The Instructive Lessons Behind a Federal Court’s Denial of Trump’s Lawsuit Against CNN Over Comparison to Hitler’s “Big Lie”

​A three-judge panel of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals denied President Trump’s lawsuit against CNN for saying that his claims about the 2020 election were a “Big Lie.”

What’s the big deal about the Big Lie?

That propaganda term was coined by Adolf Hitler in the 1920s to describe a technique in which many people – who might doubt a small, unfounded accusation – are apt to believe an absurd, outlandish falsehood. Say that your opponent is beholden to special interests, and people shrug. Say that he sacrifices stray dogs to the Roman God Mars, and a surprising number of people will believe it must be true.

Why do some react this way? Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf that it is because most people believe that no one “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.”

So, when CNN ran a story accusing Trump of peddling the “Big Lie” that the 2020 election was stolen, the president was understandably offended by the comparison. He sued. But was he correct in telling the court that audiences would assume that he was doing exactly what “Hitler did in his monstrous, genocidal crimes against humanity”?

A cursory search shows that the “big lie” trope has been watered down by commonplace usage. During President Trump’s first term, then-Attorney General William Barr described the allegations that Trump’s 2016 victory occurred with an assist from Putin as a “big lie.” Sen. Mitch McConnell, then-Minority Leader, accused Democrats of pushing a “big lie” about Republican proposals for voter IDs. President-elect Joe Biden castigated Sen. Josh Hawley for being “part of the big lie” about the 2020 election.

The term “big lie” might have been defamatory in 1938. By 2025, it has been used so often and so elastically that it has surely lost much of its sting. That is one reason why the appeals court panel ruled:

“To be clear, CNN has never explicitly claimed that Trump’s ‘actions and statements were designed to be, and actually were, variations of those [that] Hitler used to suppress and destroy populations.’”

Two of the three judges were Trump appointees. The judges harked back to failed defamation cases in which one plaintiff was described as a “fascist” and another as “an outspoken proponent of political Marxism.” Courts found that such terms were, in the ruling on the first case, “so debatable, loose and varying that they were insusceptible to proof of truth or falsity.”
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Courts have long recognized that political speech deserves the widest latitude when it comes to defamation. Politics is not for the easily bruised. Still, with great freedom comes great responsibility. We would all be better off as a country if politicians and journalists alike were to dial back the rhetoric and stick with the facts.

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