During the 2024 presidential race, journalists worried a lot about threats from Donald Trump and his allies to use the courts to punish or silence his media critics on grounds that negative coverage was either defamatory or represented “election interference.”
At the time, these ideas were sometimes dismissed as revenge porn aimed at “owning the libs” and entertaining MAGA activists, but they are becoming very real as Trump’s second inauguration draws nigh. The former president has just scored a legal win by reaching a settlement with ABC News over George Stephanopoulos saying on-air that Trump was found “liable for rape” in the E. Jean Carroll civil case, though he was actually found liable for “sexual abuse.” This settlement did not require any change in defamation law, but it will certainly encourage Team Trump to explore the legal limits.
And now Trump himself is suing pollster Ann Selzer over the survey she released days before the election that showed Kamala Harris winning Iowa by 4 percentage points (Trump won the state by 16 points), NBC News reports:
Donald Trump sued Ann Selzer, her polling firm, The Des Moines Register and the newspaper’s parent company Gannett, on Monday night, accusing them of consumer fraud, according to a copy of the filing reviewed by NBC News.
The suit, filed in Polk County, Iowa, says it seeks “accountability for brazen election interference” over a Nov. 2 poll that showed Kamala Harris up 3 percentage points in Iowa. Trump is making the claim under the Iowa Consumer Fraud Act, which prohibits deceptive advertising.
Apparently, an inaccurate poll falls under Trump’s definition of “election interference,” as Raw Story reports:
During a Monday press conference, Trump was asked if he would continue to sue media outlets after settling a lawsuit with ABC News …
“I think you have to do it because they’re very dishonest,” Trump said of future lawsuits. “I’m going to be bringing one against the people in Iowa, their newspaper, which had a very, very good pollster who got me right all the time.”
“And then, just before the election, she said I was going to lose by three or four points, and it became the biggest story all over the world because I was going to win Iowa by 20 points,” he continued. “And in my opinion, it was fraud, and it was election interference. You know, she’s gotten me right always. She’s a very good pollster. She knows what she was doing.”
The premise seems to be that because Selzer is a “very good pollster” who knew what she was doing, either she or her media sponsors (the Des Moines Register and Mediacom) were trying to “rig” the election with a deliberately false (and widely doubted) finding that Harris was ahead in Iowa. Here’s how Trump’s lawsuit puts it in his characteristically turgid language, per Fox News:
“The Harris Poll was no ‘miss’ but rather an attempt to influence the outcome of the 2024 Presidential Election,” the lawsuit states, adding that “defendants and their cohorts in the Democrat Party hoped that the Harris Poll would create a false narrative of inevitability for Harris in the final week of the 2024 Presidential Election.”
“Instead, the November 5 election was a monumental victory for President Trump in both the Electoral College and the Popular Vote, an overwhelming mandate for his America First principles, and the consignment of the radical socialist agenda to the dustbin of history.”
The poll did get a lot of attention in a sort of man-bites-dog manner, but there’s no evidence it affected voting in Iowa or anywhere else (Selzer suggested the poll might have actually helped Trump win his big Iowa victory by leading his supporters in the state to believe that they needed to make a supreme effort). Beyond that, Selzer and her sponsors have been very transparent in publishing details about the offending poll and its methodology; if they’re hiding nefarious intentions, they’re doing an incredibly good job of it. It’s probably confused matters that after the election, she announced she was retiring from the polling business, as though she is afflicted by shame, but she credibly claims this retirement was in the works for a long time.
What should be clear, however, is that the standard Trump is proposing for stipulating criminal intent in any adverse poll he doesn’t like would shut down the entire polling industry. Who is going to publish a poll with unusual results if the candidate who didn’t get favorable numbers will risk facing a civil lawsuit or a prosecution by their government allies? There’s already a lot of pressure on pollsters and their media underwriters to nail every result or confess membership in various partisan cabals. Why take the risk of gathering or publishing any public opinion research at all?
Perhaps Trump’s suit against Selzer and her sponsors is just a shot across the bow aimed at potential media critics. Long before he entered politics, he was notorious for using the threat of litigation to make adversaries and critics weigh the ruinous costs of battling his lawyers versus just doing as he wished. But when it’s the president of the United States firing these brushback pitches, a lot of people are going to retire from the game.
This post was updated after Trump filed the civil suit in Iowa.
More on politics
- What Happened to Texas Congresswoman Kay Granger?
- Who Is Lara Trump and What’s With the Quashed Senate Rumors?
- The Republican Party Is Out of Control
