What can we expect of Donald Trump’s second term, besides mass deportations, January 6 pardons, a “virtual closure of [the] Department of Education,” and a potential end to some lifesaving childhood vaccines? A war on the media, it would seem!
During a press conference on Monday, Trump was asked if he planned to file additional defamation lawsuits following the one he settled with ABC News over the weekend, which resulted in the network cutting a $15 million check. He responded that that is absolutely the plan, saying, “We have to straighten out our press. Our press is very corrupt, almost as corrupt as our elections.” Then he said: “I’m gonna be bringing one against the people in Iowa, their newspaper, which had a very, very good pollster, who got me right all the time. And then just before the election, she said I was gonna lose by three or four points.” The pollster in question is Ann Selzer, who has done work for The Des Moines Register for years and who published a poll shortly before the 2024 election that showed Vice President Kamala Harris with a three-point lead over Trump in Iowa.
Of course, as we now know, Trump won the state by just over 13 points, meaning Selzer got it very, very wrong. Still, it’s not clear that incorrectly predicting the results of the election is illegal. In fact, Selzer presumably very much wishes she had gotten it right, rather than so embarrassingly not right. Speaking to PBS last week, the Iowa pollster said: “I am mystified about what motivation anybody thinks I had and would act on in such a public poll. I don’t understand it. And the allegations I take very seriously. They’re saying that this was election interference, which is a crime…. To suggest without a single shred of evidence that I was in cahoots with somebody, I was being paid by somebody—it’s all just kind of…it’s hard to pay too much attention to it except that they are accusing me of a crime.” She also noted that she believed her poll putting Harris ahead of Trump “could actually energize and activate Republican voters” into coming out in droves for the ex-president. Selzer announced last month that she was quitting public opinion polling.
Trump’s vow to file further suits against the media comes just days after ABC News announced that it would pay $15 million to settle a defamation suit brought against the network by the former president. In that case, Trump had claimed he was defamed by anchor George Stephanopoulos, who said in an interview that Trump was found liable for rape. Rather, a jury found him liable for sexual abuse against writer E. Jean Carroll, although the judge presiding over the case later wrote in a filing: “…the jury’s finding that Mr. Trump ‘sexually abused’ Ms. Carroll implicitly determined that he forcibly penetrated her digitally – in other words, that Mr. Trump in fact did ‘rape’ Ms. Carroll as that term commonly is used and understood in contexts outside of the New York Penal Law.”
Critics of ABC’s decision to settle fear that it will lead to more lawsuits against the media by an emboldened Trump. (As Trump noted during Monday’s press conference, he currently has pending suits against CBS News, reporter Bob Woodward, and the Pulitzer board.) On X, former Obama adviser David Axelrod wrote: “Now Trump says he’s suing the Des Moines Register because their poll understated his support; 60 Minutes because of their editing of @KamalaHarris interview; the Pulitzer committee for honoring @nytimes coverage of Russian election interference. Welcome to Hungary, folks!”
