'Thin-skinned' Trump slammed for 'frivolous lawsuit' against Iowa pollster
During a press conference at Mar-a-Lago on Monday, December 16, President-elect Donald Trump told reporters that he plans to sue pollster Ann Selzer and the Des Moines Register because of a poll that turned out be way off.
Seltzer's final Des Moines Register poll before the United States' 2024 presidential election showed Vice President Kamala Harris leading Trump in Iowa by 3 percent. But Trump won Iowa by 13 percent, meaning that the poll was off by 16 percent.
Trump, at Mar-a-Lago, told reporters that Selzer was a "very good pollster" who "got me right all the time" — until that final pre-election poll. And he went on to say, "In my opinion, it was fraud, and it was election interference."
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Trump's announcement is receiving a lot of responses on X, formerly Twitter.
When journalist Aaron Rupar tweeted video of Trump announcing his plan to sue Seltzer, conservative Trump critic Gil Loder responded, "I am completely content with Trump wasting his money on frivolous lawsuits as long as he spends his own money on them and not mine. He needs to keep his hands off the government treasury."
Republicans Against Trump tweeted, "Trump just said he plans to sue pollster Ann Selzer and the Iowa newspaper for publishing an inaccurate poll a few days before the election. The most thin-skinned insecure little man on planet Earth."
X user Brian Knotts posted, "Can someone explain the legal theory behind Trump suing the Des Moines Register/Ann Selzer? It seems to me that they are free to publish whatever they want and present it as a poll or whatever. I don't see any law that is broken, even if they make it up 100%.... Is the idea that the allegedly fraudulent (as opposed to merely inaccurate) poll constitutes defamation? That seems like a stretch, to say the least."
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PBS reporter Lisa Desjardins wrote, "Trump: I am going to be bringing a defamation lawsuit against the ppl in Iowa, they had a pollster who said I was going to lose by 3-4 points. (He means Ann Selzer, a polling legend whose final poll missed the Iowa results significantly. She has retired now. )"
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