Donald Trump’s lawyer has sent the Center for American Progress (Cap) a letter threatening a $5bn lawsuit unless the liberal thinktank retracts a report that dares to suggest the president’s National Guard deployment wasn’t the crime-fighting triumph it was cracked up to be. Because nothing says “law and order” like suing people for pointing out that your policies had no measurable effect.

The report, released on 13 July, argues that the National Guard deployment in Washington DC, Memphis, and Los Angeles failed to have a measurable impact on crime in those cities, despite an estimated cost of $1.7bn. The report notes that violent crime began falling well before Trump took office in 2025, and that cities without National Guard intervention saw statistically similar declines. In other words, the Guard may have been a very expensive, very well-armed version of a placebo.

Alejandro Brito, Trump’s personal lawyer, sent Cap a letter demanding retraction, as reported by the New York Times on Friday. The letter is a threat from Trump to sue the center in his personal capacity, not on behalf of the federal government. Because when you’re a billionaire president, you can afford to litigate your feelings.

Cap, unsurprisingly, is not backing down. In a statement on Friday, the center stood by its report and castigated the threat as an attack on the public’s right to speak truth to power. “Based on analysis of crime data, our report demonstrated facts about the National Guard deployments that are inconvenient to the Trump administration,” wrote Neera Tanden, Cap’s president and CEO. “This threatened lawsuit’s attack on facts and evidence is baseless. A fundamental protection of the First Amendment is to allow for the publication of facts and analysis that are contrary to the arguments and claims of any administration. A lawsuit is a transparent attempt to silence us. We will neither cower nor bend in the face of it.”

Brito’s letter, meanwhile, argues that the report’s statements imply that “the President of the United States knowingly deceived the American people, manipulated crime statistics for political advantage, exploited public fear, abused military and executive authority for an ulterior purpose, staged a sham law enforcement operation, and then lied about its success.” Which is a lot of words for “the report said the thing didn’t work.”

Cap’s response describes the defamation claim as “absurd,” noting that the report’s conclusions are statements of fact based on meticulous research. The report and commentary “on their face, concern crime statistics and causality, or actions of the federal government, not President Trump himself,” the center wrote. “In addition to being true, these statements cannot defame President Trump because they are not about him.” So the lawsuit is not only baseless, it’s also about the wrong guy.

Cap, founded in 2003 by former Clinton White House chief of staff John Podesta (who later chaired Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign), is Washington’s leading liberal thinktank. And apparently, it’s not afraid to tell the emperor he has no clothes - even if the emperor has a $5bn temper tantrum.