Trump Is on a Winning Streak in War on Press: Is Sullivan Next?

About 15 years ago, Guy Lawson had lunch in New York with his editors at Rolling Stone. He was tired of covering the drug wars in Mexico, and wanted to know what else they might be interested in.

“We want you to do stories about young people doing fucked-up things,” he was told.

The conversation led to an article about two stoner arms dealers who became entangled in corruption in Albania, which became a book and then the 2016 movie “War Dogs,” starring Jonah Hill and Miles Teller.

“It was a great story,” Lawson says.

It also got him sued. A year after the movie was released, Shkelzen Berisha, the son of the Albanian prime minister, accused Lawson of defamation.

The suit went to the Supreme Court, which refused to hear it. But two justices, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, sided with Berisha and suggested that New York Times v. Sullivan, the bulwark of sharp-elbowed journalism for 60 years, should be overturned.

“It was a very weak case,” Lawson says. “But it seems part of a larger attempt to change the whole notion of what precedent means and what constitutes freedom of expression.”

Until recently, President Trump’s war on the press has been seen as largely performative. His lawsuits could be time-consuming and costly but were doomed to fail, just like his threat to “open up” libel laws.

But since winning the election, he’s been on a hot streak. In December, Trump got a $16 million defamation settlement from ABC. Last week, Meta agreed to pay $25 million for kicking Trump off Facebook. Some also fear that the broader effort — an assault by Trump’s allies on the Sullivan decision — could also prevail.

“It seems he’s making good on these threats against the press,” says Samantha Barbas, author of “Actual Malice,” a history of the Sullivan case. The 1964 decision set a high bar for public officials to prove defamation. Barbas noted several recent challenges to…