Imagine if Harry Truman sued the Chicago Tribune for publishing the famously inaccurate headline, “Dewey Defeats Truman,” after the 1948 election. That would be the closest analogy to president-elect Donald Trump’s bizarre lawsuit filed this week against Iowa pollster Ann Selzer, The Des Moines Register, and Gannett, which owns the Register.
Trump won the election. But the incoming president can’t just satisfy himself in the knowledge that he defeated an incumbent administration and that in the process, he gave the legacy press that despises him a good, swift kick as well. The wildly inaccurate Iowa poll published on the eve of Election Day is, in Trump’s mind, evidence of an elaborate fraud on the American people.
“Before this astonishing sixteen-point polling miss Selzer brazenly claimed: ‘It’s hard for anybody to say they saw this coming,’ ” read Trump’s complaint, which was filed in Polk County, Iowa. “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.”
Normally, this would be—and, indeed, should be—the stuff of Truth Social posts and op-eds. But this time it’s the opening salvo in a lawsuit against Iowa’s leading newspaper and a woman long known as the state’s most respected pollster. And it appears that it is part of a broader strategy of Trump’s, to sue the pants off media companies. Trump already has active suits pending against Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, the Pulitzer Prize Board, and CBS News.