WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — President-elect Donald Trump has 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 toward 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 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.”
Unlike most of Trump’s other lawsuits against the media, which involve claims of defamation, this case alleged Selzer violated the Iowa Consumer Fraud Act, which prohibits deceptive practices that occur in sales or advertising.
“We believe this lawsuit is without merit,” said Lark-Marie Anton, a spokesperson for the Des Moines Register. “We have acknowledged that the Selzer/Des Moines Register preelection poll did not reflect the ultimate margin of President Trump’s Election Day victory in Iowa by releasing the poll’s full demographics, cross-tabs, weighted and unweighted data, as well as a technical explanation from pollster Ann Selzer.”
Anton added: “We stand by our reporting on the matter and will vigorously defend our First Amendment rights.”
Selzer said she hadn’t seen the lawsuit and could not comment. But last week, in an interview with PBS, she strongly denounced the idea that she was colluding with anyone to influence an election.
The lawsuit marked the second time this fall that Trump has used state laws against misleading consumers to attack a news outlet. In October, he sued CBS News in federal court in Texas, alleging that “60 Minutes” engaged in deceptive trade practices when it aired an interview with Harris.
That argument — along with searching for specific legal jurisdictions that the Trump team believes could be favorable to him — is part of a more targeted approach that the incoming president and his advisers are taking to use the court system as a weapon.
Trump, who has called reporters “the enemy of the people,” has repeatedly described wanting to be treated “fairly.” But what he would consider fair has often appeared to be news coverage that doesn’t challenge him.
Trump’s pick to lead the FBI, Kash Patel, said months before the election that he would use his job in the next administration “to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections.”
Since winning the election, Trump told NBC he didn’t expect that Patel would investigate Trump’s “political enemies.” But when asked if he wanted to see that happen, Trump replied: “If they were crooked, if they did something wrong, if they have broken the law, probably. They went after me. You know, they went after me, and I did nothing wrong.”
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Just this week, Trump’s allies in Congress moved to support his efforts to seek retribution against Cheney, a chair of the House committee that investigated the events of Jan. 6, 2021, and recommended criminal charges against Trump.
On Tuesday, a House oversight subcommittee issued a report recommending that Cheney face criminal investigation for some of the work she did while investigating Trump. The report accused Cheney of secretly communicating with one of the committee’s star witnesses, Cassidy Hutchinson, without Hutchinson’s lawyer knowing.
Hutchinson gave significant but disputed testimony at one of the committee’s public hearings, describing, among other things, how Trump was warned that his supporters were carrying weapons on Jan. 6 but expressed no concern because they were not a threat to him.
By recommending that Cheney be investigated — including for possibly violating the same federal obstruction statute that she cited in recommending charges against Trump — House Republicans appeared to be laying the groundwork for a potential criminal prosecution. Trump has repeatedly said that Cheney and other members of the Jan. 6 committee should face charges and jail time.
In Trump’s own telling, winning his civil legal actions isn’t always the point.
Trump, who has often attacked journalists publicly for details in news accounts that he hasn’t liked, famously lost a libel case that he brought against writer Timothy O’Brien over O’Brien’s description of Trump’s net worth as much less than he claimed it to be.
The case played out over the span of years. But during the 2016 election, Trump told The Washington Post that it was worth it, even with the loss.
“I spent a couple of bucks on legal fees, and they spent a whole lot more,” he said of O’Brien and his book publisher. “I did it to make his life miserable, which I’m happy about.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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