Donald Trump doesn’t like a new set of polls that show his popularity eroding. In a Truth Social post, he says the news companies that published them should be investigated for “election fraud.”
This is the kind of thing Trump has said many times. Up until recently, it was easy to ignore. After all, it’s certainly not fraud to publish a poll someone doesn’t like.
Right?
Except of course things are different now: Donald Trump is already suing The Des Moines Register, its owner Gannett, and pollster Ann Selzer for publishing a poll he didn’t like during the 2024 election.
Trump filed that suit after he’d won the election last year, but before he was sworn in as president in January. And since Trump’s inauguration, Brendan Carr, Trump’s choice to head the Federal Communications Commission, has announced probes into Disney and Comcast over their use of diversity, equity, and inclusion practices.
Carr has also opened an inquiry into an interview that ran on Paramount/CBS’ “60 Minutes” with Kamala Harris last year. That’s theoretically separate, but quite parallel, to a lawsuit Trump filed in 2024 about the same interview. That story got new attention last week when Bill Owens, the top producer at “60 Minutes,” said he was stepping down because he’d lost his editorial independence. Subsequent reports said Paramount owner Shari Redstone, who wants to sell her company to Larry and David Ellison, has been weighing in on programming at the show and CBS News in general.
So. On the one hand, you’d be excused for ignoring a social media post from a president who says things on social media and elsewhere that he may not actually mean — or may mean at one point but then decide that he doesn’t mean, after all. (Trump now says that his promise to solve the war between Russia and Ukraine on his first day in office — something he said dozens of times in 2024 and 2023 — was actually made “in jest“.)
You might also point out that even if Trump is serious, it’s not clear which federal agency or official could carry out his wishes. While Carr theoretically gets to weigh in on the likes of Comcast and Paramount because they own broadcast licenses, the FCC doesn’t have any oversight of the Times or the Post. (I’ve asked both Carr and the White House for comment.)
But one thing we are learning about 2025 is that things Trump writes or says — even if they are illogical or impossible — sometimes get turned into action, anyway.
If I’m running a media organization — or simply someone who thinks the federal government shouldn’t be threatening media organizations because it doesn’t like what they publish — I wouldn’t brush this off completely.
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