Filing dubious lawsuits is one of Donald Trump’s favorite hobbies. He’s taken on the likes of The New York Times, Facebook, Twitter-as-was and Youtube, just to name a few. These legal temper tantrums aren’t designed to win (and usually don’t); mostly they have been about assuaging Trump’s bruised ego and keeping his name in the press.
The president-elect’s lawsuit against the pollster Ann Selzer and the Des Moines Register, however, is different.
There are many things wrong with Trump’s claim. It’s still comical — there’s a reason that Donald Trump has so much trouble retaining top-tier attorneys, apart from his notorious reluctance to pay their bills — but it’s also deeply disturbing. The only real question is whether the judge will use the F word (frivolous) when it gets dismissed.
The complaint Trump filed is 25 pages long, but most of that is window dressing. There’s only one actual claim, and it boils down to Trump arguing that the Selzer poll predicting he might lose Iowa was false and that, because of this false poll, Trump had to spend campaign money to “mitigate and counteract the harms of the Defendants’ conduct.”
For starters, Trump doesn’t have standing to sue. He filed this action in his personal capacity, but it would have been his campaign that spent the money and suffered any damages. But let’s look at the bigger picture here.
Trump is claiming that he can bring an action for damages because Selzer and the Des Moines Register said stuff that wasn’t true and this caused him political harm. He says this is “election interference” and that it violates the Iowa Consumer Fraud Act.
