Donald Trump calls Canadian PM Justin Trudeau ‘governor’ for second time as he weighs in on deputy PM’s departure – live | Donald Trump

Donald Trump is suing the Des Moines Register newspaper and Iowa’s best-known pollster, Ann Selzer, for a survey released shortly before the November elections showing him trailing Kamala Harris in the state, Fox News reports.

The poll, which was published in the state’s largest newspaper, wound up being a big miss by Selzer, who in the past accurately forecast Barack Obama’s 2008 win in the Iowa caucuses, and Trump’s victory in the state’s presidential election 2016. Iowa has taken a hard turn to the right in recent years, but Selzer’s poll released three days before this year’s 5 November election found Harris leading with 47% support to Trump’s 44% support.

Then, on election night, Trump triumphed in Iowa with a whopping 56% of the vote to Harris’s 43%, and turned to focusing his ire on Selzer and the Register.

According to Fox, Trump is alleging fraud in the civil suit filed Monday. Here’s more:

The lawsuit was filed Monday night in Polk County, Iowa under the Iowa Consumer Fraud Act and related provisions. It says it seeks “accountability for brazen election interference committed by” the Des Moines Register (DMR) and Selzer “in favor of now-defeated former Democrat candidate Kamala Harris through use of a leaked and manipulated Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll conducted by Selzer and S&C and published by DMR and Gannett in the Des Moines Register on Nov. 2, 2024.” The lawsuit is also against the parent company of the Des Moines Register, Gannett, which also owns other publications, including USA Today.

“Contrary to reality and defying credulity, defendants’ Harris Poll was published three days before Election Day and purported to show Harris leading President Trump in Iowa by three points; President Trump ultimately won Iowa by over thirteen points,” the lawsuit states.

Selzer released her final Des Moines Register-sponsored poll of Iowa just three days before the election, on Nov. 2, showing Vice President Kamala Harris leading Trump by three points. That shock poll showed a seven-point shift from Trump to Harris from September, when he had a four-point lead over the vice president in the same poll.

But Trump ultimately beat Harris in Iowa by more than 13 percentage points.

Selzer’s poll, though, had been hyped up by the media ahead of the elections, as her polling predictions in previous elections had been historically accurate.

Trump attorneys said Selzer’s prediction of Harris’ three point lead in “deep-red Iowa was not reality, it was election-interfering fiction.”

Here’s a look back at Selzer’s surprise poll, and the brief and ultimately fruitless shock waves it sent through the presidential campaign following its release:

At a gala dinner in New York last night, Donald Trump ally Steve Bannon publicly mulled the idea of the president-elect serving a third term in office.

Trump cannot seek re-election in 2028 since he already served one term as president, from 2017 to 2021. But that didn’t stop Bannon and Maga hardliners from opining about the 78-year-old running again, the Guardian’s Hugo Lowell reports:

Donald Trump’s allies have become increasingly emboldened to float their most audacious ideas as Trump prepares to return to office, suggesting he run for an unconstitutional third term in 2028 and accusing the news media of having engaged in a criminal conspiracy with prosecutors against him.

Those suggestions, by Trump’s former strategist Steve Bannon, came at a self-congratulatory gala dinner for conservatives in New York on Sunday. At times the remarks seemed like the product of the euphoria that permeated the audience.

The underlying message was clear: with Trump back in the White House and with Bannon renewing his influence with the president-elect, the most extreme and polarizing proposals at the very least were up for consideration.

“The viceroy Mike Davis tells me, since it doesn’t actually say consecutive, that maybe we do it again in 28?” Bannon said of Trump possibly running again, in his remarks at the New York Young Republican Club gala dinner, which also saw a Trump adviser keel over the lectern and fall off the stage.

Riding the wave of self-congratulatory sentiment in the room, Bannon, who ignored the black-tie dress code with a wax jacket and black – collared shirt, doubled down on pursuing a campaign of retribution against Trump’s perceived enemies in the news media and at the justice department.

It’s worth noting that at a meeting with Republican lawmakers shortly after he won re-election, Trump joked about perhaps seeking a third term in the White House. Here’s more about what his allies talked about at last night’s dinner:

Good morning, US politics blog readers. Since winning re-election last month, Donald Trump has, for reasons that are not clear, taken to calling Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau “governor”. He’s done it in two instances that we can think of, the most recent coming last night, in a post on Truth Social where the president-elect weighed in on the departure from Trudeau’s government of deputy prime minister Chrystia Freeland, who had disagreed with Trudeau over how to handle Trump’s threatened economic policies. Without giving examples, the president-elect said “her behavior was totally toxic”, and accused her of standing in the way of a trade deal between the two countries.

The “governor” moniker is a strange one to bestow on Trudeau, considering it is both inaccurate, and because the prime minister has made efforts to reach out to Trump, including by dining with him at Mar-a-Lago. Hanging over the two men’s relationship is Trump’s threat to impose steep tariffs on Canada, which Trudeau is trying to convince him not to follow through with. But at a press conference at Mar-a-Lago yesterday, Trump made clear he’s not changing course. “We lose a lot of money to Canada, tremendous amount,” the president-elect said, later adding: “Tariffs will make our country rich.”

Here’s what else is going on today:

• Kamala Harris will give a speech billed as encouraging young people to be active in their communities in the Washington DC suburbs at 11.35am ET.

• Congress is scrambling to pass a year-end spending bill to ward off a government shutdown that will otherwise occur on 20 December. Neither party wants that to happen, but, as usual, their negotiations may go down to the wire.

• Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is making one last push to become the top Democrat on the high-profile House oversight committee. Yesterday, a Democratic committee that recommends candidates for ranking members passed the New York progressive over in favor of longtime congressman Gerry Connolly.