One day about 25 years ago, when I was a cub reporter at a small-town newspaper in the Pacific Northwest, I received a threatening letter from a law firm. The attorney was writing to claim that my recent obituary of a crusading local politician from decades ago had defamed one of the people he ran against by implying he was corrupt. My heart racing, I took it to the glass-walled office of my editor, John C. Hughes.
Nonsense, he said, they're both dead. The first rule of libel law is that you can't defame the dead.
In my haste to talk with my editor, I hadn't noticed that the letter was being sent on behalf of the allegedly corrupt opponent's daughter. Any libel case wouldn't last more than 10 minutes before a judge — something the lawyer surely knew. My boss assured me in no uncertain terms not to worry another minute about it, and sent the lawyer back a note inviting his client to write a letter to the editor if she still felt strongly. We never heard back.
Hughes thanked me for taking the risk of libel seriously, but he also gave me some parting advice. "Anyone can pay a lawyer $100 to write you an angry letter," he said.
"Anyone can pay a lawyer $100 to write you an angry letter," he said.
I thought of that moment recently when I learned that President-elect Donald Trump is suing pollster Ann Selzer, her polling firm, The Des Moines Register and the newspaper’s parent company, Gannett, over a Nov. 2 poll that showed Kamala Harris winning Iowa by 3 percentage points. (Trump ended up winning the state by 13 points.)
Trump's lawyers claimed that the defendants hoped the poll "would create a false narrative of inevitability for Harris" in the final week of the election. The newspaper responded that it has already acknowledged the poll missed the mark, released all relevant information and published a technical explanation from the pollster. "We stand by our reporting on the matter and believe this lawsuit is without merit," the Register's spokesperson said.
To be clear, this is not a libel lawsuit: it's being brought under an Iowa law that bars deceptive advertising. But when evaluating the merits of this suit, my old editor's dictum still applies. Anyone can pay a lawyer to write an angry letter. Over the years, in fact, Trump has paid a lot of lawyers to write a lot of angry letters and even file lawsuits. Many of these legal cases haven't made it very far.
Consider just a sample of his record:
• In 1984, he sued Paul Gapp, the Chicago Tribune's Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic, over a column that described his proposal for a giant skyscraper as "one of the silliest things anyone could inflict on New York" and said Trump Tower had a "kitschy shopping atrium of blinding flamboyance." A judge dismissed the suit.
• In 2013, he sued HBO host Bill Maher after Maher joked that he would donate $5 million to charity if Trump could prove his father was not an orangutan. (It was a joking reference to Trump's questions about Barack Obama's birth certificate.) Trump withdrew the complaint shortly after filing it.
• In 2022, he sued Hillary Clinton, the Democratic National Committee, former FBI officials and two dozen other people and groups he claimed conspired against his 2016 campaign. A judge dismissed the case and fined Trump and one of his attorneys $1 million for filing a frivolous case.
As a billionaire, he may find the cost of hiring lawyers to pursue these cases trivial.
In a legal sense, Trump may not have won these cases, but that doesn't mean he lost either. As a billionaire, he may find the cost of hiring lawyers to pursue these cases trivial, even in the one case where he faced a fine that would bankrupt most of us. In exchange, he got a lot of news articles written about his claims, forced his legal opponents to spend money on their own lawyers and served notice to others to think twice about criticizing him.
As a public figure, Trump has to meet a high standard in court to prove that he was libeled. He's long said that he would like to change the law to make it easier to sue journalists, but neither Congress nor the Supreme Court have taken up the cause yet. Some lawmakers have even proposed legislation that would make it harder by giving journalists more options to get frivolous lawsuits dismissed.
Recently, ABC News chose to pay $15 million to settle a defamation suit with Trump, with the money going to a future "presidential foundation and museum" to be established by him. The network has received a lot of criticism over it, with many drawing a line from there to Trump suing a pollster, something that would have been unthinkable in the past. But it's important to take a step back and put this in the bigger picture and remember the time that Trump sued an architecture critic who called his building "kitschy."
If he'd sue over that, he'd sue over anything.