Trump Loses CNN Defamation Case As Own Appointees at Conservative Appeals Court Rejects 'Big Lie' Election Coverage

Donald Trump's £370 million ($475 million) defamation lawsuit against CNN, built around the phrase 'Big Lie,' has been extinguished by a federal appeals court after not a single judge on the full bench agreed to reopen it.

On 17 March 2026, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit issued a one-paragraph per curiam order denying Trump's petition for a rehearing en banc, a request for the full court to reconsider a panel ruling handed down the previous November.

The order, signed by Judges Adalberto Jordan, Kevin Newsom, and Elizabeth Branch, the same three judges who rejected Trump in November, stated that 'no judge in regular active service on the Court' had asked for the court to be polled on the matter.

The decision closes off every available avenue at the appellate level, leaving only the US Supreme Court as a potential next step.

How the Lawsuit Began — and Was Dismissed Twice

Trump filed the original lawsuit in the US District Court for the Southern District of Florida in 2022, while he was out of office. The suit accused CNN of defamation for repeatedly using the term 'the Big Lie' to describe his false claims that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen from him, and sought £370 million ($475 million) in punitive damages.

Trump's legal team contended that CNN's use of the phrase, which historians trace to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, created, in the words of the original complaint, a 'false and incendiary association' between Trump and Adolf Hitler.

In July 2023, US District Judge Raag Singhal, himself a Trump appointee, dismissed the case with prejudice, meaning it could not be amended and refiled. Singhal ruled that CNN's references to 'the Big Lie' were statements of opinion rather than verifiable statements of fact, writing that 'bad rhetoric is not defamation when it does not include false statements of fact.' He acknowledged that Nazi comparisons were 'odious and repugnant,' but held that repugnant speech does not automatically constitute actionable defamation under U.S. law.

Trump's team described CNN's coverage as part of a 'concerted effort to tilt the political balance to the Left,' alleging the network had branded him 'racist,' 'Russian lackey,' 'insurrectionist,' and ultimately linked him to Hitler. The complaint catalogued five specific defamatory statements and referenced what it described as 'nearly 7,700 instances' in which CNN had used the phrase, a figure the courts would later find legally irrelevant.

The Appellate Panel's November 2025 Ruling

Trump appealed to the 11th Circuit, where a three-judge panel issued an unpublished per curiam opinion on 18 November 2025, unanimously affirming Singhal's dismissal. Two of the three judges, Kevin Newsom and Elizabeth Branch, were Trump's own appointees. The third, Adalberto Jordan, was an Obama appointee. All three agreed that Trump had failed to plead the essential element of 'falsity' required for any defamation claim under US law.

The panel found Trump's central argument, that 'the Big Lie' constituted a provably false statement of fact, to be 'untenable,' citing persuasive precedent from other circuits. Drawing on Buckley v. Littell (2nd Cir. 1976), in which courts held that terms like 'fascist' and 'radical right' were too 'debatable, loose and varying' to be proven true or false, the panel applied the same logic to 'Big Lie.'

The judges wrote that Trump's conduct after the 2020 election was 'susceptible to multiple subjective interpretations, including CNN's,' and therefore was 'not readily capable of being proven true or false.'

The En Banc Petition — and What 'No Vote' Means

Following the November ruling, Trump's legal team filed a petition for rehearing en banc, a formal request asking the full bench of the 11th Circuit to reconsider the case rather than allow the three-judge panel's decision to stand. The tactic made a degree of strategic sense: the 11th Circuit has a notably large number of Trump-appointed judges, and the president's team may have anticipated a more favourable reception from the wider court.

The 17 March 2026 order, however, was unambiguous. Citing Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure Rule 40, the panel denied both the petition for rehearing and the petition for rehearing en banc, noting that 'no judge in regular active service on the Court' had requested that the court be polled.

Under the rules governing the 11th Circuit, a majority of active judges must agree to convene the full court; if no judge even asks for a vote, the petition dies at the threshold. Politico legal reporter Josh Gerstein reported on 17 March that the outcome was unanimous; not a single judge intervened on Trump's behalf.

According to Mediaite's legal reporting, at least five of the active judges on the 11th Circuit bench at the time of the petition were Trump nominees. None of them stepped forward to request a poll.

Having lost at the district court, the appellate panel, and now the full 11th Circuit — each time before judges he himself appointed — Trump's four-year legal battle to make 'the Big Lie' defamatory appears, for now, to be over.