Who gets to decide when the President sues his own government?
Consider This from NPR
NPR
4.2 • 6.2K Ratings
🗓️ 18 February 2026
⏱️ 12 minutes
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Summary
Of all the ways President Trump has pushed the bounds of executive power one stands out to lawyers and watchdogs.
He wants the government he leads to pay him billions of dollars.
Trump has filed multiple claims arguing he’s been hurt by Justice Department investigations and the leak of his tax returns years ago.
What does that mean to be on both sides of these legal claims? For sponsor-free episodes of Consider This, sign up for Consider This+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org. Email us at considerthis@npr.org.
This episode was produced by Erika Ryan with audio engineering by Damian Herring.
It was edited by Courtney Dorning.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Over the course of his adult life, President Donald Trump and his companies have been involved in |
| 0:04.5 | thousands of lawsuits. It might even call him litigious. I think we have a case that's going to be |
| 0:10.6 | not only very interesting, but a case that we're going to win. The way that they've established |
| 0:14.7 | themselves, the practices that they've used, are going to be brought out very strongly in the case. |
| 0:19.1 | That's Trump speaking to ABC's Good Morning America back in 1984. |
| 0:23.8 | At the time, he owned the New Jersey Generals, a team in the USFL, the U.S. Football League. |
| 0:28.7 | Trump led fellow owners in filing an antitrust suit against the rival National Football League. |
| 0:35.0 | That pattern of behavior turning to the courts has been playing out for |
| 0:38.1 | at least five decades. Back in 1973, Trump countersued the U.S. Department of Justice for |
| 0:44.5 | defamation and $100 million. That came after Trump, his father, and their company were accused |
| 0:50.0 | of racial discrimination under the Fair Housing Act. Trump's suit was dismissed, and the Justice Department settled with Trump, his father, and his |
| 0:58.0 | company a couple of years later. |
| 1:00.2 | The suits and the countersuits continued steadily all the way from when the real estate magnate |
| 1:05.1 | became a candidate, the president, the former president, and once again president. |
| 1:10.1 | Donald Trump spends a lot of time with lawyers. |
| 1:13.4 | She said that I did something to her that never took place. There was no anything. I know |
| 1:22.8 | nothing about this nut job. That's from a deposition President Trump gave back in 2022. The writer E. Gene |
| 1:29.8 | Carroll successfully sued Trump for defamation and sexual assault. Trump later filed a |
| 1:35.1 | countersuit saying Carol defamed him. The president has also sued CNN, ABC, CBS, the Wall Street Journal, |
| 1:42.6 | the New York Times, and most recently the BBC. |
| 1:45.8 | Here's President Trump in November. |
| 1:47.5 | We'll sue them for anywhere between a billion and $5 billion. |
... |
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