Trump’s Latest Vengeful Lawsuit Is Dripping with Wounded Egotism

The president-elect is actually suing Ann Selzer, TheDes Moines Register, and—watch out for this—Gannett newspapers because they got a poll wrong shortly before the presidential election last fall. The complaint is a masterpiece of Trumpian rhetoric—vengeful, fantastical, and dripping with wounded egotism, a symphony of victimhood pitched in a major key.

Contrary to reality and defying credulity, Defendants’ Harris Poll was published three days before Election Day and purported to show Harris leading President Trump in Iowa by three points; President Trump ultimately won Iowa by over thirteen points. Selzer brazenly claimed: “It’s hard for anybody to say they saw this coming . . . . Harris has clearly leaped into a leading position.” However, as Selzer well knew, there was a perfectly good reason nobody “saw this coming”: because a three-point lead for Harris in deep-red Iowa was not reality, it was election-interfering fiction.

Yet, Selzer—who had prided herself on a mainstream reputation for accuracy despite several far less publicized egregious polling misses in favor of Democrats—discussed would have public believe it was merely a coincidence that one of the worst polling misses of her career came just days before the most consequential election in memory, was leaked, and happened to go against the Republican candidate. The Harris Poll was no “miss” but rather an attempt to influence the outcome of the 2024 Presidential Election.

“For too long, left-wing pollsters have attempted to influence electoral outcomes through manipulated polls that have unacceptable error rates and are not grounded in widely accepted polling methodologies. While Selzer is not the only pollster to engage in this corrupt practice, she had a huge platform and following and, thus, a significant and impactful opportunity to deceive voters.

The Register clearly ate all the strawberries.

I wish Selzer and the Register good luck on this one, and I suspect that the capitulation, if it comes, will come from Gannett, which has something of a track record of abandoning its newsroom personnel under pressure from outside money power.

My advice for the defendants? Don’t forget to duck.