies
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