Maybe the lesson this Christmas season is that even if turnabout is fair play, at some point, enough is enough.
Start with the specious lawsuits brought against President-elect Donald Trump, to the great glee of many of his never-Trump and Democratic detractors. Some of them, especially Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s March 2023 indictment charging that Trump’s signing off on allegedly false business records in 2017 somehow swindled the electorate in 2016, had an immediate turnabout effect.
Within a few weeks, what had looked like a close Republican primary race between Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) became a runaway romp for Trump. Bragg got a Manhattan jury to vote for conviction, but Trump has had the last laugh.
But in the meantime, he has filed a couple of antic lawsuits of his own. And, contrary to many observers’ expectations, none has been dismissed. His targets are the political press. But just as flimsy prosecutions such as Bragg’s threatened to limit free speech by a political candidate, Trump’s — how should one put it? — creative lawsuits threaten to limit political speech all around.
The first lawsuit is brought against the Des Moines Register’s well-known pollster Ann Selzer, whose Oct. 28-31 poll showed Trump trailing Vice President Kamala Harris by 47% to 44% in a state he had carried 53% to 45% in 2020.
The result was all the more startling because Selzer had a record of gauging accurately late shifts of opinion in the state. The instant reaction of many analysts, professional and amateur, was to wonder whether the bottom was falling out of Trump’s campaign in Iowa and nationally.
Turns out it wasn’t. Other polls showed nothing like such a shift from 2020, and Trump carried Iowa 56% to 43%. Selzer’s postelection analysis, as former Washington Post poll analyst David Byler wrote, showed that if she had adjusted her raw results in ways most pollsters do in this post-landline-telephone era, she would have shown Trump ahead. Her methods, which had spotlighted last-minute shifts in Iowa’s first-in-the-nation precinct caucuses, failed in a race in which opinion was more deeply rooted.
Trump’s preposterous claim is that Selzer presented fake numbers to harm his campaign. I can’t imagine a jury would agree. More importantly, political campaigns are full of sound and fury, dubious claims and downright lies. Elections are adversary processes, with both sides having a say.
Trump’s other creative lawsuit, as Ben Smith reports in Semafor, was brought in 2022 against the Pulitzer Prize Board for defamation, for issuing and refusing to rescind awards to journalists who wrote stories about what Trump calls, picturesquely but accurately, “the Russia, Russia, Russia” collusion hoax.
Trump’s lawyers attack the board for issuing awards “particularly when many of the key assertions and premises of the Russia Collusion Hoax that permeated the Awarded Articles had been revealed by the Mueller Report and congressional investigations as false.”
That, aside from the eccentric capitalization, is a fair comment. As Smith admits, much reporting on supposed Russia collusion, “with its breathless cable news and social media cheerleading, did not bear out,” and “some of that reporting … was powered by a delusion.” Smith also admits, at least via hyperlink, that he, as the then-editor of BuzzFeed, first published the specious and always dubious Steele dossier.
Trump has a legitimate grievance against the Democrats who concocted that document and peddled the Russia collusion canard in an effort to force him from office — an enterprise that weakened the credibility of their legitimate criticisms of him for not accepting the result of the 2020 election.
It would be desirable for both Democrats and Republicans, and for the press, to return to the norm of recognizing as legitimate the results of elections, however distasteful. Enough turnabout.
It would be desirable as well for Trump to drop his creative lawsuits, however gratifying it might be to submit his journalistic tormenters to the ordeal of depositions. As Eli Lake writes in the Free Press, he “should take the win and move on.”
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It would be desirable, thirdly, for the press to admit error, as Ann Selzer and Ben Smith, perhaps a little less forthrightly, have done. It is better to get into the habit of doing so voluntarily rather than risk lawsuits that may establish restrictions.
The Russia collusion hoax did great harm to a duly elected president and, therefore, to the country, and it was always based on a dubious theory and on exceedingly thin, if not nonexistent, evidence. The press owe, not to Donald Trump but to the public, a full accounting.