Donald Trump spent decades in business gleefully suing and angrily being sued by his adversaries in civil court. But since winning reelection, he has suddenly posted a remarkable string of legal victories, as litigants rush to settle their cases.

On November 20, 2024, lawyers for Trump and Elon Musk’s company X, filed a joint letter to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco without press release or fanfare. That court was expected to rule on the legal merits of a set of 2021 lawsuits that Trump had filed against X, Facebook, and YouTube, alleging that the companies had unlawfully removed his social media accounts under government pressure weeks after the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Oral arguments in 2023 had gone poorly for Trump, and many legal observers saw little hope for him. As recently as August 2024, nearly two years after Musk took over the company formerly known as Twitter, X had filed a brief with the Ninth Circuit arguing that Trump’s case lacked merit and that it had been properly dismissed by a lower court.

[Read: Why Trump won’t stop suing the media and losing]

Now, the attorneys told the court in the November letter, no ruling would be needed in the case. “We write to advise the court that the parties are actively discussing a potential settlement,” read the joint letter, which was also signed by lawyers for Trump’s co-plaintiffs.

The attorneys did not explain the sudden shift in strategy. The merits of the case had not changed, but the broader context had: The litigants were no longer adversaries, and the plaintiff was about to become president of the United States. Musk had just spent more than $250 million to help elect Trump, moved into his Palm Beach property, accepted a position as a transition adviser, and was celebrating his new nickname—“first buddy.” The day before the letter was filed, Trump had appeared in South Texas with Musk to watch the launch of Musk’s latest Starship rocket.

In seeking to settle with Trump, X, it turned out, was at the start of a trend. A series of litigants that have fought the newly reinstated president in court, in some cases for years, have now lined up to negotiate. ABC News and its parent company, Disney, settled with Trump in December.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who had been threatened with jail by Trump as recently as September, traveled to Mar-a-Lago on January 10 to negotiate a settlement with Trump in the Facebook case, which named Zuckerberg personally as a defendant. The deal they struck, according to two people briefed on the agreement who requested anonymity to discuss the arrangement, will cost Meta $25 million in damages and legal fees, a remarkable turn of events that coincided with other demonstrations by Zuckerberg of new fealty toward Trump. The Wall Street Journal reported today that $22 million will go to fund Trump’s presidential library, with the rest going to legal fees and the other plaintiffs.

“We don’t have any comment or guidance to offer,” Meta spokesman Andy Stone told me in a text message, before confirming the $25 million settlement.

These agreements stand to give the most litigious president in American history symbolic victories for himself and financial victories for his legacy. The settlement negotiations raise the question of whether Trump is using his new powers to bully his legal opponents into submission, and whether the litigants are seeking to purchase favor as they try to navigate the many regulatory threats from his new government.

Neither X nor the president’s legal team have publicly disclosed the terms of their settlement discussions with Trump, or even confirmed whether the cases have been settled. Ari Horltzblatt, the attorney for X who filed the settlement notice in the Ninth Circuit, declined to comment when reached by phone. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Multiple co-plaintiffs with Trump, who filed his 2021 case as class action lawsuits, also declined to comment this week when reached by The Atlantic. “No comment at this time,” Jennifer Horton, a Michigan school teacher who lost her Facebook account after posts that were flagged for COVID misinformation, wrote to me in a text message. “Check back with me later in week. I can’t talk right now,” radio host Wayne Allyn Root, who lost his Twitter account, wrote in an email.

[Paul Rosenzweig: It’s not amateur hour anymore]

Trump based his 2021 legal crusade against the social media giants on the assertion that they banned his accounts because of government pressure, in violation of the First Amendment. His co-defendants, including the feminist writer Naomi Wolf, have claimed substantial financial harm—“at least $1 million,” in Wolf’s case—from having their own accounts banned. The companies have argued that Trump has failed to show clear evidence that their decisions were directly dictated by a government power. Trump’s argument also has been complicated by the fact that he ran the federal executive branch at the time that his accounts were shut down; Joe Biden was still president-elect.

Ironically, some legal observers argue that Trump might now be committing the very sin that he accused Democrats of perpetrating against him—using the power of his incoming presidency to pressure private companies to take actions for his personal benefit. They worry the companies are agreeing to settlements less from fear that they would lose in court than fear that they would win.

“Trump may be doing what he claimed Biden was doing but he never really did,” Eric Goldman, a professor of law at Santa Clara University who has been tracking the X and Meta cases, told me. “If there is a cash settlement, it is because it’s just a staggering economic transaction to buy influence.”

The precedent for such legal surrender was established late last year by ABC News, which had been sued by Trump for defamation; the case concerned comments by the network host George Stephanolopolous that Trump had “been found liable for rape,” when a New York court had found him liable for sexual abuse under state law—though the judge later clarified that the behavior in question was “commonly considered ‘rape’ in other contexts.” ABC News struck a settlement with Trump in mid-December that sent $15 million from parent company Disney to help build his future presidential library and paid $1 million in legal fees, shocking First Amendment attorneys. (Attorneys for Disney had concluded that the case posed substantial risk, The New York Times reported, and that the settlement was a small price to pay to resolve it.)

The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month that the parent company of CBS News, Paramount Global, was considering a settlement with Trump over his $10 billion claim that 60 Minutes illegally interfered with the election by favorably editing an interview with Vice President Kamala Harris. Paramount is in the process of merging with Skydance Media, a deal that would require approval by Trump appointees. “We have no comment,” Paramount Global spokesman Justin Dini told me in a statement.

Trump has also sued Gannett, the owner of The Des Moines Register, alleging consumer fraud for a poll the Register published before the 2024 election that showed Harris with a lead over Trump in Iowa days before the election. (Trump won the state.) Gannett has signalled that it intends to contest the case in federal court.

The Founding Fathers, for all their foresight, did not concern themselves with the possibility that a future president might use civil litigation to extract money or fealty. The U.S. criminal code does little to prevent the president, who is exempt from its primary conflict of interest provisions, from continuing civil litigation or profiting from court cases once he takes office.

[Read: The strategy behind Trump’s policy blitz]

Richard Painter, the chief White House ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, told me that the current situation gives enormous power to a president who has indicated a willingness to use litigation to get his way. “What law prevents him from basically extorting media companies? Absolutely no law at all,” Painter said. “These suits are going to settle. It is not just the money he is getting from it. We are going to have the media be cowed by the president of the United States.”

The Trump case against YouTube and Sundar Pichai, the CEO of parent company Google, filed in 2021 with the X and Meta cases, has been lying dormant in a Northern California courtroom since December 2023, pending the outcome of the Ninth Circuit appeal of the case against X.

Musk’s decision to settle before an opinion now opens the possibility that the YouTube case will be revived unless that company too seeks a settlement. Jose Castañeda, a spokesperson for Google, declined this week to comment on the company’s legal strategy.

For a moment on Sunday, the government of Colombia’s Gustavo Petro looked like it might be the first in Latin America to take a meaningful stand against President Donald Trump’s mass-deportation plans. Instead, Petro gave Trump the perfect opportunity to show how far he would go to enforce compliance. Latin American leaders came out worse off.

On Sunday afternoon, Petro, a leftist who has held office since 2022, announced on X that he would not allow two U.S. military aircraft carrying Colombian deportees to land. He forced them to turn back mid-flight and demanded that Trump establish a protocol for treating deportees with dignity.

Colombia had quietly accepted military deportation flights before Trump’s inauguration, according to the Financial Times. But the Trump administration began flaunting these flights publicly, and some deportees sent to Brazil claimed that they were shackled, denied water, and beaten. Petro saw all of this as a step too far, and reacted. He clarified that he would still accept deportations carried out via “civilian aircraft,” without treating migrants “like criminals” (more than 120 such flights landed in Colombia last year).

Trump responded by threatening to impose 25 percent tariffs on all Colombian goods (to be raised to 50 percent within a week), impose emergency banking sanctions, and bar entry to all Colombian-government officials and even their “allies.” The message was clear: To get his way on deportations, he would stop at nothing, even if this meant blowing up relations with one of the United States’ closest Latin American partners.

[Quico Toro: Trump’s Colombia spat is a gift to China]

Petro almost immediately backed down. He seemed to have taken the stand on a whim, possibly in part to distract from a flare-up in violence among armed criminal groups inside his country. The White House announced that Colombia had agreed to accept deportation flights, including on military aircraft. Petro gave a tepid repost, then deleted it.

For Trump, the incident was a perfect PR stunt, allowing him to showcase the maximum-pressure strategy he might use against any Latin American government that openly challenges his mass-deportation plans and offering a test case for whether tariffs can work to coerce cooperation from U.S. allies. For Latin America, the ordeal could not have come at a worse time.

Across the region, leaders are bracing for the impact of deportations—not only of their own citizens, but of “third-country nationals” such as Venezuelans, Nicaraguans, and Cubans, whose governments often refuse to take them back. They are rightfully worried about what a sudden influx of newcomers and a decline in remittance payments from the United States will mean for their generally slow-growing economies, weak formal labor markets, and strained social services, not to mention public safety, given the tendency of criminal gangs to kidnap and forcibly recruit vulnerable recent deportees.

If Latin American governments are trying to negotiate the scope or scale of deportation behind closed doors, they do not appear to be having much success. Several leaders seem to be losing their nerve. Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, went from expressing hope for an agreement with the Trump administration to receive only Mexicans to accepting the continued deportation of noncitizens—perhaps because Trump threatened to place 25 percent tariffs on all Mexican goods as soon as February 1. Honduras threatened to expel a U.S. Air Force base on January 3 if the United States carried on with its deportation plans. By January 27, Honduras folded, saying that it would accept military deportation flights but requesting that deportees not be shackled. Guatemala is trying to draw the line at taking in only fellow Central Americans.

Most Latin American leaders will bend to Trump’s wishes on mass deportation rather than invite the strong-arm tactics he threatened to use on Colombia. One reason is that tariffs can really hurt the countries whose cooperation Trump needs most on deportations. Unlike most of South America, Mexico, Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador still trade more with the United States than with China. Only with Mexico, the United States’ largest trade partner, does the leverage go both ways, but even there it is sharply asymmetrical (more than 80 percent of Mexican exports go to the U.S., accounting for nearly a fifth of the country’s GDP).

Latin American countries could improve their bargaining position by taking a unified stand and negotiating with Trump as a bloc. But the chances that they will do so are slim and getting slimmer. Today, Honduran President Xiomara Castro called off a planned meeting of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, a left-leaning regional bloc, to discuss migration, faulting a “lack of consensus.”

[Juliette Kayyem: The border got quieter, so Trump had to act]

Latin American presidents have relatively weak incentives to fight Trump on migration. The region is home to more than 20 million displaced people, millions of whom reside as migrants or refugees in Mexico, Colombia, Peru, and elsewhere—and yet, migration is simply not that big of a diplomatic political issue in most countries. That could change if deportations reach a scale sufficient to rattle economies, but Latin American leaders are focused on the short term, much as Trump is. Presidential approval ratings tend to rise and fall based on crime and the economy more than immigration, and at least for now, anti-U.S. nationalism is not the political force it has been in the past.

So Trump will likely get his way in more cases than not. But he shouldn’t celebrate just yet, because the short-term payoff of strong-arming Latin America will come at the long-term cost of accelerating the region’s shift toward China and increasing its instability. The latter tends, sooner or later, to boomerang back into the United States.

“Every South American leader, even pro-American ones, will look at Trump’s strategy vis-à-vis Panama, Colombia, and Mexico and understand the risks of being overly dependent on the U.S. right now. The majority will seek to diversify their partnerships to limit their exposure to Trump,” Oliver Stuenkel, a Brazilian international-relations analyst, posted on X in the middle of the Colombia standoff. He’s right. Latin American leaders, even several conservative ones, moved closer to China during Trump’s first term, which is not what Trump wants. Reducing China’s presence in Latin America seems to be his No. 2 priority in the region (see his threats to Panama over the Hong Kong company operating near its canal). Chinese investments in dual-use infrastructure and 5G technology pose long-term national-security risks to the United States. But Trump’s tariff threats and coercion could rattle Latin America and help China make its sales pitch to the region: We’re the reliable ones. The long-standing lament that Latin American conservatives, centrists, and leftists share is that whereas the United States comes to the region to punish and lecture, China comes to trade. Trump’s current approach gives that complaint extra credence.

[From the September 2024 issue: Seventy miles in hell]

Trump’s deportation plans threaten to destabilize parts of Latin America, which will have repercussions for the United States. The arrival of hundreds of thousands of people to countries without the economic or logistical capacity to absorb them could leave the region reeling. Consider that the Trump administration is negotiating an asylum agreement with El Salvador—a country with one of the weakest and smallest economies, and highest rates of labor informality, in all of Central America. If Venezuelans, Nicaraguans, and Cubans are sent there, they are almost guaranteed not to find jobs. People deported to Honduras and Guatemala will also likely struggle to find work and face recruitment by gangs. And because remittances make up about a fifth of GDP in Guatemala and about a quarter in El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua, large-scale deportations threaten to deliver a brutal shock to their economies. Mexico’s economy is bigger and sturdier, but economists have shown that large influxes of deportees there, too, tend to depress formal-sector wages and increase crime. The inflow of workers might still benefit economies like Mexico’s in the long run. But in the short to medium term, Trump’s mass-deportation plans are a recipe for instability.

The lesson of the past several decades—Trump’s first term included—is that Latin American instability never remains contained within the region. It inevitably comes boomeranging back to the United States. Mexican cartels didn’t gain far-reaching influence just in their country. They fueled a fentanyl epidemic that has killed more than a quarter million Americans since 2018. Venezuela’s economic collapse under authoritarian rule didn’t bring misery only upon that country; it produced one of the world’s biggest refugee crises, with more than half a million Venezuelans fleeing to the United States. Instability nowhere else in the world affects the United States more directly, or profoundly, than that in Latin America.

In the 1980s and ’90s, internal armed conflicts raged in Colombia and Central America, and Mexico confronted serial economic crises. Since then, the United States’ immediate neighbors have become relatively more stable, democratic, and prosperous. But slow growth, fiscal imbalances, and, above all, the growing power of organized crime have tested that stability in recent years. Trump is adding to the pressure with mass deportations—then hoping to contain whatever erupts by simply hardening the southern border. That’s quite the gamble.

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