Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Getty Images (Jim Watson/AFP, Kevin Winter)
More than 15 million people watched Sunday’s 67th annual Grammy Awards on CBS, and that apparently included President Donald Trump, who is threatening to sue the show’s host, Trevor Noah, over a Jeffrey Epstein joke.
Noah, who reminded audiences that this was his final year hosting the show, compared the end of his reign to a presidential run. “I believe in term limits,” he said. “I wanted to set an example for anyone who might be watching the show. Just leave when your term is up. You know. Whatever.” It wasn’t his only nod to Trump. While introducing the award for Song of the Year, Noah noted how it was one of the big awards of the night. “That is a Grammy that every artist wants almost as much as Trump wants Greenland, which makes sense … because Epstein’s island is gone, [so] he needs a new one to hang out with Bill Clinton,” Noah said.
It didn’t take long for Trump to reveal exactly what he’s going to do about it — call his lawyers. Posting on Truth Social after the broadcast ended, Trump called it “virtually unwatchable” and then he took aim at Noah directly, saying he was “almost as bad as Jimmy Kimmel.” In the tirade, he also said Noah “INCORRECTLY” stated that he’s been to Epstein’s island. “WRONG!!!” he claimed. Despite Trump appearing in Epstein’s files, there has never been any evidence that the president visited his island.
Trump also, because he can’t not, called Noah a “total loser” and then threatened him. He “better get his facts straight, and get them straight fast. It looks like I’ll be sending my lawyers to sue this poor, pathetic, talentless dope of an M.C., and suing him for plenty$,” Trump wrote. “Get ready Noah, I’m going to have some fun with you! President DJT.”
It’s not the first time Trump has threatened legal action against a comedian. Last year, after Jimmy Kimmel returned to the air after his three-day suspension for remarks over Charlie Kirk’s death, Trump was shocked and called Kimmel “yet another arm of the DNC” on Truth Social, saying that would be a “major illegal Campaign Contribution.” Trump said at the time that he was going to “test ABC out” and then pointed out he received a $15 million settlement from ABC in 2024 after Good Morning America anchor George Stephanopoulos misstated the verdicts of the E. Jean Carroll civil cases. Trump also previously received a $16 million settlement from CBS over its editing of a Kamala Harris interview on CBS. Kimmel called Trump a “bully” on air the next day, and Trump never went through with his threat.
But does it actually mean anything that Trump is threatening to sue? He already has five other pending lawsuits against the media. According to the Washington Post, Trump is currently suing the New York Times, the Pulitzer Prize Board, The Wall Street Journal, the BBC, and the Des Moines Register. Because his lawyers are so busy, we reached out to two legal experts on our own to see if Trump actually has an actionable case against Noah. Thankfully for Noah, both experts — Georgetown University Law and Public Policy professor David D. Cole, the former national legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, and Tre Lovell, a California litigator and expert in defamation cases — agree: Jokes are legal.
Both Cole and Lovell said it’s far-fetched for a court to view a joke as defamation.
“It would be an absolutely frivolous lawsuit,” Cole said. “It was a joke made during a comedic monologue. No reasonable listener would take it as stating any particular fact as true, and so I think there is no basis for a defamation lawsuit whatsoever.”
Cole explained that in order for a statement to be considered defamatory by a court, it would have to pass a tough test. It not only would have to be “understood as a statement of fact,” but it also has to be knowingly false or said with reckless disregard for whether it was true or false.
“But this claim would fail at the first stage,” Cole said. “It is not a statement of fact. It is a joke. And so there is literally no justification for a defamation suit with respect to Trevor Noah’s statement.”
Lovell agreed.
“Comedy is a combination of satire, sarcasm, absurdity, things that want to make you laugh,” Lovell said. “The person is not listening to that and taking anything that Trevor Noah is saying as factual. It’s meant to be funny. It’s entertainment. It’s not a factual news report.”
Lovell said he would be very surprised if Trump actually decided to file a lawsuit against Noah, because it would be a very difficult case to win.
“Does this mean Trump won’t sue? No,” Cole said. “Does that mean a media company might not settle? No, but I would hope that this time they would stand up for their principles and get the case dismissed, which they could have and should have done with respect to the Kamala Harris interview [on 60 Minutes — CBS later settled the lawsuit, paying Trump $16 million in damages]. This is an equally baseless lawsuit.”
“Anytime somebody says something bad about Trump that he doesn’t like, he threatens to come after them,” Lovell said. “And it could have a chilling effect on comedians, because even if it’s a meritless case and a completely frivolous case, they don’t want to have to go through the steps of having to address it and defeat it.”
More so, Trump’s outburst is illustrating his pattern of attacking the press. “He has undertaken a campaign to try to silence criticism of his actions through fear and through wielding the power of the federal government even where he has baseless claims,” Cole said.
“Thankfully, Trevor Noah was not chilled,” he added.