President-elect Donald Trump is seeking to tame the press during his second term with the help of the courts and taxpayer-funded prosecutors.
Invigorated by winning the popular vote in November and putting most of his criminal legal challenges behind him, Trump is ramping up his litigious media strategy by suggesting Justice Department attorneys should act as his personal lawyers.
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After ABC News last weekend agreed to settle Trump’s defamation lawsuit against host George Stephanopoulos for a $15 million donation to Trump’s presidential library and $1 million in legal fees, Trump, seemingly emboldened, sued another news outlet, the Des Moines Register, and pollster Ann Selzer for their preelection poll in which Vice President Kamala Harris had a surprising small lead over Trump.
Trump, who won Iowa by 13 percentage points last month, said he would prefer the Justice Department to take responsibility for similar lawsuits against news outlets after his inauguration next month.
“I feel I have to do this,” Trump told reporters Monday during a 90-minute press conference. “I shouldn’t really be the one to do it. It should have been the Justice Department or somebody else, but I have to do it. Costs a lot of money to do it, but we have to straighten out the press. Our press is very corrupt.”
As a reality TV star, Trump was a media darling, but, as a politician, his relationships with traditional news outlets have become fraught. He routinely refers to flagship news outlets that have covered him critically as “fake news.” At his raucous rallies, Trump takes time to point out the press in attendance, eliciting boos from his supporters.
He has filed a libel lawsuit against the Pulitzer Prize Board for awarding the prestigious journalism prize to the New York Times and the Washington Post for coverage of the 2016 Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. He also sued the New York Times for another Pulitzer Prize-winning story about the Trump family’s wealth and tax practices. Trump has a pending lawsuit against famed journalist Bob Woodward for releasing audio tapes of their interviews.
Trump’s approach resonates with members of the public who no longer have confidence in news outlets, according to Bud Cummins, a former U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas.
“President-elect Trump is 100% correct: We have a right to hold people accountable for intentionally placing blatantly false stories into newspapers and onto television,” Cummins told the Washington Examiner. “At a minimum, we deserve to learn their identities and understand their true motives.”
Financially challenged news outlets beset by layoffs may win the lawsuits in court, but the exercise of having to come up with hefty legal fees to battle a president could have the desired effect of a more cautious press.
Trump’s suggestion that the Justice Department “be the one” responsible for his news outlet-related lawsuits has concerned Democrats, particularly after Trump nominated Kash Patel for FBI director. In a 2023 podcast with another Trump ally, former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, Patel pledged that “we will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media.”
“Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections,” Patel, who previously worked for the House Intelligence Committee, told Bannon’s War Room podcast last year. “We’re going to come after you. Whether that’s criminally or civilly, we’re going to figure that out. But yeah, we’re putting you all on notice.”
Democrats are hoping that Trump will no longer “be a vengeful, backward-looking politician” but instead become “a civilized president in the mold of his predecessors and beholden to the rule of law,” according to former Maryland Attorney General Douglas Gansler.
“One of the central tenets of a democracy is freedom of the press,” Gansler, now a partner at Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, told the Washington Examiner. “The Department of Justice should never be politicized and weaponized to undermine democracy.”
Patel, a former Justice Department prosecutor who served in Trump’s first term in defense and national intelligence roles, has downplayed his War Room comments. Trump also denied that he would direct Patel to investigate his so-called enemies during an interview with NBC News but said Patel “probably has an obligation to” if he considers “that somebody was dishonest, or crooked, or a corrupt politician.”
Although legal experts argue that the Des Moines Register and Selzer lawsuit, in which Trump criticizes the poll as “brazen election interference,” is weak because of its basis in consumer fraud law, the chilling effect on news outlets could be strong.
“Trump doesn’t have to be able to win these lawsuits to succeed in his goal,” attorney Susan Simpson wrote on social media. “Which is to make it economically unviable for most people and organizations to publish news, polls, or opinions that are unfavorable to him.”
In the Des Moines Register-Selzer legal filing, Trump writes that he is trying to discourage “radicals from continuing to act with corrupt intent in releasing polls manufactured for the purpose of skewing election results in favor of Democrats,” complaining it caused him to reallocate campaign resources.
Trump transition spokesman Steven Cheung told the Washington Examiner that Trump will “hold those who have committed, and are committing wrongdoings, accountable for blatantly false and dishonest reporting, which serves no public interest and only seeks to interfere in our elections on behalf of political partisans.”
Incoming White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt similarly contended on Fox News that Trump will not “tolerate defamatory statements” anymore and news outlets “will be held accountable with litigation” and from “behind the podium.”
At the same time, Cummins, the former U.S. attorney who was appointed by former President George W. Bush in 2001 before working on Trump’s first transition in 2016, underscored that “the bigger priority” should be “restoring credibility to the Department of Justice and federal investigative agencies.”
“Investigating the truth about past events while rebuilding trust for the future will be challenging,” he said.
Meanwhile, Des Moines Register spokeswoman Lark-Marie Anton remained adamant that the newspaper stood “by our reporting on the matter and believe this lawsuit is without merit.”
“We have acknowledged that the Selzer/Des Moines Register pre-election poll did not reflect the ultimate margin of President Trump’s Election Day victory in Iowa by releasing the poll’s full demographics, crosstabs, weighted and unweighted data, as well as a technical explanation from pollster Ann Selzer,” Anton told the Washington Examiner.
ABC News did not respond to the Washington Examiner‘s request for comment, and Selzer declined to comment.
Trump sued ABC News and Stephanopoulos after the host repeated during a March episode of This Week that Trump had been found civilly liable for the rape of writer E. Jean Carroll at the New York City Bergdorf Goodman department store in the mid-1990s and not her sexual abuse as defined by New York law. Trump is appealing the verdict. The settlement included an apology as well.
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Trump also sued CBS News, which did not provide comment, in October shortly after an episode of 60 Minutes aired in which Harris was quoted differently in the final edit compared to a clip of the interview.
Trump railed against “partisan and unlawful acts of election and voter interference” intended to “mislead the public and attempt to tip the scales” of the contest for Harris.
