It’s time for Trump to drop the lawsuits and for the media to apologize

Start with the horrific lawsuits brought against the President-elect Donald Trumpmuch to the delight of many of his never-Trump and Democrat detractors. Some of them, notably Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s March 2023 indictment alleging that Trump’s signing of allegedly false business filings in 2017 somehow defrauded the electorate in 2016, had a immediate return effect.

In a matter of weeks, what looked like a tight Republican primary race between Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) became a runaway fun for Trump. Bragg got a Manhattan jury to vote to convict, but Trump had the last laugh.

But in the meantime, he filed some ancient lawsuits. And contrary to the expectations of many observers, none were rejected. His targets are the political press. But just as thin lawsuits like Bragg’s have threatened to limit a political candidate’s free speech, Trump’s — how should he say it? — creative processes threaten to limit political discourse everywhere.

The first lawsuit is filed against The Des Moines Register the well-known Ann Selzer poll, whose October 28-31 POLL showed Trump trailing Vice President Kamala Harris 47 percent to 44 percent in a state he carried 53 percent to 45 percent in 2020.

The result was all the more surprising because Selzer had a track record of accurately gauging late shifts in opinion in the state. The immediate reaction of many analysts, professional and amateur, was to wonder if Trump’s campaign bottom was dropping in Iowa and nationally.

Apparently it wasn’t. Other polls showed nothing like such a shift from 2020, and Trump carried Iowa 56% to 43%. Selzer’s post-election analysisas before Washington Post wrote poll analyst David Byler, showed that if he had adjusted his raw results in ways that most pollsters do in this post-landline era, he would have shown Trump ahead. Her methods, which highlighted last-minute swings in Iowa’s first caucuses in the country, backfired in a race where opinion was more deeply entrenched.

Trump’s absurd claim is that Selzer presented fake numbers to damage his campaign. I can’t imagine a jury would agree. More importantly, political campaigns are full of sound and fury, dubious claims and outright lies. Elections are adversarial processes, with both sides having a say.

Trump’s other creative process, as Ben Smith reports Traffic lightswas brought to 2022 against the Pulitzer Prize Board for defamation, for giving and refusing to rescind awards to journalists who wrote stories about what Trump picturesquely but accurately calls the “Russia, Russia, Russia collusion hoax.”

Trump’s lawyers are attacking the awarding board “especially when many of the key claims and premises of the Russian collusion hoax that permeated the awarding articles have been revealed by the Mueller Report and congressional investigations to be false.”

That, aside from the eccentric capitalization, is a fair comment. As Smith acknowledges, many reports of alleged Russian collusion, “with its breathless cable news and social media cheerleading, have not produced results,” and “some of that reporting … has been fueled by delusion.” Smith, too admitat least by hyperlink, that he, as the then editor BuzzFeedfirst published the specious and always dubious Steele dossier.

Trump has a legitimate grievance against the Democrats who concocted that document and sold Russian collusion in an effort to force him out of office — an enterprise that undermined the credibility of their legitimate critics of him for not accepting the outcome of the 2020 election.

It would be desirable for both Democrats and Republicans, as well as for the press, to return to the norm of recognizing as legitimate the results of elections, however unpleasant. Enough going back.

It would also be desirable for Trump to abandon his creative processes, as gratifying as it would be to subject his tormentor journalists to the ordeal of depositions. As Eli Lake writes in Free presshe “should take the win and move on.”

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It would be desirable, thirdly, for the press to admit the error, ca Ann Selzer and Ben Smith, perhaps a little less directly, did. It is better to get into the habit of doing this voluntarily than to risk lawsuits that may impose restrictions.

The Russia collusion farce has done great harm to a duly elected president and thus the country, and has always been based on a dubious theory and extremely thin, if not non-existent, evidence. The press owes, not Donald Trump, but the public, a full accounting.