President-elect Donald J. Trump sued The Des Moines Register for running a poll before the election that showed him trailing Vice-President Kamala Harris, escalating his threats to seek retribution against the mainstream media and his political enemies.
Trump has long said that people he claims have wronged him should be prosecuted, including President Joe Biden and his family; Jack Smith, the special counsel who charged Trump with trying to overturn the 2020 election and mishandling classified documents; and Liz Cheney, the former representative from Wyoming who helped lead the House investigation into Trump’s efforts to cling to power in 2020.
In recent months, he has filed various legal actions against the media that amount to a warning shot about what sort of retaliation journalists, in particular, might face.
As he prepares to take office again, Trump will have at his disposal the levers of government, a Republican Party that is more pliant than it was four years ago and a well-funded external political apparatus.
“It’s clear that Trump is waging war on the press,” said Samantha Barbas, a professor at the University of Iowa College of Law whose book, Actual Malice, is about the Supreme Court’s most famous defamation case. “Trump and his lawyers are going to use any legal claim that they think has a chance of sticking. They’ll cast a wide net to carry out this vendetta.”
Barbas added that prevailing in court may be beside the point. The lawsuits “are not so much geared towards winning as much as threatening”, she said.
Many of Trump’s lawsuits go nowhere, including one that accused Hillary Clinton and a group of other Democrats of being part of a racketeering conspiracy against him. That particular suit resulted in nearly $1 million in fines issued by the judge against Trump’s lawyer.
But last week, ABC News settled a defamation suit filed against the network by Trump for $15 million, along with another $1 million in legal fees, a huge sum and one that appears to have emboldened the incoming President.
The latest legal action came on Monday when Trump filed a lawsuit against pollster J. Ann Selzer, her polling firm, The Des Moines Register and Gannett, the newspaper’s parent company.
The suit, filed in Polk County, Iowa, and obtained by The New York Times, accused Selzer of “brazen election interference” for a poll published shortly before the election that showed Harris leading in Iowa by three points.
Trump won the state handily, as he has in the past.
On Monday, at a news conference in Florida, Trump previewed the lawsuit, which was already in the process of being drafted.
“I have to do it,” Trump said. “We have to straighten out the press.”
New York Times News Service