A federal judge has thrown out President Donald Trump’s $15 billion lawsuit against Penguin Random House and the New York Times, which the President had filed earlier this week on the grounds of defamation, calling it “improper and impermissible in its present form.”

In the order, Judge Steven D. Merryday of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida dismissed the 85-page filing, which he described as “florid and enervating,” and said that, should the President’s attorneys want to refile, he would have to do in “a professional and dignified manner,” by limiting it to 40 pages and using more proper and concise legal language.

A PRH spokesperson said in a statement, “We applaud the judge's decision, which recognizes and dismisses such an ‘improper and impermissible’ complaint.” The publisher had previously called the suit “meritless,” and said it planned to "stand by the book and its authors and will continue to uphold the values of the First Amendment that are fundamental to our role as a book publisher.”

Trump’s original filing did not formally allege defamation until the 80th page. Before that, the judge said the document mostly lambasted Trump’s political rivals, including PRH and the Times, and engaged in gratuitous self-promotion.

“As every lawyer knows (or is presumed to know), a complaint is not a public forum for vituperation and invective,” wrote Judge Merryday, an appointee of George H.W. Bush. “A complaint is not a megaphone for public relations or a podium for a passionate oration at a political rally or the functional equivalent of the Hyde Park Speakers’ Corner.”

Filed in Florida on Monday, the lawsuit accused PRH, the Times, and four Times journalists, including Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig, of disparagement. The initial complaint claimed that Buettner and Craig’s book based on their reporting, Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success (Penguin Press), was “carefully crafted by Defendants, with actual malice, calculated to inflict maximum damage upon President Trump.”

The suit was only Trump’s latest attempt to punish a book publisher for putting out constitutionally protected speech with which he disagrees. In 2018, Trump tried to block Macmillan’s Henry Holt imprint from publishing Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury, and has either threatened to or sued Simon & Schuster over titles by former national security adviser John Bolton, his niece Mary Trump, and journalist Bob Woodward, among others.

Shortly after the lawsuit was filed, PW spoke with two big Big Five CEOs about the current political landscape in the U.S. and its impact on freedom of expression in the country today. Both affirmed the importance of continuing to publish books in the face of censorship and threats of retribution.

“The right to free speech is foundational in the U.S. for a reason, and the chilling or silencing of certain types of speech goes against this fundamental right,” Jon Karp, CEO of Simon & Schuster, said. “If you don’t like a book, you have the right to tell people you don’t like it and why, but not to prevent someone else from reading that book.”

“It’s important to push back against censorship in any format,” he added. “Our authors come first in everything we do, and we remain committed to protecting their rights to express their opinions and beliefs as well as the rights of the public to access those works.”

On the subject of Trump’s lawsuit, Karp added, “This isn’t a zero-sum game. Threats to a competitor’s First Amendment right to speech is a threat to our own. We stand in solidarity with any publisher that’s facing these challenges.”

Macmillan CEO Jon Yaged concurred. “We need to fight to make sure that we can continue to publish books that create a discourse and represent multiple points of view, especially when a book is being banned or authors feel pressured to self-censor,” he said. “The discourse is what’s valuable, and we have to make sure that it endures.”

Yaged further pointed to remarks he made earlier this year at the 2025 PEN Literary Gala, where he was presented with the organization’s 2025 Business Visionary Award.

“The concepts of censorship and free expression have been co-opted by people that want anything but the free exchange of ideas and the freedom to read. Their message is clear and overt—do what we want or else we will boycott you, delete your post, encourage others to dox you, or worse,” Yaged said in the speech. “All of this limits conversation and the free exchange of ideas,” he added. “It makes us a less effective democracy. Simply put, this makes us weaker, puts us on a path to mediocrity as a people and decline as a nation.”