Government

Donald Trump Sues Yet Another Media Outlet For Tortious Journalism-ing

The First Amendment protects speech. But journalism is "merchandise," okay?

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Former President Trump Addresses The Turning Points Action Conference In West Palm Beach, California

(Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

To call Donald Trump a transactional leader is to damn with faint praise. The man hawks gold sneakers. He took the White House photographers’ work and turned it into a $100 coffee table book. He shreds his clothes and sells them for literal scrap. He got paid billions of dollars to vomit nonsense onto a bespoke social media platform whose only rule was that you couldn’t criticize him (or his business or his family).

And so it is perhaps unsurprising that President-elect Got Mine thinks speech is literally merchandise. That is the basis of his trollsuit (h/t Politico) against J. Ann Selzer and the Des Moines Register, filed last night in the District Court for Polk County, Iowa. Trump says that Selzer rigged and leaked a poll that showed him losing the state to Vice President Harris, and that amounts to election interference, which somehow violates Iowa’s Consumer Fraud Act.

“President Trump brings this action to redress the immense harm caused to himself, to the Trump 2024 Campaign, and to millions of citizens in Iowa and across America by the Harris Poll and the Defendants,” his lawyer  Edward Paltzik blusters. “Further, this action is necessary to deter Defendants and their fellow radicals from continuing to act with corrupt intent in releasing polls manufactured for the purpose of skewing election results in favor of Democrats.”

The entire exercise is nonsense. Trump is suing in his individual capacity, and yet demands to recoup “direct federal campaign expenditures” diverted “to mitigate and counteract the harms of the Defendants’ conduct.” The suit claims that “President Trump, together with all Iowa and American voters, is a  ‘consumer’ within the meaning of the statute.” It goes to considerable lengths to call Selzer a discredited hack, then claims that “consumers, including Plaintiff, were badly deceived and misled as to the actual position of the respective candidates in the Iowa Presidential race.”

And the “harms” described appear to be … not harms?

Selzer's deceptive "miss" caused extensive harm: It is more likely that someone deliberately manipulated the sample so that it included too many Democrats, or simply made up the numbers as they came in for the purpose of giving confidence to Harris voters and worry for Trump supporters, or to bring national attention to a poll taken in a state not regarded as competitive. The poll did receive national attention and was widely discussed. Selzer appeared on television interviews to talk about the poll and its implications. If the goal was to promote the poll, then the gambit succeeded —at least until election day, when it was revealed to be ridiculously far off the mark.

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After 20 pages of inchoate screeching peppered with quotes from local Republican officials, Paltzik comes to his sole count of “Violation of Iowa Consumer Fraud Act Iowa Code Chapter 714H.” That bog standard consumer protection statute bars deception “in connection with the advertisement, sale, or lease of consumer merchandise, or the solicitation of contributions for charitable purposes.” That would not on its face appear to include “election interference,” even if such a thing could be proved. Trump is clearly mad about newspaper articles predicting information that turned out to be untrue. But, no, Trump insists that the statute does apply to journalism because “Defendants furnished ‘merchandise’ to consumers within the broad meaning of the statute since they provided a service: physical newspapers, online newspapers, and other content that contained the Harris Poll.”

Voilà! Speech is now “merchandise” (or possibly a service), and your dumbshit SLAPP suit is now outside the ambit of the First Amendment. And not for the first time — Paltzik filed a similar suit in Texas (NDTX Amarillo division, natch) alleging that CBS violated the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices-Consumer Protection Act by editing Vice President Harris’s interview on “60 Minutes.”

Gannett, the parent company of the Register, is also a named defendant. In a publicly released statement, its spokesperson Lark-Marie Anton said, “We stand by our reporting on the matter and will vigorously defend our First Amendment rights.”

Of course, a vigorous defense, even one that is ultimately successful, is terribly expensive. And unlike Trump, the paper won’t be able to be able tap endless piles of PAC money to fund its legal defense.

Nice First Amendment you got there. Be a shame if an avalanche of bad faith litigation were to happen to it.

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Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she produces the Law and Chaos substack and podcast.

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