Left: President Donald Trump participates in a session of the G7 Summit, Monday, June 16, 2025, in Kananaskis, Canada (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein). Right: Pollster J. Ann Selzer (Jenny Condon Photography, used with permission of FIRE).
A federal judge presiding over Donald Trump”s “consumer fraud” lawsuit against an Iowa newspaper and a pollster who incorrectly predicted the 2024 election results has warned the president’s private lawyers to file an amended complaint by the deadline or else risk facing sanctions.
U.S. District Judge Rebecca Goodgame Ebinger on Wednesday refused to grant Trump a stay that would have pushed back a basic filing deadline another month, after he was previously granted an extension and failed to voluntarily dismiss his own case.
Trump was ordered to file his amended complaint against now-retired pollster J. Ann Selzer, the Des Moines Register, and media company Gannett on July 18, removing current and former lawmaker “co-plaintiffs” Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks and Bradley Zaun from the case and “eliminating claims exclusive to those Plaintiffs.”
Instead of filing the amended suit, however, Trump sought a stay on the day of the deadline, claiming that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit should be allowed to decide first whether jurisdictional technicalities meant the case actually was successfully dismissed.
“Again, on the final day Trump was permitted to file the previously ordered amended complaint, Trump moved for ‘the Court [to] stay the requirement to file an amended complaint for 30 days following the Eighth Circuit’s disposition of the motion’ described above,” Ebinger noted. “Defendants resist.”
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The judge concluded that because Trump “has not shown a strong likelihood of success or the presence of irreparable harm,” he was not entitled to a stay. But she also warned him to comply with the new deadline of July 25 by 5 p.m., or else.
“The Court expects compliance with all court orders. Failure to comply with orders of the Court may result in sanctions,” Ebinger wrote. “The parties must comport with all rules regulating this litigation, including the Local Rules and applicable deadlines.”
The warning from the judge did not come out of nowhere. Selzer’s attorneys with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) days ago blasted the plaintiff for acting like “compliance” with court orders is “optional” by essentially blowing off the July 18 deadline to repeat a failed stay tactic.
“This is the second time Plaintiff Donald Trump has defied an order from this Court directing him to file an amended complaint removing the allegations he added ‘to defeat the Court’s jurisdiction over the case,'” the filing said. “The first time, after this Court denied Plaintiff’s remand motion and ordered him to file an amended complaint within seven days, he instead filed a motion for stay.”
“This Court promptly denied that motion and ordered Plaintiff to file his revised pleading on July 18th,” the defendants summed up. “He’s now pulled the same stunt again.”
Trump’s sudden effort to drop the federal lawsuit came as he refiled his complaint against Selzer and the newspaper in state court in late June — a day before Iowa’s new anti-SLAPP (anti-strategic lawsuits against public participation) law was set to take effect.
A spokesperson for the newspaper said Trump’s attempt to “unilaterally dismiss his lawsuit from federal court and re-file it in Iowa state court,” after already failing to move the federal case to state court, was “clearly intended to avoid the inevitable outcome of the Des Moines Register’s motion to dismiss[.]”
When FIRE began representing Selzer, it said that Trump’s case was a quintessential SLAPP suit, “filed purely for the purpose of harassing and imposing punishing litigation costs on perceived opponents, not because they have any merit or stand any chance of success.”
Trump sued the Register and Selzer over a poll published ahead of the 2024 presidential election that predicted then-Vice President Kamala Harris had a slight lead over Trump in Iowa, a state he would win by about 13 points. Though Selzer acknowledged the failed prediction and said that she was “humbled” by the way her career ended, Trump followed through on a threat to sue.
The complaint was filed under an Iowa law against “consumer fraud” in which the president accused Selzer and the Register of being in cahoots with “cohorts in the Democrat Party” who “hoped that the Harris Poll would create a false narrative of inevitability for Harris in the final week of the 2024 Presidential Election.”
The complaint alleged “brazen election interference” through the use of the allegedly “manipulated” poll to “deceive voters.”
Jerry Lambe contributed to this report.
