Trump Would Have Slim Chance in Court Against Trevor Noah, Experts Say; The New York Times, February 2, 2026

Benjamin Mullin, The New York Times ; Trump Would Have Slim Chance in Court Against Trevor Noah, Experts Say

Legal experts said that jokes like the one told by Mr. Noah at the Grammys on Sunday were protected by the First Amendment.

"President Trump early on Monday added Trevor Noah to the long list of high-profile individuals and institutions in his legal cross hairs after the comedian made a joke while hosting the Grammys about Mr. Trump’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein.

But legal experts say that Mr. Trump’s threat to sue Mr. Noah, whom he called a “poor, pathetic, talentless, dope of an M.C.” on social media, has very little chance of succeeding in a courtroom.

“Trevor Noah is pretty clearly protected by the First Amendment,” said Jameel Jaffer, the executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. “The fact that Noah was hosting the Grammys and not writing a news story in The Washington Post has constitutional significance,” he added.

Mr. Noah said on Sunday evening’s broadcast, which was aired on CBS, that Mr. Trump’s pursuit of Greenland made sense “because Epstein’s island is gone, he needs a new one to hang out with Bill Clinton.” Though Mr. Trump had been a friend of Mr. Epstein’s until the early 2000s, there is no evidence that he visited Mr. Epstein’s private island."

When do rants exceed First Amendment boundaries and become true threats?; ABA Journal, August 2018

David L. Hudson Jr., ABA Journal; When do rants exceed First Amendment boundaries and become true threats?

"True threats are not protected in part because of the fear and disruption they cause in their recipients. “Speech that places a victim in fear for his or her physical safety is deeply harmful in that it disrupts the target’s life and may deter him or her from engaging in key life activities,” says University of Colorado Law School professor Helen Norton, who writes frequently on First Amendment topics.

“Indeed, true threats may themselves undermine First Amendment values by silencing the speaker’s target.” The push to combat threats is understandable. The problem is discerning the boundaries between protected speech and unprotected true threats. “The unclear part of the definition is what makes a threat ‘true,’ meaning that it is an expression dangerous enough for the government to have the power to punish, and the definition is narrow enough that it does not chill protected speech,” says Leslie Gielow Jacobs, a First Amendment expert who teaches at the University of the Pacific.

“We don’t want to criminalize political hyperbole, jokes or drunken rants,” Norton explains. “Not infrequently, we say extreme things that we don’t mean to be understood literally, such as ‘I am so mad at X that I could kill him.’ Speech of that sort furthers an individual’s First Amendment interests in expressive autonomy, and the government’s regulation of it threatens overreaching and other dangers.”"