Trump Is an Appalling Hypocrite When It Comes to Lawfare

O ne of the dangers of writing about how much you enjoy it when someone in the media deservingly gets kicked in the teeth for their arrogance is how you open yourself up to the karmic boomerang. Just a few days ago I mocked George Stephanopoulos — a man who built his public career on savaging the subjects of Bill Clinton’s “bimbo eruptions” back in the early 1990s — for bringing a painfully public comeuppance upon himself and ABC News by wrongfully claiming in March that Donald Trump had been “found liable for rape.” More fool me for writing that piece a day before Trump’s Monday press conference at Mar-a-Lago.

By gum, that presser almost made him seem normal most of the time. There he was, correctly refusing to reveal his strategic hand against Iran, denying that he was pushing Lara Trump for a Florida Senate appointment, reassuring America that the polio vaccine wasn’t going anywhere, and generally acting sane. Yes, he dangled the prospect of a pardon for New York City mayor and Turkish Airlines enthusiast Eric Adams, but that was the sort of nonsense from Trump that we’ve so priced in by now that we no longer even bat an eyelash. (A funnier move would have been to dangle the prospect of a pardon in front of Andrew Cuomo, tanking him in a potential 2026 Democratic primary.) But then, of course, Trump had to go and announce, almost as an aside, that he will be suing retired Iowa pollster Ann Selzer for publishing a bad poll:

As an example, we’re bringing — I’m doing this, not because I want to, I’m doing this because I feel I have an obligation to — I’m going to be bringing one [a lawsuit] against the people in Iowa, their newspaper, who had a very, very good pollster who got me right all the time, and then just before the election she said I was going to lose by three or four points, and it became the biggest story all over the world, because I was going to win 20 points — the farmers love me, and I love the farmers.

And it was interesting the way she did it, she brought it down — two weeks before, she said I was only going to win by four, that was a big strike — but that was good because she brought it down from like 22 points to four, or whatever the number was, way up, way up, an easy win, never even thought to go there. I respect them, I love them, they understand there’s no reason to go there. Because she brought it from way up, walkaway, which it was — and it turned out to be in the election too by the way, it was a win by many, many points — and then she brought it down very smartly to four, a couple of weeks before, and everyone said, “Wow, that’s amazing, he’s only up by four points!”

Then she brought it down to where I was down by three or four, whatever the number she used, and that was the Des Moines Register, and it was their parent, and in my opinion it was fraud, and it was election interference. You know, she’s gotten me right always, she’s a very good pollster, she knows what she was doing. And she then quit, before, and we’ll probably be filing a major lawsuit against them today or tomorrow.

To begin with, I’m deeply weirded out by the possibility that someone might have fed Trump the piece I wrote for National Review last month (or at least a digest of it) about Selzer’s polling disgrace, because he upsettingly repeats my basic arguments seriatim — down to the praise for Selzer’s long-standing accuracy — while completely severing my diagnosis of how she went fatally wrong. What destroyed Selzer was the near-instant death of her polling methodology in the new era of polarization (and yes, female overresponse), plus a dash of interpretive hopium. It was a deeply unfortunate end to a career that had already shown, increasingly, a cycle-by-cycle tendency to miss in favor of the Democrats. Instead, Trump turned this argument inside out, making it sound as if there were a conspiracy against him — “She was so good up until this cycle, you can see her planning it in advance in early polls!” — which is par for the course for him but cannot help but irk me on principle alone.

Beyond that, when paranoid delusion (we’ve all got a right to fulminate, one supposes, though ideally not in public) turns into blindly egotistical lawfare, I get utterly revolted. Listen to Trump again. Understand the hypocrisy here, the weaponization of the legal system out of sheer pique. Forget his laughable line about how he practically feels an obligation to do this, for the people! To put it politely, Trump has always talked like a manure salesman chewing on a mouthful of his own sample, and never more so when he’s consciously selling its terminal excrescence as a national concern.

Even the most indifferent of former attorneys can well understand that a lawsuit based on the claim “Your polling number was bad, I suspect shenanigans!” — lodged on the basis of a novel take on Iowa’s 2009 Consumer Fraud Act — is meant as punishment by process: a case filed with full knowledge of the likelihood of failure but meant to bleed the opponent either via fees or embarrassing discovery and ideally lead to settlement prior to ultimate dismissal. An exercise in public relations, not justice in any sense our laws properly recognize.

Thus I am reminded as well of the bully Trump has always been, of the danger he authentically poses as he plows through civic norms in mad pursuit of impossible psychological vindications. This is the Trump I have forever disliked and feared, the mindless brute who, for as much as he has been sinned against by the deep state — which mounted a post-2021 campaign to sue him into penury and send him to prison — must be denied an honest man’s full sympathy, simply because he has so gleefully jammed the same vindictive lawfare down others’ throats for decades now, and continues to do so.

I had to take Trump’s side against those who tried to imprison him or derail his presidential campaign with cheap lawfare, because to have done otherwise would have been to let the Left chop away all civic norms in the mad pursuit of a demon they mostly created with their own bad faith and acts. Political principle alone demanded it, because I am a conservative. But what can reasonably be asked of anyone of conscience when Trump, now holding the whip hand, decides to lash out blindly for vanity’s sake, to vampirically drain those who merely happened to offend his pride? This isn’t even the superseded Old Testament logic of an eye for an eye. This is the authoritarian logic of “publish what I want to see or else the law will ruin you.” Shall we now cheer the sort of lawfare we were asked to denounce when it was used against Trump, merely because Trump is returning serve?

I fear that far too many will happily join the cheering crowd, indifferent to the principle of it all and willing to accept any half-mounted excuse. “They had it coming.” “But I want to know.” “We had to burn this village to save it.” All the eternal refrains of the damned. No, only the coding “Two legs bad, four legs good” matters to these types, and in that moment I am reminded of the fearsome gap that lies between myself and the next four years of Republican governance.