It’s wrong for the incoming president to start suing newspapers and it’s a transparent effort to bully the press, but there Donald Trump stood last Monday, proclaiming that “we have to straighten out the press. Our press is very corrupt. Almost as corrupt as our elections.”
Neither the press nor elections are crooked, but Trump is now suing the Des Moines Register and its former top pollster Ann Selzer in a clear effort to intimidate journalists.
Trump claims that the Register, Selzer and her polling firm violated an Iowa consumer protection law with the publication of a pre-election poll that showed Vice President Kamala Harris ahead in the state Trump ultimately carried comfortably.
The legal arguments here and in other such Trump litigation efforts against the media are mostly pretext. They’re window dressing for the real message, which is that the future president really hates criticism, dissent or even inconvenient factual information and will use the legal system to target those who engage in it.
Trump is already suing CBS News for a “60 Minutes” broadcast that he thought was too favorable to Harris, as well as taking author Bob Woodward to court, and he’s talking about bringing a case against the Pulitzer Prize Board because he didn’t like them giving a prize to coverage of the Russian attempts to meddle in the 2016 election.
Trump also went after ABC News because of anchorman George Stephanopoulos’ description of the former president having been found “liable for rape” by the jury in the E. Jean Carroll case.
The network settled the other day and paid Trump $15 million and another $1 million for his legal fees.
Observer and legal experts say it was rare for a case to be settled at this stage of the proceedings, especially in favor towards a public figure plaintiff.
Just like any private citizen, Trump can avail himself of the court system as a plaintiff. But he must not bring in the federal bureaucracy that he will soon control. We don’t have to speculate about his appetite for using that authority to punish his enemies because he’s been very candid himself, having made more than 100 threats to investigate, prosecute, jail or otherwise use federal powers against them.
The idea that Selzer and the Register violated some sort of consumer laws by engaging in the long-standing tradition of public polling is not just absurd, it’s outrageous and self-evidently asinine. Polls have been wrong before, and they’ll be wrong again.
The entire practice of polling has only gotten more difficult as people have moved away from landlines and answering their cell phones, plus there are a thousand reasons why a poll might have been off base.
Trump built his career in New York in large part on manipulating the legal system, stiffing workers, under- or over-valuing his properties when convenient and generally trying to bully everyone around him.
He has often mused openly about loosening up the nation’s historically strong First Amendment protections and making claims of libel easier to pursue, no doubt at least partly inspired by the foreign strongmen he so admires, who have helped consolidate their power by taking aim at the institutions that could hold them accountable.
— New York Daily News