The Daily Fuckup

Donald Trump went to his Bedminster club on July 7, 2021, to announce three separate federal lawsuits, one each against Facebook, Twitter and YouTube/Google. The complaints were filed the same day in the Southern District of Florida, so this was not a future threat or a loose promise. It was a press event attached to an actual filing. Trump was a lead plaintiff in the cases, alongside other plaintiffs, and each platform had its own complaint.

The lawsuits were built around the claim that the companies had acted as state actors and violated First Amendment rights through their moderation and suspension decisions. Trump cast the move as a free-speech fight and a defense of conservatives, but that was his allegation, not a settled legal conclusion. The central question for the courts was whether private platforms could be treated that way at all.

That was the gap between the show and the substance. Trump used the event to keep himself at the center of the story, but the legal burden did not disappear because a camera was rolling. The complaints had to survive ordinary judicial review, and the state-actor theory was always going to face a hard test.

So the Bedminster appearance did two jobs at once. It announced three lawsuits and turned them into a political performance built around censorship, grievance and punishment. The cases were in court the same day. The spectacle was the point of the event.