Donald Trump sued the Des Moines Register and famed pollster Ann Selzer for publishing an inaccurate preelection poll.
Trump’s suit, filed late on Monday, alleges that publishing the poll, which showed Vice President Kamala Harris leading Trump by 3 percentage points, was “brazen election interference.” The suit also alleges that the poll was “election-interfering fiction.”
The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution protects the freedoms of speech and of the press. Newspapers have a right to publish information like the poll in question no matter how inaccurate it proves to be, just like Trump has the right to lie as he has for almost the entirety of his life in the public eye.
The suit will require the Register and Selzer to spend money to defend their rights, while Trump has millions at his disposal to pursue frivolous legal challenges.
Pollsters get inaccurate results all the time. Trump ultimately won Iowa by more than 13 points, yet Trump is not suing the other pollsters and outlets that also inaccurately predicted the results of the race. An InsiderAdvantage poll had Trump only winning by 7 points, while Emerson College’s poll had him with a 9-point lead, still underestimating his support.
Trump is attempting to punish the poll that showed the Democrat in the lead, even though they have a legal right to be inaccurate. Following the election result, Selzer announced her retirement from polling, which she says was planned a year ago.
The suit comes just a few days after ABC News capitulated to Trump and settled with him for $15 million after he filed a defamation lawsuit against the network. Legal experts have said that ABC had a decent chance at prevailing if they fought the suit, but the network chose to knuckle under the pressure. “This problem needed to go away,” an executive with ABC anonymously told CNN.
Trump said on Monday that he intends to expand his legal fight against free speech, targeting outlets that have criticized him or done reporting that paints him in a negative light. He has singled out CBS’ “60 Minutes,” the Pulitzer Prize committee in response to reporting by The New York Times and Washington Post, and journalist Bob Woodward, who has written books about Trump.
While pursuing this legal action, many of the billionaires who own media and media-related tech companies have begun to publicly demonstrate subservience to Trump. Multibillionaire Elon Musk spent millions to elect Trump, while Amazon’s Jeff Bezos (who owns The Washington Post) and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg have gone to Mar-a-Lago for private meetings with him.
Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times, killed an editorial endorsement of Harris (as did Bezos at the Post), and has recently hired a pro-Trump pundit to be a part of that paper’s editorial board.
Trump is suing the media for speech he doesn’t like, and media executives are in his camp. Speech is under fire, and Trump isn’t even in office yet.
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