TRUMP OPENS FIRE ON THE MEDIA

The point is not necessarily winning. The point is fear. Now that Disney has surrendered and paid their initiation fee, Trump is ready to commit more extortion, er, I mean start more lawsuits.

In his rambling fact-challenged press conference yesterday, Trump targeted Bob Woodward, CBS, and the Pulitzer Board for awarding its 2018 Prize to the New York Times and the Washington Post for their coverage of Trump’s campaign, the Steele Dossier, and the Mueller investigation into Russian interference with the 2016 election. Trump also described recent visits from Apple CEO Tim Cook, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, and other tech barons. “In the first term, everyone was fighting me. In this term, everyone wants to be my friend.”

On Monday night, less than 48 hours after securing a $15 million settlement from ABC News, Trump filed a lawsuit in Iowa District Court accusing venerated pollster Ann Selzer and her polling company - and well as The Des Moines Register and its parent company, Gannett - of “brazen election interference” and “consumer fraud” over her November 2 poll showing Kamala Harris winning by 3 points in Iowa.

Whether Seltzer’s polling error constitutes an “election-interfering fiction,” as the suit alleges, is now the question before a Polk County court. Iowa lacks an anti-SLAPP law, a protection that gives judges the ability to swiftly toss out frivolous attacks on free speech. Trump’s newest legal adventure leans on an extremely aggressive reading of Iowa’s consumer fraud law intended to prevent businesses from making misrepresentations to deceive purchasers.

Selzer’s spent three decades in the polling business and boasts an A+ rating from Nate Silver, Her sterling reputation was the main reason why many in Washington and the media took her startling Iowa result at least somewhat seriously. Even among veteran political operators who wrote off the Harris +3 number as an outlier, the prospect that pollsters might be significantly undercounting Democratic votes fomented a temporary media narrative that Kamala’s campaign had crucial momentum heading into the final days of the race.

Two weeks after the election, Selzer announced she would be retiring from the polling business to explore “other ventures and opportunities,”a decision she said she made last year. “Would I have liked to make this announcement after a final poll aligned with Election Day results? Of course,” she wrote in a guest essay for The Des Moines Register. “It’s ironic that it’s just the opposite.”

Trump was still fuming over the last-minute narrative shift that the poll generated. He now appears eager to run up the score.

Ahead of filing the lawsuit Monday evening, Trump previewed his plans in an afternoon press conference. “We have to straighten out our press,” he said. “Our press is very corrupt, almost as corrupt as our elections.”

Besides the ABC News suit, Trump is suing CBS News for $10 billion for the way it edited Bill Whitaker’s 60 Minutes interview with Harris - claiming the edited broadcast amounted to “partisan and unlawful acts of election and voter interference.” He is now pursuing a case against the Pulitzer Prize board for awards to journalists from The New York Times and Washington Post who investigated his ties to Russia during the 2016 campaign.

Never before has a candidate sued a pollster for setting off a negative news cycle. Typically, if a pollster is wrong, their reputation suffers, but they are rarely blamed for damaging a campaign.

The Des Moines Register said they stand by their reporting and believe a lawsuit would be “without merit.” It will be interesting to see what Gannet does here - they are a major company in the news business without other corporate interests.

As with Trump’s other lawsuits against media organizations, the objective isn’t to win but to intimidate.

Litigation is expensive for all parties, especially in high-profile cases such as those involving a former and future president, even if the suit is ultimately found to be frivolous. There is also the burden of the discovery process, which is always invasive and frequently ugly. Already, nervousness is spreading, with media companies preparing for litigation targeting journalists, including charges like defamation or even violations of the Espionage Act. Axios recently told its staff to expect an increased number of lawsuits from the Trump administration.

The fact that Trump has filed litigation against Selzer, and 60 Minutes could undercut his argument he’s too busy as president-elect to shoulder the burdens of civil litigation.

The two dominant theories about ABC’s surrender are that either Trump has unearthed potentially damaging information or correspondence at ABC News that Disney doesn’t want revealed, or that this is CEO Bob Iger’s gesture to Trump to avoid his vengeance and the lightning-rod spectacle of a public trial against a sitting president. Iger, since he returned to Disney, has been willing to placate the right to keep the company out of its crosshairs He knows he can’t give $1 million to Trump’s inauguration without causing an internal firestorm, and he hasn’t made his own tail-between-legs pilgrimage to Mar-A-Lago. But he knows this settlement is a way to buy some insurance for the next four years. The question is how much goodwill it actually buys. If Trump sees an opportunity to benefit from attacking Disney, he’ll do it, regardless of Disney’s surrender.

Michelle Goldberg wrote of these events, Collectively, all these elite decisions to bow to Trump make it feel like the air is going out of the old liberal order. In its place will be something more ruthless and Nietzschean.”

Anne Applebaum, an expert on descents into authoritarianism, said, “Many people assumed in the past that the news media in the United States was too big, too diverse, and too complex to be intimidated.”

So much for that cornerstone of democracy.

“When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.” - Edmund Burke

“You were given the choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour, and you will have war.' - Winston Churchill

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