America is stuffed to the brim with excessively litigious rich folks, and Donald Trump leads the morally bankrupt pack.
Across his excruciating 78 years on this Earth, Donald J. Trump has been engaged in more than 4,000 lawsuits. These stem from his personal beefs with competition and naysayers, to lawsuits over his campaign lies, wrongdoings by his businesses, and efforts to recoup losses. The legal system and business world have always been closely tied, of course, but Trump takes the notoriously litigious tendency of Americans to a whole new level.
Just days after ABC News settled a lawsuit brought by Trump, the unabashed fraudster is once again initiating a legal struggle, this time with an Iowa pollster. Trump successfully convinced ABC and anchor George Stephanopoulos to shell out a $15 million settlement over the anchor’s use of the word “rape” to describe Trump’s sexual abuse of author E. Jean Carroll.
Still riding high on that First Amendment-damning victory, Trump is hoping to once again twist the legal system into his favor with his latest lawsuit. This time he’s targeting Iowa pollster Ann Selzer, along with the Des Moines Register, and all over a pre-election poll that didn’t accurately predict the results of the election.
Three days before the 2024 election, Ann Selzer’s polling firm, the Des Moines Register, published a poll predicting that Kamala Harris was up three percentage points in the state. Trump ultimately ended up winning Iowa by 13 percentage points, and yet somehow he’s still out for blood.
Trump is now attempting to sue Selzer and her firm — along with its parent company, Gannett — over what he calls “brazen election interference.” He and his lawyers seem to think that the ultimately inaccurate poll was somehow attempting to alter the election results, but the logic behind this train of thought is still unclear.
Discussing the suit, Trump said “I’m doing this because I feel I have an obligation to. I’m going to be bringing one against the people in Iowa, their newspaper, which had a very, very good pollster who got me right all the time, and then just before the election, she said I was going to lose by 3 or 4 points.” That’s apparently more than enough to warrant a lawsuit, according to Trump, but legal experts remain skeptical over the suit’s ability to hold water in court.
Selzer, meanwhile, retired from political polling directly following the election. She announced her intent to venture into new territory in mid-November, weeks before the Trump lawsuit came to light, and yet that decision will likely be used by Trump as some kind of evidence in his barely-existent suit.
Pursuing an empty lawsuit is nothing new for Trump, so we really shouldn’t be surprised, but there’s at least a small portion of the nation who still expects this man to be presidential. The rest of us learned better years ago, but for those poor souls who thought Trump would be better this time around, we now have yet more proof that he absolutely will not.
Published: Dec 17, 2024 02:01 pm