Trump Loses Selzer Case, Wins in His Heart

By Jeffrey Blehar

Friday, September 25, 2026

 

A small footnote on a case I’ve written about several times in the past: In Iowa in 2024, esteemed pollster Ann Selzer — she of the “Iowa Poll,” the famously laser-accurate polling apparatus affiliated with the Des Moines Register, which had seemingly mastered this crucial, yet famously difficult-to-poll swing state — belly flopped in her final act: In her last poll before the election,, she showed Kamala Harris surprisingly leading 47–44 in the state (she would lose 56–43).

 

Embarrassing, and even perhaps motivated in its credulity — all good pollsters should report their outlier numbers, yet Selzer’s skepticism about Trump surely added to her enthusiasm in receiving such counterintuitive results — but perfectly understandable, as well as professionally par for the course. Except to Trump, that is, who (newly reelected, and flexing his litigious muscles) decided to sue both Selzer and the Des Moines Register under ridiculous grounds for “fraud.”

 

The claim was barely articulated (or articulable) in Trump’s legal filing; the point was transparently to attack them for injuring his majesty, with a conspiratorial through line underlying his entire case that Selzer was trying to “tilt the scales” against Trump at the last minute. (This alone betrays how cynically Trump understands the polling industry: as a media signaling exercise rather than an attempt to measure the situation on the ground.)

 

This is of course absurd, and even were it true, it would still not be legally actionable. Thankfully I no longer have to argue with idiots about this, as Judge Scott Beattie, of the Iowa District Court of Polk County, has dismissed Trump’s lawsuit with prejudice, as well as brutal specificity:

 

The only question before the Court is whether the Petition states a claim the law recognizes. At its core, the Plaintiffs’ Petition seeks to stretch both Iowa statutory and common law beyond their current bounds, turning speech that enjoys the highest category of First Amendment protection into a liability. After considering the parties’ arguments, the Court must conclude that the protection is too great and the reach is too far. The case must therefore be dismissed.

 

The complete holding can be read here. It is definitive — its legal logic was self-evident to all except spoiled children and simpletons — and will survive any appeal. And Trump may well yet appeal.

 

Because let us not lose sight of what really matters for Donald Trump: As far as he’s concerned, this loss is a win. If Trump knows anything, it’s what he learned from his mentor Roy Cohn about how to weaponize the courts against your enemies: The process is the punishment. With unlimited money — and now with the powers of the Justice Department in his hands as well — Trump finds himself living out his wildest private dream: of being able not just to disagree with or publicly battle his detractors but to smite them (and anyone else who inconveniently stumbles into the frame) as well.

 

It remains a supreme irony that the president most pursued by his enemies via “lawfare” after his first term (Bill Clinton? Forget Clinton, kid — I lived through that as one of the enthusiastic persecutors) has become historically infamous as its most enthusiastic practitioner during his second term: a man who has explicitly weaponized his Justice Department to pursue his enemies and extract financial concessions from all who might wish to be his friends. Ironic, but not unpredictable.