How Democratic donors can fight back against Trump’s intimidation campaign
During his Monday, December 16 press conference at Mar-a-Lago, President-elect Donald Trump doubled down on his threat to aggressively attack journalists with defamation lawsuits. And he specifically mentioned Iowa pollster Ann Seltzer and the Des Moines Register.
Seltzer's final poll before the 2024 presidential election showed him trailing Democratic nominee Kamala Harris by 3 percent in Iowa, a state he ended up winning by 13 percent. Although her poll was off by 16 percent, many experts on media law have been slamming Trump's lawsuit as frivolous and stressing that a flawed poll hardly constitutes defamation as defined in the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark New York Times v. Sullivan ruling of 1964.
Talking Points Memo's Josh Marshall discussed Trump's threat to use the legal system against his foes — from journalists to members of Congress to judges — during an appearance on The New Republic's podcast. And he offered a way to fight back: a giant, well-funded legal fund to help Trump's targets.
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Marshall told Sargent, "The idea is that you create some organization, probably a 501(c)(3), that can collect money, both small-donor money and big checks, and create a big pile of cash so that people who are threatened by Trump — whether it's his private lawsuits or Kash Patel harassing people with the FBI, whichever those things are — do not have to face ruinous legal bills, let alone potentially going to prison."
The Talking Points Memo reporter continued, "A lot of people have proposed something like that, and I think it's a great idea. …. You start with an idea that there is resources — legal resources, money resources — that for each person who gets targeted, this organization can swoop in and say, 'Hey, don’t worry about the legal bills. We got it. We're all over this. We've got unlimited money. We're going to fight this, etc. There's a lot of people who've talked about that great idea."
Marshall argued that one of the defense fund's goals could be to "embarrass" lawyers who file "baseless" lawsuits on Trump's behalf.
"That's the language they understand," Marshall told Sargent. "Outrage and very normal and understandable reactions, that’s what they’re looking for."
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Listen to the full New Republic podcast at this link or read the transcript here.
