Ominous overtones in Trump press attacks

During this year’s presidential race, many Democrats, and some Republicans, warned that Donald Trump was a danger to American democracy and that his second term could usher in an age of rising authoritarianism. Trump supporters dismissed such rhetoric as scaremongering. But are the warnings starting to come true even before his inauguration?

That’s certainly a question we should be asking this week as Trump targets both the press and political opponents for legal action.

First, ABC News settled a defamation lawsuit over repeated statements by George Stephanopoulos last March that Trump had been found liable for rape. He was found liable for sexual abuse; the judge later clarified that the act for which the jury assigned liability would constitute rape as commonly understood — though not under New York’s penal law at the time. In addition to expressing regret, ABC agreed to pay $15 million in damages. Even some media analysts who believed ABC should have promptly issued a correction thought the payment set a dangerous precedent.

But if one could find some legal validity to the lawsuit against ABC, not even broadly Trump-sympathetic pundits have found merit in his latest lawsuit: against the Des Moines Register, its parent company Gannett, and its then-pollster Ann Selzer. The issue is a poll published a few days before the election that showed Democrat Kamala Harris ahead by three points in Iowa — a red state that Trump was expected to easily win, and that he ultimately won by 13 points. Trump’s complaint charges that the poll was intentionally fraudulent, an attempt to demoralize Republicans and galvanize Democrats by suggesting that Harris was headed toward inevitable victory. Trump also claims the poll forced his campaign to spend extra resources in Iowa.

This is, of course, an absurd conspiracy theory. Sometimes, polls are wrong. The idea that a single poll could sway a close race is ludicrous. The chances of Trump winning this lawsuit are slim to none — and if he did win, the verdict would likely be tossed on First Amendment grounds. But even successful litigation is costly and exhausting, and lawsuits can be used to cow both journalists and pollsters.

At the same time, House Republicans have recommended that Trump critic Liz Cheney, the former GOP congresswoman from Wyoming, should be investigated by the FBI for witness tampering because of her communications with witness Cassidy Hutchinson, an ex-Trump staffer, during the congressional inquiry into the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Trump has written on social media that Cheney, whose prosecution he had repeatedly advocated before the election, "could be in big trouble." Here, too, nearly all legal experts agree that a prosecution would fail — but the intimidation can still have its effect. Let’s recall that Kash Patel, Trump’s pick for FBI director, has openly talked about going after Trump’s foes in both government and media.

It may or may not be relevant that two women are among the first few people Trump has targeted prominently after the election. After all, Cheney was one of his biggest critics. But even if his use of state power to harass opponents and critics proves gender-neutral, that’s hardly an improvement.

This is not to say that freedom in America is about to go extinct. But both individuals and institutions should be prepared to defend it at every step from a president who is about to give a new meaning to the term "bully pulpit."

Opinions expressed by Cathy Young, a writer for The Bulwark, are her own.

By Cathy Young

Cathy Young is a writer for The Bulwark.