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President Donald Trump speaks with reporters in the Oval Office at the White House, Tuesday, Feb. 11, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
Lawyers for the Des Moines Register and its parent company called out Donald Trump for suing the Iowa newspaper and its former pollster J. Ann Selzer, saying that his lawsuit is nothing more than an unconstitutional “work of fantasy” which only serves to confirm that the president is a “sore winner.”
Trump in December 2024, filed the lawsuit over a poll published ahead of the 2024 presidential election that predicted Vice President Kamala Harris had a slight lead in the race that Trump went on to win. Selzer’s poll, which was released three days before the election, had predicted that Harris had about a three-point lead in Iowa over then-candidate Trump, who went on to win the state by about 13 points.
Trump soon filed suit under an Iowa law against “consumer fraud” in which he accused Selzer and the Register of being in cahoots with “cohorts in the Democrat Party” who “hoped that the Harris Poll would create a false narrative of inevitability for Harris in the final week of the 2024 Presidential Election.” The complaint accuses the defendants of committing “brazen election interference” through use of the allegedly “manipulated” poll to “deceive voters.”
“The President of the United States, Donald J. Trump, brings this lawsuit ostensibly to ‘seek accountability’ for alleged ‘election interference’; but instead, his lawsuit only confirms that President Trump is a sore winner,” the filing states. “[N]o court in this country has ever recognized a cause of action based on the publication of ‘fraudulent news.’ This is no time to start. The very notion is an affront to the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.”
Trump is seeking relief in the form of damages and a court order to prevent the newspaper from publishing any future “deceptive polls” that might “poison the electorate.” But the Register argues that even the relief being sought by the president would be unconstitutional.
“To borrow a phrase, the Amended Complaint is a piece of “political theater’ that amounts to ‘nothing more than a work of fantasy,”” the Register’s attorneys wrote. “There is no legal basis for President Trump to obtain the relief he seeks; indeed, such relief would violate free speech principles.”
Additionally, the newspaper argues that the fraud law under which Trump is suing has no place in a legal action over allegations of election interference. The law is meant to punish unfair, deceptive, or fraudulent conduct “in connection with the advertisement, sale, or lease of consumer merchandise, or the solicitation of contributions for charitable purposes.”
“President Trump attempts to punish press coverage of which he disapproves through tortured application of the Iowa Consumer Fraud Act, as well as through frivolous tort claims for fraudulent misrepresentation and negligent misrepresentation,” the filing continued. “If he had his way, such claims would become weapons for any political candidate to challenge any press coverage they do not like. However, his claims all fail to state a cause of action on which relief can be granted.”
The motion to dismiss goes on to assert that polls are non-actionable opinions that cannot constitute actionable statements of material fact as they are the product of an expert’s opinion on methodology and are snapshots in time of randomized samples of voters.
The paper also published an “extensive write-up” about how the poll was performed and the factors upon which Selzer weighted the responses. The motion notes that nowhere in Trump’s filings does he allege that the data collected was false or that the methodology was implemented incorrectly.
The Register further argues that Trump’s own claim of injury for which he is seeking relief — alleging in the complaint he was “badly deceived and misled” — is contradicted by the president’s own words in the very same complaint, which states, “President Trump certainly could not have trailed Harris by three points in Iowa at any time in the 2024 cycle.”
“Plaintiffs do not allege that they credited the poll results or relied on them to make any consumer decision; they do not allege this in the Amended Complaint because they in fact did no such thing,” the filing states. “Plaintiffs were not in fact ‘deceived’ by the Iowa Poll and were perfectly capable of disregarding its analysis and conclusion based on their own certainty of its inaccuracy. To the extent they were ‘deceived and misled,’ such an injury was easily avoidable if Plaintiffs (together with their very well-staffed and capable campaigns) simply read the published underlying polling data and reached their own conclusions about their import.”
Trump’s lawsuit was one of a flurry of actions initiated by the president after winning the 2024 election, including defamation suits against ABC and star anchor George Stephanopoulos that controversially settled for $15 million and another in which the president is seeking $20 billion from CBS over a 60 Minutes segment featuring Harris that he claimed was “doctored.”
The suit against the Register and Selzer has long been panned by legal experts who have criticized it as an effort to impose a financial burden on the defendants.
“I don’t expect this lawsuit to go anywhere,” Rick Hasen, an election law expert and professor at UCLA School of Law, wrote after it was filed.
The case is before U.S. District Judge Rebecca Goodgame Ebinger, an appointee of Barack Obama
