Ten billion dollars is a remarkable sum to demand from a newspaper, and on Saturday a federal judge in Miami decided that Donald Trump had not earned a single cent of it. Judge Darrin P. Gayles dismissed the president's libel suit against the Wall Street Journal for the second time, and this time he did so with prejudice, which means the same claim can never be filed again. The case grew out of a July 2025 report that described a bawdy birthday message supposedly sent by Mr Trump to Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex offender, more than two decades earlier.

Mr Trump denied writing it and sued the day after publication. Under American law, however, a public figure must show "actual malice": that the publisher knew the story was false or acted with reckless disregard for the truth. Judge Gayles found that Mr Trump had not done so. The ruling turned on a subtle point.

In effect, the judge wrote in his 20-page decision, the president argued that his denial should have obliged the reporters to ignore everything else they had found and drop the story. That is not what the standard demands, he said, and accepting such logic would itself offend the First Amendment. A denial, in other words, cannot work as a veto over publication. Mr Trump's lawyers promise to press on, and an appeal is the likely next step.