How many civil lawsuits has Donald Trump faced since 1970 by year and case type?
Executive summary
Available sources show long-running efforts to count and classify the many civil suits involving Donald Trump but do not provide a clean, year-by-year tabulation by case type from 1970 onward; authoritative inventories range from multi-thousand cumulative counts to focused trackers of current cases (not a per-year breakdown) [1] [2] [3]. Major compendia cited by news organizations note “thousands” of suits (USA TODAY) and multi-hundred contemporary actions against the Trump administration (Bloomberg cited in The Fulcrum), but none of the supplied sources supply a complete year-by-year, categorized table from 1970 to 2025 [1] [4] [5].
1. Why a precise year-by-year, by-type count is missing — the limits of public inventories
Journalistic and academic trackers collect different slices of Trump’s litigation: USA TODAY compiled “thousands” of suits over decades but presents aggregated tallies rather than annual, typed breakdowns; AP and Just Security maintain active trackers of present civil and criminal matters but focus on current cases and major actions, not a complete historical time series dating to 1970 [1] [2] [3]. Lawfare and Just Security expressly track litigation related to administration actions or currently pending matters, which means retrospective private-business litigation and hundreds of older state or local suits may be outside their scopes [6] [7] [3].
2. What the big-count sources say — scale but not a timeline
A USA TODAY deep dive described Trump as involved in “thousands” of lawsuits spanning decades, and The Fulcrum cites that a 2016 USA TODAY review tallied at least 4,095 suits where Trump was a defendant [1] [4]. These large aggregate counts convey scale: multiple thousands of civil suits across business disputes, defamation, real estate, taxes, and sexual-assault-related claims — but they are not presented as a per-year ledger from 1970 onward in the items provided [1] [4].
3. Contemporary trackers: focused, up-to-date, but selective
AP and Reuters maintain trackers of “current and pending” civil and criminal cases against Trump, providing detailed files on recent, high‑profile civil matters such as the New York AG’s civil fraud case and E. Jean Carroll’s civil judgments [2] [5]. Just Security and Lawfare build litigation trackers too, but they notify readers that their projects concentrate on specific categories (administration actions, pending cases) rather than compiling every civil suit across decades [7] [6] [3].
4. Case-type buckets reported across sources — useful for categorization, not annual counts
Available reporting consistently groups suits into broad types: business and real-estate disputes, defamation cases, employment/contract litigation, regulatory/antitrust and tax disputes, and sexual‑assault/defamation claims connected to allegations by women such as E. Jean Carroll [4] [2] [8]. Major civil‑fraud and corporate‑valuation suits (New York AG) and notable defamation/assault suits (Carroll) are tracked in depth by AP and Reuters, illustrating how major categories recur over time even if year-by-year tallies are not published [2] [8] [5].
5. Disagreements, editorial choices, and potential agendas in the sources
Different outlets emphasize different narratives: USA TODAY’s “thousands” framing emphasizes volume and unusual litigiousness [1]; The Fulcrum highlights legal costs and democratic risk with a cited Bloomberg figure about hundreds of suits against an administration [4]. Trackers like Just Security and Lawfare aim at legal detail for practitioners and focus on government‑action litigation, which can undercount private suits or older civil filings [7] [6] [3]. Readers should view each inventory through its editorial lens: scale-focused investigations vs. case-level legal trackers.
6. What a researcher would need to produce the requested table
None of the supplied sources provides a definitive, year-by-year table by case type from 1970 to present. Producing that would require aggregating multiple datasets: historical court dockets (federal and state), news archives (e.g., USA TODAY’s dataset), and existing trackers (AP, Just Security, Reuters, Lawfare) and then normalizing case types and filing dates. The items provided point to starting sources for such work but do not themselves offer the full dataset or a prebuilt chronological breakdown [1] [2] [3] [6].
7. Practical next steps I can take for you
I can: (a) extract and summarize the major civil cases and their years from AP/Reuters/Just Security entries in the provided sources; (b) help design a methodology and list of public databases (state court dockets, PACER, USA TODAY archive) you’d need to build a year-by‑year, by‑type database; or (c) attempt a partial year-by-year table limited to high‑profile civil cases cited in these trackers. Tell me which option you prefer; the supplied sources permit overview and targeted extraction but do not contain a full chronological, categorized count [2] [5] [3].