The Nation

02/03/2025

But marginal political advantage isn’t what’s driving Trump’s litigation roadshow against the press. Rather, it’s a raw show of oligarchic strength, calculated to intimidate other media organizations—particularly ones with shallower pockets than the backers of ABC and CBS —from programming principled and independent investigations of the many power grabs, crimes, and constitutional trespasses of the second Trump White House.

There’s no other way to suss out an intelligible through line from the other marquee Trump media suits—consumer fraud complaints against the Pulitzer Prize board for recognizing the reporting of The New York Times and The Washington Post on allegations of collusion between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia, and against the Des Moines Register and its lead pollster Ann Selzer for a misleading voter survey showing Harris pulling ahead of Trump in Iowa during the election’s homestretch. (Trump wound up winning Iowa by 15 points, again raising the question of whether ostensible media plotting against his campaign actually benefited it.)

Given Trump’s own penchant for lying extravagantly about his own Russian entanglements and election results, it’s grimly amusing to see him pretend to police the alleged bad-faith reportage of the press. It’s also striking, though notably absent from coverage of the Paramount suit, that there was indeed a major interview conducted with a presidential candidate during the campaign’s homestretch that a network scrubbed of its many damning falsehoods and non sequiturs—the Fox News footage of Trump’s interview at a Bronx barbershop.