US President-elect Donald Trump on Tuesday pushed forward on the media front of his self-described revenge tour in 2025, filing a lawsuit against a prominent pollster, J. Ann Selzer; her polling firm; her newspaper, The Des Moines Register; and its parent company, Gannett.
Trump’s legal team alleges that Selzer’s data, which projected Trump to lose the politically influential state in the 2024 presidential elections to Kamala Harris, when he ended up winning it by about 13 percent, somehow violates the Iowa Consumer Fraud Act, which is meant to combat deceptive advertising to consumers there.
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“Defendants and their cohorts in the Democratic Party hoped that the Harris Poll would create a false narrative of inevitability for Harris in the final week of the 2024 Presidential Election,” Trump’s attorneys wrote in the suit. “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.”
“Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press”
The lawsuit is just the latest in the twice-impeached president and convicted felon’s legal campaigns against media outlets that he deems to have treated him unfairly over the years. He has also suggested using the US Department of Justice to take aim at his political opponents in the White House and Capitol Hill to the same end. But until he is inaugurated in late January, Trump can only rely on his own personal attorneys to target journalists through defamation suits and other creative legal wrangling.
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Over the weekend, ABC News settled out of court for a defamation lawsuit brought by the former president, agreeing to pay $15 million to a Trump-linked foundation and apologize for anchor George Stephanopolus’ remarks that Trump had “raped” writer E. Jean Carroll. A jury in a New York civil case earlier in the year ruled that Trump had sexually abused Carroll and defamed her, but the former president was not found liable for rape.
At an impromptu press conference at his home in Florida on Monday, the president-elect laid out a skeleton plan for his first few weeks in office, including his planned pitches to President Volodymyr Zelensky and Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin to end the war. When asked if Kyiv should cede territory, he dodged the question by noting only that some districts in Ukraine have become “demolition areas” and therefore Ukrainian refugees would be unable to return to their homes as “there is nothing left.”
Trump went on to describe his view of what the constitutionally protected US media might expect under his new regime. When asked if even more lawsuits were coming against journalists, Trump responded:
“I think you have to do it because they’re very dishonest. We need a great media. We need a fair media,” Trump said. He mentioned at least two Fox News personalities who he, by contrast, thought had done a “good job” in their coverage: conservative entertainers Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson.
He went on to name other media figures on his list of enemies, against whom he has started legal action already: legendary Watergate journalist Bob Woodward, who wrote a less-than-flattering book about the first Trump administration, the CBS News “60 Minutes” program, and the Pulitzer Prize board, which awarded journalists from the New York Times and Washington Post for their reporting on Trump’s first presidential campaign and its underhanded dealings with Ukraine and the Kremlin.
That latter reporting helped build the US House of Representative’s successful case against then-President Trump in his first impeachment, although the Republican-held Senate at the time did not have the votes to convict him, leading the Trump team to call it all a “Russia hoax.”
The First Amendment of the US Constitution states:
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
Another peculiarity of the US legal system as regards libel law is that the plaintiff in the US must prove that the journalists’ statements are factually false, whereas in some legal systems in Europe, for example, the plaintiff must only demonstrate malicious intent, regardless of the truth.
“There just doesn’t seem to be any basis for any of these suits other than his anger,” Floyd Abrams, a constitutional attorney specializing in the First Amendment, told CNN’s Jake Tapper about Trump’s legal vendettas on Tuesday afternoon.
“We stand by our reporting on the matter and believe this lawsuit is without merit,” a spokesperson for Gannett, Lark-Marie Anton, said on Tuesday.
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