Donald Trump announced Monday he would sue political pollster Ann Selzer and The Des Moines Register, which published a shock poll showing Trump losing Iowa by three points.
“I’m not doing this because I want to, I’m doing this because I feel I have an obligation to,” the president-elect said.
Trump’s announcement comes after he received a settlement from ABC News after he filed a defamation suit against the network. ABC News’ star anchor, George Stephanopoulos, said multiple times Trump was found “liable for rape,” when he was actually found liable for sexual abuse. As a result, ABC will contribute $15 million to Trump’s future presidential library. Trump’s win against ABC would embolden him to sue even more news organizations, critics said.
“The people in Iowa, their newspaper had a very, very good pollster who got it right all the time,” Trump said. “Then just before the election, she said I was going to lose by four points and it became the biggest story of all time, all over the world.”
Selzer predicted in a poll three days before the election that Kamala Harris would top Trump 47 percent to 44 percent because of older women showing out to vote for reproductive rights. The poll gave Democrats false hope that Harris would win the White House decisively. Ultimately, Trump won Iowa by 13 points.
Trump blasted the poll in a post on Truth Social at the time.
“In fact, it’s not even close! All polls, except for one heavily skewed toward the Democrats by a Trump hater who called it totally wrong the last time, have me up, BY A LOT,” he wrote.
Selzer, who had an A+ rating for accuracy, first broke onto the scene as Iowa’s top pollster when she correctly predicted Barack Obama winning the Iowa caucuses over Hillary Clinton in 2008. She announced in a column after the 2024 election that she’d be retiring from polling.
“Would I have liked to make this announcement after a final poll aligned with election day results? Of course,” she wrote. “It’s ironic that it’s just the opposite.”
On PBS, Selzer responded to the allegation that her poll had been a form of election interference.
“I am mystified about what the motivation anybody thinks I had and would act on in such a public poll. I don’t understand it,” Selzer said.
Iowa pollster J. Ann Selzer responds to Donald Trump’s attacks during an appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. / MSNBC
The suit against Selzer and the Register, which Trump said he would file on Monday or Tuesday, would be another in Trump’s long list of lawsuits against journalists and the media. He currently has a lawsuit pending against CBS’ 60 Minutes, which he claims favorably edited Harris’ answers.
“They took Kamala’s answer, which was a crazy answer, a horrible answer, and they took the whole answer out and they replaced it with something else she said later on in the interview,” Trump said on Monday.
Trump is also suing famed journalist Bob Woodward for allegedly misquoting him and selling interview tapes for his book The Trump Tapes, as well as the Pulitzer committee for giving an award to journalists reporting on Russian election interference in 2016.
Trump’s vengeance against the media is a change of heart from just last week, when he told NBC News’ Kristen Welker that his “retribution will be through success.”
“I’m really looking to make our country successful. I’m not looking to go back into the past,” Trump said.
The Daily Beast has reached out to Trump for comment but did not hear back in time of publication.
