The Trump Organization, owned by President Donald Trump, is taking legal aim at online sellers on platforms like Amazon and eBay for allegedly offering counterfeit Trump merchandise. The company is leveraging a rarely used but aggressive legal strategy—known as a Schedule A case—to pursue a large number of sellers at once while sidestepping the burden of high filing fees.
In a lawsuit filed Friday in a U.S. District Court in Florida, the Trump Organization accuses unnamed sellers on Amazon, Walmart, eBay, and other platforms of distributing “inferior imitations” of products bearing the Trump name. These items include baby clothes, mugs, T-shirts, and other goods.
“Defendants are improperly advertising, marketing, and/or selling unauthorized and illegal products infringing upon at least a portion of plaintiffs’ Trump trademarks,” the complaint states. It goes on to argue that such counterfeit items confuse consumers and dilute the brand’s integrity.
Selling Trump-branded merchandise is no small business. According to data from Omnisend, about 9,000 Amazon vendors earned nearly $140 million in revenue from Trump merch in the lead-up to the election.
A controversial approach to trademark enforcement
Legal experts have taken note of the Trump Organization’s strategy. Schedule A cases have become increasingly popular among trademark attorneys in recent years. These cases let plaintiffs sue large groups of unnamed defendants—typically foreign sellers—without having to file individual lawsuits or pay separate filing fees for each one.
This method also empowers judges to take swift action. In many cases, a court can freeze the accounts of accused sellers based solely on a boilerplate complaint, often before the defendants are even made aware of the lawsuit. According to Sarah Fackrell, an intellectual property law professor at the Chicago-Kent College of Law, the allegations typically describe the sellers as serious trademark violators, prompting courts to act quickly.
“As you might imagine, when courts grant this, you wake up one day and your Amazon account is frozen, and you don’t know what’s going on,” Fackrell told Fortune. “That creates an … incredible incentive to either settle or just default, depending on how much money you have or your business model.”
Fackrell noted that anywhere from dozens to up to a thousand sellers can be swept into these lawsuits at once. “So this is the game,” she said. “This is really extraordinary. This is not normally how federal litigation goes.”
Concerns over fairness and due process
Critics say this legal maneuver raises due process concerns. Sellers often first learn they’re being sued through email, sometimes after discovering their e-commerce accounts have been locked. Many aren’t major counterfeiters, according to Fackrell, but they’re treated as such under the broad scope of a Schedule A case.
“There’s a lot of reasons to be concerned about due process, and these defendants kind of getting railroaded, whether or not they did anything wrong,” she said.
In one 2023 case, a woman in Florida was ordered to pay $250,000 for selling just $360 worth of tumblers with the image of country singer Luke Combs. She claimed she only found out about the lawsuit after discovering the court notice in her junk email folder—after the deadline had already passed, while she was hospitalized. Combs later apologized after learning about the case and offered to assist with her medical bills.
Other defendants in that case reportedly included large-scale sellers based in Asia.
Why now?
It’s unclear why the Trump Organization is choosing this moment to escalate its fight against unauthorized merchandise. Schedule A cases are often sealed, so it’s difficult to determine how much money plaintiffs are recovering. However, Fackrell said some attorneys have acknowledged that the lawsuits can be profitable.
“At least some of these plaintiffs are sold on this litigation format as an alternative revenue source,” she said.
Amy Landers, an intellectual property law professor at Drexel University’s Thomas R. Kline School of Law, told Fortune that companies usually weigh whether unauthorized merch actually harms their brand before pursuing legal action. Some view it as free advertising.
Luxury brands like Chanel and Louis Vuitton, she added, may be more inclined to litigate aggressively to avoid their trademarks becoming diluted or generic. But in the Trump Organization’s case, counterfeit goods have circulated for over a decade, which raises questions about the timing of the lawsuit.
“If other people are selling merch and they didn’t authorize it, eventually they might look generic,” Landers said. “But this is so counterintuitive to me, because … there really wasn’t enforcement until now.”
