YouTube has agreed to pay $24.5 million to settle a 2021 lawsuit that President Trump brought against the company and its chief executive over its suspension of Trump’s account after that year’s riot at the U.S. Capitol, according to court papers.
The settlement makes YouTube, which is owned by Alphabet ’s Google, the final Big Tech company to settle a trio of lawsuits Trump brought against social-media platforms in the months after he left the White House. Meta Platforms agreed in January to pay $25 million , most of it to a fund for Trump’s presidential library, and X agreed to pay $10 million , much of it going directly to Trump, The Wall Street Journal previously reported.
Google executives were eager to keep their settlement smaller than the one paid by rival Meta, according to people familiar with the matter. Trump’s share of the settlement—$22 million—will go to the nonprofit Trust for the National Mall, earmarked for the construction of a Mar-a-Lago-style ballroom Trump is building at the White House, according to the court documents. The White House has said the ballroom, expected to cost $200 million, would be funded by donations from Trump and “other patriot donors.”
A further $2.5 million will go to the other plaintiffs on the case, a group that includes the American Conservative Union and writer Naomi Wolf . The settlement doesn’t mention attorney fees.
Google declined to comment.
Since last fall’s election win, Trump has raked in more than $80 million in settlements stemming from lawsuits he has brought against Big Tech and media companies. Paramount Global said in July that it had agreed to pay $16 million to settle a suit that Trump brought over a “60 Minutes” interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris .
John P. Coale , a Trump lawyer and ally, brought Trump’s three cases against social-media companies four years ago along with lead litigation attorney John Q. Kelly . Coale said Trump’s return to power was critical in pushing the parties to settle the cases. “If he had not been re-elected, we would have been in court for 1,000 years,” he said. “It was his re-election that made the difference.”
When top Google executives including Chief Executive Sundar Pichai and co-founder Sergey Brin arrived at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida for a mediation session in early May, the president chatted amiably with the executives for a few minutes before throwing a curveball, according to people familiar with the conversation. His question: Would they mind moving the conversation over to his nearby golf club? Trump, it turned out, was due to play a round with former football coach Nick Saban.
After motorcading to the golf club with the president, the Google crew and the lawyers rode in golf carts with Trump for several holes as he played with Saban, and later lunched together on the terrace, according to people familiar with the talks. Back at Mar-a-Lago, Trump left the group, and talks began—for the first time that day—about how to settle the case.
Coale, who is now Trump’s special envoy to Ukraine and Belarus and has worked to release political prisoners held by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko , presented Trump with settlement papers to sign in the Oval Office this past Wednesday. Trump’s reaction was: “This is great, on to the next thing,” Coale said. “Then we talked about Belarus.”
After his round of victories in the lawsuits he brought while he was out of office, Trump has continued to wage legal battles while in the White House, including against the New York Times and Dow Jones, the publisher of the Journal. A judge dismissed the Times lawsuit; Dow Jones last week moved to dismiss the case.
YouTube suspended Trump’s channel after the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, saying it had removed videos that violated its policies against content that could incite violence. The platform reinstated his channel in March 2023.
Legal analysts have been dubious about the legal merits of Trump’s complaints against Meta, YouTube and X (then called Twitter). In May 2022, a federal judge dismissed the suit against Twitter, which Trump’s lawyers appealed. Judges subsequently stayed the Meta and YouTube suits, and in 2023, a judge administratively closed the YouTube case. After X paid to settle Trump’s lawsuit in February, Trump’s lawyers sought to reopen the case.
“There is a reason to settle, but it has little to do with the law,” said Mark Graber , a professor at the University of Maryland’s Carey School of Law. “The present Supreme Court doctrine is very clear that private companies need not give anyone a right of access.”
But he said major companies that are regulated by the Trump administration likely have a strong business case to resolve the legal matters. “If you’re Meta or Google, $25 million is lunch money. It is probably worth $25 million in lunch money to make this go away.”
The settlement comes as Google is under pressure from the Justice Department to break up its ad businesses after a federal judge ruled this spring that the company had created a monopoly in advertising. A federal court last week began hearing testimony to decide what penalties the company should face. Earlier this month, the company emerged largely unscathed from a similar challenge to its online search stronghold.
In May, lawyers for Trump and YouTube notified the court that they had been “engaged in productive discussions” about next steps in the case, and asked to delay a case-management conference. On Monday, they filed for the case to be dismissed.
Write to Rebecca Ballhaus at rebecca.ballhaus@wsj.com and Annie Linskey at annie.linskey@wsj.com
