President Trump’s reelection campaign is demanding a retraction and an apology from CNN for running a poll that has Mr. Trump trailing his Democratic rival in the presidential race.
In the cease-and-desist letter to CNN President Jeff Zucker, the Trump campaign accused the liberal-leaning network of trying to “mislead American voters through a biased questionnaire and skewed sampling.”
The letter from senior legal adviser Jenna Ellis and chief operating officer Michael Glassner called the poll “a stunt and a phony poll to cause voter suppression, stifle momentum and enthusiasm for the President, and present a false view generally of the actual support across America for the President.”
The letter formally requests that CNN retract the survey and publish a “full, fair, and conspicuous retraction, apology, and clarification to correct its misleading conclusions.”
That will not happen.
The letter’s “allegations and demands are rejected in their entirety,” wrote David Vigilante, CNN’s executive vice president and general counsel, going on to compare the Trump administration to third-world despotisms.
“To my knowledge, this is the first time in its 40-year history that CNN had been threatened with legal action because an American politician or campaign did not like CNN’s polling results,” he said in the network’s official response. “To the extent we have received legal threats from political leaders in the past, they have typically come from countries like Venezuela or other regimes where there is little or no respect for a free and independent media.”
CNN’s own report on the letter said as a fact in the second paragraph that the letter “contained numerous incorrect and misleading claims.”
The poll, which was released Monday, has Mr. Trump trailing former Vice President Joseph R. Biden by 14 percentage points — 55%-41% — among registered voters.
The survey conducted by polling form SSRS puts Mr. Trump’s approval rating at 38% and disapproval rating at 57% — his worst showing in almost a year-and-a-half.
According to CNN, those numbers are comparable to those of Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush at this point in their presidencies. Those men were the only two sitting presidents since World War II to lose elections seeking a second term.
• Victor Morton can be reached at vmorton@washingtontimes.com.
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