Lyle Muller is a board member of the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting and Iowa High School Press Association, a trustee of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council, former executive director/editor of the Iowa Center for Public Journalism that became part of the Midwest Center, former editor of The Cedar Rapids Gazette, and a recipient of the Iowa Newspaper Association’s Distinguished Service Award. In retirement, he is the professional adviser for Grinnell College’s Scarlet & Black newspaper. This article first appeared on his Substack newsletter.

So, Donald Trump is suing The Des Moines Register and pollster J. Ann Selzer for consumer fraud, which he claims was willful election interference. Bring it on, I would like to say—but I don’t run The Register and my subscription does not entitle me to make such a challenge. I would be doing Selzer no favors, either. 

It would be like pushing the weakest sucker in your group of eighth-grade buddies to the front of the group after mouthing off to a bully. And, make no mistake, a bully is involved in this lawsuit. The kind you thought you left behind in eighth grade.

Trump’s lawsuit claims consumer fraud under Iowa law but was sent to U.S. District Court via a petition by The Register’s owner, Gannett. Trump received 30 days to petition for a hearing to send it back to state court but the venue doesn’t matter much. Wherever this plays out, it is both a frivolous lawsuit but serious matter, and to much more than The Register and the private, Made in the USA business that Selzer runs.

Thanks, ABC News. More on that later. Lawsuits like these are called SLAPPs, which stands for Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation. The participation targeted in lawsuits against news organizations — or anyone else, by the way, but in this case media outlets — is a newsroom or writer reporting things the person or organization doing the suing does not want repeated. Big pockets to pay lawyers can jam a lot of misery into smaller pockets, so much that no room is left for any more money.

Ordinarily, these suits, which Iowa does not prohibit but 34 other states do, are for defamation of character or libel, but they do not have to be. The main factor is who the plaintiff is, Brett Johnson, associate professor at the University of Iowa School of Journalism with a Ph.D. in journalism and a law degree, said. In other words, someone who wants to shut someone else up or down for speech the plaintiff does not like. “I have no trouble calling this a SLAPP,” Johnson told me when we talked about Trump’s lawsuit.

So what? many will ask. News media have a responsibility to be accurate and fair. True. But, in SLAPP cases, the sued media outlet usually has done just that. That is why the person or entity is suing. The Register faithfully reported what Selzer’s usually stellar political polling found leading up to election day — that Kamala Harris led Donald Trump by 47 percent to 44 percent among respondents in her poll.

Selzer and The Register conceded after the election that they made an error, an embarrassing one they had no incentive to make given that their own reputations were at stake. Selzer re-ran the numbers, using her usual methodology, which The Register published along with questions about what went wrong with the poll and why the re-run found pretty much the same results. Selzer remains baffled, she says.

The error certainly did not interfere with Trump voters. He won the state by—checks his math to avoid his own Trump lawsuit—13.2 percentage points.

“This is the autocrat, oligarch playbook,” Brant Houston, the University of Illinois John S. and James L. Knight Foundation Chair in Investigative and Enterprise Reporting, former Investigative Reporters and Editors executive director, and president of the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting, said when I talked with him about the lawsuit.

ABC set dangerous precedents when it settled with Trump for how it depicted a verdict that found Trump liable for sexual abuse, even though legal analysts thought the lawsuit was a loser for Trump. The precedents sail beyond the $15 million ABC is paying. For starters, the settlement gives Trump followers an understandable feeling that they are right when it comes to a biased, and therefore ignorable news media. 

But, it also supports a more sinister notion: that the aggrieved can do more than just seek vengeance from newsrooms with whom they disagree. They actually can get it.

There is more. The settlement emboldens this group of Americans to think that First Amendment protections for press coverage don’t apply to those against whom they seek vengeance. Take that to its next logical step and they will think nothing of trouncing on other constitutional protections and laws to get what they want from anyone else—you, for example—especially when their leader summons them to do his bidding.

That, my friends, is the real danger. Trump promises more lawsuits and his happy supporters are eager to see the spoils that drip from the retribution, all because they don’t like reporting about Trump’s hush money payments to a porn star, his efforts to overturn an election that resulted in a deadly invasion of the U.S. Capitol, his boorish behavior when dealing with his enemies, and his trademark habits of boasting, lying, and looking out for himself.

Moreover, Trump has established that he can threaten and file lawsuits as a private citizen about his presidential political career, and suggests that he also can when president—remember that government-not-interfering-with-free-speech thing? The free speech right that allows politicians to lie through their teeth about opponents? He can sue you. You cannot sue him. 

The president is part of government. Hell, he is its CEO. But, it looks like that branch of government has a lot of leeway, at least according to the Supreme Court. “Few things would threaten our constitutional order more than criminally investigating a former President for his official acts,” Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in the landmark 2024 Trump v. The United States ruling that says presidents cannot be prosecuted for official acts, including breaking the law if deemed by the president to be in the best interests of the country.

Maybe a U.S. president suing Americans because he doesn’t like what they say could be one of those “few things” more threatening. 

Here is one of many examples of how a SLAPP lawsuit can chill the American air. The Center for Public Integrity was sued in 2000 by two bank-owning Russian oligarchs who, the Center reported, were benefiting from influence peddling involving then-vice presidential nominee Dick Cheney. Ironic, in that Trump and his minions in Congress are trying now to shut up Cheney’s daughter, Liz, as well for standing up to Trump.

The influence peddling lawsuit was dismissed five years later with a summary judgment favoring the Center, but only after the center paid $5 million in legal fees. The impact? The center cut back to writing mostly about domestic issues and became extra careful—not a bad thing, mind you—about its reporting to make sure that it was not exposed to legal exposure, the center’s then-chief of staff Jin Ding, told the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN) for a January 2023 story about the institute’s release of a report about liability exposures and insurance for nonprofit news organizations.

Quick transparency, the Iowa Center for Public Affairs journalism (IowaWatch), which I formerly ran, was a member of the Institute for Nonprofit News, a consortium of nonprofit news outlets. Now, the Iowa Center is part of the larger INN member Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting, of which I am a board member along with Houston.

Today, the Center for Public Integrity, a Pulitzer Prize-winning organization, is pretty well gone. Its last story online is dated September 22, 2024. Previous to that, some were published in mid-May, as the Center teetered between merging with someone who would take it or closing for good. The center laid off eleven union reporters in early 2024 and its webpage most recently showed a staff of two reporters, although at least one no longer works there, further investigation revealed. There have been no mergers. Do the math.

Recent management—critics call it mismanagement—has been blamed for a lot of the Center’s decline. But the die was cast when the Center had to start a special defense fund in the aftermath of its $5 million SLAPP battle because its insurance refused to insure the Center, even though the Center won the lawsuit. 

Rina Hamzey, of Endless Insurance Services, said in a news release from the Institute for Nonprofit News about its liability insurance study that insurance companies want evidence that news organizations are taking steps to avoid future exposure to potential lawsuits. And, to be fair, a lot of newsrooms laid off journalists in 2024. A lot.

Houston said SLAPP lawsuits essentially can do three things in order to censure an independent press:

1. Cause enough financial ruin to damage or shut a news organization down. 
2. Hang the threat of lawyers and insurance companies over any notion of publishing a critical, true story about abuse of power.
3. Suggest that the press is corrupt.

“Trump has been very transparent about his goals,” Houston said. “It’s more about the lawsuit than the outcome.”

That preferred outcome is discrediting any version of the truth that is not Trump’s. Just like news consumers, God knows we have a lot to clean up in the journalism profession. That is why day-to-day discerning journalists who care about doing the right thing continue to work at honing their skills, digging deeper, checking their biases that exist, and fact-checking what they write so their credibility is not destroyed. 

It also is why Trump continually files lawsuits and does not care that he loses most of them. 

And, it is why lawsuits like the one Trump delivered to The Register’s front stoop is worth fighting, instead of considering it to simply be a nuisance. As Houston put it in our conversation, the free and independent press “is the final guard rail” against corrupt government. 

Especially the kind that will sue you at the drop of a hat when its chief executive officer does not like you.