Trump signals plans to use all levers of power against the media

For many years, Donald Trump repeatedly threatened to sue the press but often didn’t follow through. When he did, he almost always lost.

But Trump’s recent settlement with ABC News and a cascade of lawsuits and other complaints against media entities from him and his allies signal a ramped-up campaign from the president-elect. Together, the action has spurred concerns that his efforts could drastically undermine the institutions tasked with reporting on his coming administration, which Trump has promised will take revenge on those he perceives as having wronged him.

“The law in this country hasn’t really changed, but what has changed is that the atmosphere and hostility to the press is intense, and that emboldens plaintiffs of all kinds,” said David Korzenik, a media defense lawyer at the boutique Miller Korzenik Sommers Rayman LLP.

The pressure from Trump and his allies on the media is already growing and will continue to intensify, according to two Trump aides who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share sensitive internal deliberations.

In the two months before the presidential election, Trump attacked the media more than 100 times in public speeches or other remarks. The week before Election Day, Trump threatened to sue the New York Times, his campaign lodged a Federal Election Commission complaint against The Washington Post and he sued CBS News for editing a “60 Minutes” interview with Vice President Kamala Harris in a way he said was deceptive. Those media outlets have defended their work.

On Monday, he filed a consumer fraud suit against pollster J. Ann Selzer and the Des Moines Register over an outlier poll it ran showing Trump trailing Harris in the presidential race in Iowa, a conservative state that he went on to win by 13 percentage points. The complaint does not hinge on a defamation claim - public figures must cross a high legal threshold to prove that they’ve been libeled - but rather a perceived violation of the state’s consumer protection statute.

Lark-Marie Antón, a spokeswoman for the Register’s parent company, Gannett, said in a statement that although the poll’s findings differed from the election results, “We stand by our reporting on the matter and believe a lawsuit would be without merit.”

The next day, Trump said he planned to continue suing the press. “It costs a lot of money to do it, but we have to straighten out the press,” he said at a news conference at his Mar-a-Lago Club in West Palm Beach, Florida.

Steven Cheung, a Trump spokesman, said the president-elect plans to focus on “blatantly false and dishonest reporting, which serves no public interest and only seeks to interfere in our elections on behalf of political partisans.”

Korzenik, the media defense lawyer, recently participated in a call organized by the Media Law Resource Center, a trade group of sorts for First Amendment attorneys. As they brainstormed protective strategies for their clients heading into a second Trump term, some in the meeting advocated waiting to see what form new attacks on the press would take.

“There was concern that the claims would multiply, and the goal was to encumber the press with cost and exhaustion so they would be dysfunctional,” Korzenik said.

ABC News’s decision to settle has sent shudders through the media industry and the legal community that represents it. According to three people familiar with the company’s internal deliberations who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss legal strategy, ABC and Disney executives decided to settle not only because of the legal risks in the case but also because of Trump’s promises to take retribution against his enemies.

When executives from Disney, ABC and their lawyers gathered last Friday to discuss Trump’s defamation suit, they faced a looming deadline. The federal judge overseeing the case, Cecilia M. Altonaga, had just rejected a new request to delay the case and demanded that Disney hand over “all remaining documents” by Sunday.

Trump sued ABC News after George Stephanopoulos, the co-host of ABC’s “Good Morning America,” said in a March interview on “The Week” with Rep. Nancy Mace (R-South Carolina) that Trump had been found “liable for rape” in a New York civil trial. He repeated the assertion 10 times, even though Trump had been found “liable for sexual abuse,” which has a strict definition in New York.

Disney conducts business in more than 130 countries and employs roughly 225,000 employees - a virtual nation-state with corporate shareholders it is legally obligated to consider when making strategic decisions. The executives reasoned that being in active litigation with a sitting president could hamper the business.

Disney’s ABC operates more than 230 affiliate television stations nationwide, relying on the Federal Communications Commission for license renewals. Trump has repeatedly talked about pulling the federal licenses from television stations that broadcast news about him he doesn’t like and said last year that he plans to bring the FCC under presidential authority.

Disney and many other media companies are already planning potential merger activity that executives hope passes muster with the antitrust division of the Justice Department, which is poised to be run by Trump loyalist Pam Bondi. Disney pumps out movies and television shows that it needs to appeal to the millions of people who voted for Trump and have already shown themselves willing to boycott products he attacks.

Continuing with the case might have made public any damaging internal communications to and from Stephanopoulos. If the case made it to trial, it would face a jury in Florida - a red state that Trump carried by 13 points - that could side with the president-elect and award a penalty that could easily exceed the price of a settlement. Appeals to any decision would last for years and risk reaching the Supreme Court, where two sitting justices have already expressed their desire to weaken the court’s landmark decision that has protected the American media’s ability to report aggressively on public figures, especially officials, in the public interest.

Disney’s general counsel, Horacio Gutierrez, recommended a settlement, and CEO Bob Iger approved it, a detail first reported by the New York Times.

By last Friday evening, the two sides had settled. ABC News agreed to pay $15 million toward Trump’s presidential library and $1 million in legal fees. While eye-popping for a smaller company, the sum paled compared with other recent Disney settlements, including $233 million to settle a class-action case over wages for Disneyland workers.

ABC News agreed t0 attach an editor’s note to the online article at the center of the suit saying that “ABC News and George Stephanopoulos regret statements regarding President Donald J. Trump” made during the interview.

“We are pleased that the parties have reached an agreement to dismiss the lawsuit on the terms in the court filing,” an ABC News spokesperson wrote in a statement.

Stephanopoulos balked at the settlement and the apology until hours before it was made public last Saturday, according to three people who spoke with him and requested anonymity to discuss private conversations. He has been outspoken about his dissatisfaction, these people said. An ABC News spokesperson declined to comment on the details around the settlement but said that Stephanopoulos recently re-signed a multiyear contract to stay at the company. Stephanopoulos did not respond to requests seeking comment.

The settlement delighted Trump allies and supporters, who saw it as a momentum-building victory and validation of Trump’s pugilistic approach to his second term.

Last Sunday, Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist, publicly praised a top Trump legal adviser at a Manhattan gala for his role in securing the settlement. Boris Epshteyn devised “one brilliant legal strategy after the other - I know it’s brilliant because George Stephanopoulos is paying $15 million!” Bannon said to cheers and applause. “Boris, I will never know how you pulled that off. I don’t know if I want to ask.”

Epshteyn, an influential and controversial adviser who serves as the liaison between Trump and his outside lawyers, declined comment.

Meanwhile, journalists and First Amendment advocates expressed their dismay. “This was stunning to me and absolutely a gut punch to anybody that works for a major media company,” said NBC News’s Chuck Todd in an interview, “because I think it sets a precedent that is going to be very difficult to get out from under potentially.”

“The concern here is that we might be seeing a confluence of forces - legal, political and social - that work together to erode the confidence we once had in the vibrancy of the American press,” said RonNell Andersen Jones, a First Amendment expert and law professor at the University of Utah. “Settlement decisions aren’t made in a vacuum. Each major decision to settle sends a signal about the broader climate for the press. It can spur other public figures to sue over perceived slights and pressure other media outlets to self-censor.”

It is hardly unusual for a president to clash with the press. Richard M. Nixon kept journalists on his enemies list, while his vice president, Spiro Agnew, dubbed them “nattering nabobs of negativism.” Bill Clinton griped about coverage of his White House sex scandal, and Barack Obama’s administration brought a record number of prosecutions against journalists’ sources for leaking government information.

But legal experts say Trump has taken attacks on the press to an entirely new level, softening the ground for an erosion of robust press freedom.

“The Fake News Media should pay a big price for what they have done to our once great Country,” Trump posted on Truth Social in September in an attack on NBC News.

Experts in polarization said that Trump’s posture toward the press has eroded trust in the Fourth Estate. From the Oval Office, he can do even more.

“My concern is what he does when he has the power of the U.S. government in his hands,” said Liliana Hall Mason, a political science professor at the University of Maryland. “It looks to me like all the guardrails have been removed, and we are in for a presidency unlike any we’ve experienced before.”