Trump Sues Facebook, Twitter, And Google On Grounds That They Are Secretly The Federal Government, An Entity He Personally Operated Until Six Months Prior

BEDMINSTER, N.J. Standing at a lectern at his New Jersey golf club on Friday, former President Donald Trump announced a major class-action lawsuit against Facebook, Twitter, and Google, demanding that the courts compel the three private companies to stop removing his posts on the constitutional theory that the three private companies are not private companies at all but rather the United States government.

The suits, filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, name Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, and Sundar Pichai as defendants and argue that the platforms function as state actors bound by the First Amendment, a body of law that restricts the conduct of the federal government, an institution Trump had personally directed for the previous four years before leaving office in January.

"We're demanding an end to the shadow banning, a stop to the silencing, and a stop to the blacklisting, banishing, and canceling that you know so well," said Trump, who as recently as six months earlier had commanded the armed forces, the Department of Justice, and the actual entity to which the First Amendment applies. Legal scholars noted that the central claim, that the companies had become government bodies, would, if accepted, place Trump in the position of suing an institution he had recently run for failing to do something he was now unable to make it do.

Within minutes of the press conference concluding, Trump's Save America PAC issued an urgent appeal asking supporters to donate "immediately," promising to multiply their contributions fivefold, while officials from the America First Policy Institute directed attendees to a website where they could sign on as co-plaintiffs in the historic case. The site's fine print clarified that entering one's name and contact information did not, in fact, make a person a plaintiff, and that the form was instead collecting the names and contact information.

Constitutional experts across the political spectrum described the lawsuits as legally hopeless, observing that the First Amendment has never prevented a private business from declining to host someone's speech, and that the filings appeared engineered less to prevail in court than to generate a dependable supply of email addresses. Aides familiar with the effort characterized the litigation as one component of a broader strategy.

At press time, supporters who had clicked the link to join the landmark defense of free expression had been successfully added to a fundraising list.