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Donald Trump raged at the latest New York Times/Siena Poll, which shows him with low approval after a year in office, and said that he’ll add what he called the “fake results” to his defamation claim against the Gray Lady.
Trump’s Truth Social post on Thursday is only the latest threat to target pollsters with legal action. He sued pollster Ann Selzer and the Des Moines Register over a 2024 pre-election poll showing his behind in Iowa, yet he went on to win the state.
Trump posted on Truth Social, “The Times Siena Poll, which is always tremendously negative to me, especially just before the Election of 2024, where I won in a Landslide, will be added to my lawsuit against The Failing New York Times. Our lawyers have demanded that they keep all Records, and how they “computed” these fake results — Not just the fact that it was heavily skewed toward Democrats. They will be held fully responsible for all of their Radical Left lies and wrongdoing!”
The Times/Siena Poll, published on Thursday, showed that 49% of those surveyed said that the country was worse off under Trump, versus 32% who said better. His job approval was at 40%, and disapproval at 56%.
Trump sued the Times last year, claiming, among other things, that Susanne Craig and Ross Buettner, and their book Lucky Loser, defamed him. Their article was headlined, “The Star-Making Machine That Created ‘Donald Trump.’” The lawsuit took particular issue with the notion that Trump’s celebrity fame was due to Mark Burnett and NBC’s The Apprentice.
A judge tossed out the lawsuit shortly after it was filed, warning that “a complaint is not a public forum for vituperation and invective — not a protected platform to rage against an adversary.”
Trump refiled the complaint, citing not just the claim that Burnett made Trump a star, but other passages. His lawsuit cited claims made in the book that Trump received “the equivalent of more than $400 million from his father, much of it through fraudulent tax evasion schemes.”
The Times is challenging the filing of the case in Florida, and not New York, while arguing that Trump’s claim “fails to sufficiently allege the most basic element of a defamation claim: a false and defamatory statement of fact. It does not allege, as it must, how each statement in suit is false or what President Trump contends the truth to be, and it challenges statements that are not defamatory.”
A spokesperson for the Times did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Trump’s lawsuit against Selzer and the Register cited an Iowa consumer law. After dismissing the lawsuit in federal court, Trump filed it in state court, a day before a state anti-SLAPP statute took effect. Anti-SLAPP laws are designed to protect defendants from frivolous lawsuits meant to stifle speech. The state lawsuit is still pending.
A class-action lawsuit over the Selzer poll as dismissed by a federal judge last year. The plaintiffs, the conservative group the Center for American Rights, is appealing.
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