In Donald Trump’s current revenge tour, the media is in the spotlight. “It should have been someone else or the Department of Justice but I’m going to do it,” the president-elect said Monday. “It costs a lot of money to do it, but we have to fix the press,” he added. “Our press is very corrupt; almost as corrupt as our elections.”
This same Monday, a 15-year-old student killed two people in Wisconsin, injured six others and ended up taking her own life with a nine-millimeter pistol.
The United States Supreme Court grants the same constitutional protection to firearms as it does to freedom of speech and religion. But in Trump world, guns and the second amendment are cool; the press, not so much.
Hours after the press conference and the shooting, the president-elect got to work without wasting a second, filing a lawsuit against the newspaper Des Moines Register, against its parent company Gannett, and against the political pollster J Ann Selzer for an opinion poll published before the elections in which Kamala Harris beat him by three points in Iowa (47% for Harris compared to 44% for Trump).
On Election Day, Trump won Iowa by double digits. With that information, the lawsuit alleges that the defendants violated Iowa consumer fraud laws and committed election interference. Trump, who is not known for his accuracy, embarked on another fantasy through his lawyers. “The November 5 election was a tremendous victory for President Trump, both in the electoral college and the popular vote, an overwhelming representation of his America First principles,” the brief said.
That’s not true. According to the actual numbers, Trump’s margin in the popular vote was 1.48 points. He received less than half of all votes, for third-party votes and for ballots in which voters write names of candidates who are not running. The margins of victory for Joe Biden, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton were wider.
We are facing the same Trump who insinuated time and time again that Obama was born outside the United States. The same Trump who has to pay more than $85 million to E. Jean Carroll [unos 82 millones de euros] after losing two civil lawsuits for defamation and sexual abuse filed in federal court in Manhattan.
His message remains clear: we must kneel, or face the consequences.
give in to pressure
Some media outlets are already assuming what Trump means. Days after the election, ‘Morning Joe’ Scarborough and his wife and co-host Mika Brzezinski rushed to Mar-a-Lago for an interview with Trump proving that time and fear heals all. In 2017, Trump called Scarborough a “psychopath” and lashed out at Brzezinski. “Mika, the low-IQ crazy one,” he said, making a joke about her for having “bled a lot with a lifting face.”
Then there’s ABC News. The network recently reached an agreement in which it agreed to pay $15 million to Trump [unos 14,4 millones de euros] to resolve a defamation lawsuit. Last spring, George Stephanopoulos, the host of his Sunday show, had repeatedly said that Trump was guilty of rape, when the reality was that the jury had found him guilty of abuse.
But there is more. In August 2023, Trump lost his defamation countersuit against E. Jean Carroll. Dismissing the countersuit, New York Judge Lewis A. Kaplan explained that Carroll’s words that Trump had raped her were “substantially true.” The judge also detailed the reasons why it was possible to say that Trump raped Carroll.
Stephanopoulos said in May that intimidation would not stop him from doing his job. But both he and the ABC network They have expressed “regret” by the choice of words. Whichever way you look at it, the ABC network has bowed to the pressure and it is to be hoped that the president-elect will be emboldened.
Trump has also filed a $10 billion lawsuit against CBS [unos 9.600 millones de euros] for the alleged manipulation of an interview with Kamala Harris on the program 60 Minutes. Pending in federal court in Texas, the lawsuit also relies on the state’s consumer fraud law. CBS requested in early December that the case be dismissed.
The end of a historic sentence?
But the final prize for Trump and his allies is to ensure that the case stops serving as a precedent. ‘New York Times’ v. Sullivan, a unanimous ruling by the Supreme Court that in 1964 marked a milestone for press freedom. They want to eliminate the requirement to prove “actual malice” and for public figures to require a lower burden of proof to confront the press. The fact that more than half a century has passed since the decision means nothing.
“Political decisions disguised as constitutional law,” conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has said of the Sullivan case and those that followed. More subtly, fellow conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch argues that the advent of cable television, the Internet, and the 24/7 news cycle justified revising the requirement to prove “actual malice.”
“In 1964, the Court could have considered that the actual malice standard was necessary to ensure that dissenting or critical voices were not excluded from public debate,” Gorsuch argues. “But if that justification had weight in a world where there were comparatively few platforms for expression, its weight is less evident in a world where everyone carries a platform in their hand.”
All of this brings us back to Trump’s offensive against Des Moines Register, And what is good for some is good for all. In the last days of September, a few weeks before the presidential elections, news emerged that the polling company Rasmussen Reports had shared data from its surveys with senior officials of the Trump campaign. According to journalists from American Muckrakers and New Republican email had revealed the “close collaboration between the Trump campaign team, Rasmussen and the Heartland Institute”, an NGO classified as 501(c)3 [uno de los tipos de organizaciones sin ánimo de lucro de los EEUU]which could represent a legal problem and a headache. Turning the argument around is normal. Without realizing it, Trump may have opened a door to go against his friends.
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Lloyd Green is a lawyer in New York and worked at the US Department of Justice from 1990 to 1992.
Translation by Francisco de Zárate.
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