Des Moines Register Responds to Trump’s Deranged Lawsuit

The Des Moines Register, which published the infamous Selzer poll, has responded to Donald Trump’s lawsuit against the paper.

“We have acknowledged that the Selzer/Des Moines Register pre-election poll did not reflect the ultimate margin of President Trump’s Election Day victory in Iowa by releasing the poll’s full demographics, crosstabs, weighted and unweighted data, as well as a technical explanation from pollster Ann Selzer,” a spokesperson for the Register said, according to CBS’s Jennifer Jacobs. “We stand by our reporting on the matter and believe this lawsuit is without merit.”

Trump on Monday sued The Des Moines Register as well as veteran pollster J. Ann Selzer over a preelection poll that showed him losing the state to Kamala Harris.

“I’m going to be bringing [a lawsuit] against, uh, the people in Iowa,” Trump announced earlier on Monday. “Their newspaper, which had a very, very good pollster who got me right all the time … then just before the election she said I was going to lose by three or four points, and it became the biggest story all over the world,” the president-elect said. “It was fraud, and it was election interference.”

The Selzer poll, published on November 2, shockingly predicted Harris would win Iowa by three points. Trump ended up easily winning Iowa by 13 points, a glaring mistake for the respected pollster. Seltzer retired shortly after, although she had been planning to do so regardless of the election’s outcome.

Trump’s lawsuit is overindulgent, at best, and most legal experts don’t expect it to stick.

“This absurd lawsuit is a direct assault on the First Amendment,” Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression chief counsel Robert Corn-Revere told CNN. “Newspapers and polling firms are not engaged in ‘deceptive practices’ just because they publish stories and poll results President-elect Donald Trump doesn’t like. Getting a poll wrong is not election interference or fraud.”

Despite spending the week courting lawmakers, Robert F. Kennedy’s nomination to lead the Department of Health and Human Services is looking increasingly precarious.

The virulent conspiracy theorist reportedly only has 18 lawmakers clearly favoring his nomination, according to The Washington Post’s Dan Diamond. That’s an equal amount to the number of lawmakers who oppose him, leaving 64 lawmakers still undecided on Kennedy’s future in Donald Trump’s forthcoming administration.

Kennedy’s confirmation is likely to be an uphill battle given his raucous lifestyle that included dumping a dead bear cub in Central Park, unscientific beliefs that include theories that AIDS is not caused by HIV, a vaccine misinformation campaign sparked by his nonprofit that sent Samoa’s vaccination rate plummeting amid a measles outbreak, and claims that he allegedly groped his children’s babysitter in the late 1990s.

He’ll also have to convince lawmakers that his agenda, which opposes vaccine mandates for school-aged children and includes appointing someone who has filed a petition with the FDA to end the approval and “pause distribution” of 13 vaccines, isn’t at odds with the future of America’s health.

If no Democrats side with Kennedy, the “Make America Healthy Again” politico will only be able to afford to lose three Republican votes in the Senate.

Some of Donald Trump’s most faithful MAGA acolytes have already voiced their strong opinions in favor of Kennedy’s nomination. After meeting with Kennedy on Tuesday, Florida Senator Rick Scott described the conspiracy theorist as “very impressive” and claimed that he was “pro-vaccine.”

And despite the tough road ahead, Kennedy appeared decidedly optimistic as he navigated the Hill on Tuesday. While heading into Senator Tommy Tuberville’s office, Kennedy told Diamond that the meetings were going “really good.”

The clock is ticking on another imminent government shutdown, but Republicans can’t square the fact that two of their deepest desires are, in reality, mutually exclusive: more tax cuts for the wealthy, and a long-held goal to decrease the federal deficit.

Conservatives across the spectrum came out in fierce opposition against the House spending bill on Tuesday. The continuing resolution was originally scheduled to be released days ago, but by noon, the actual contents of the spending package were still hidden from lawmakers, fueling concern that the vote will—once again—collide with their Friday deadline to avert a shutdown.

The bill, according to House Speaker Mike Johnson, will fund the government through March 14, giving conservatives a chance to organize and reassess their spending priorities once their Republican trifecta takes effect.

“​​The CR is coming together, bipartisan work is ongoing,” Johnson told CBS News. “We’re almost there.”

The resolution was intended to be a “very skinny, very simple” stopgap solution, but it was complicated by disaster relief needs related to the devastation caused by Hurricanes Helene and Milton. Weekend discussions also hit a snag by looping America’s farmers into the spending package, which will offer a one-year extension of the farm bill, according to Politico.

But party members have been less than thrilled by the developments. Missouri Representative Eric Burlison called the continuing resolution a “total dumpster fire” in an interview with C-SPAN.

“I think it’s garbage. This is what Washington, D.C., has done, this is why I ran for Congress to try to stop this,” Burlison told the nonprofit broadcaster. “Sadly this is happening again. I think that it’s shameful that people that celebrate DOGE coming in—and yet we’re going to vote for another billion dollars to be added to [the] deficit. It’s ironic.”

Texas Representative Chip Roy rolled his eyes at the conundrum, telling C-SPAN that the “swamp is gonna swamp.”

“Since we’ve been given the majority again, we’re adding $30 billion in literally, totally unpaid for additional deficit spending, just since November 5—in 45 days,” Roy said. “I don’t see how that’s doing what we’re supposed to be doing.”

“The conference itself owns this. The conference needs to decide whether we’re actually serious about spending.… We’re just fundamentally unserious about spending,” Roy continued, highlighting the fact that his party intends to shift cash away from Social Security, shrinking the time before the program goes bankrupt. “As long as you got a blank check, you can’t shrink government. If you can’t shrink government, you can’t live free.”

Representative Nancy Mace announced in a statement that she would not be supporting the “1,500 page Continuing Resolution”—which, again, has not yet been released.

Donald Trump is incensed after the New York judge in his hush-money trial refused to toss the entire case, per his request.

Judge Juan Manuel Merchan on Monday ruled that Trump’s guilty conviction, based on 34 felony counts, will stand, regardless of what the Supreme Court has said about immunity. And that didn’t sit well with Trump, who spent the next day venting angrily on his personal posting platform, Truth Social.

“BREAKING: In a completely illegal, psychotic order, the deeply conflicted, corrupt, biased, and incompetent Acting Justice Juan Merchan has completely disrespected the United States Supreme Court, and its Historic Decision on Immunity,” Trump ranted.

“But even without Immunity, this illegitimate case is nothing but a Rigged Hoax. Merchan, who is a radical partisan, wrote an opinion that is knowingly unlawful, goes against our Constitution, and, if allowed to stand, would be the end of the Presidency as we know it. Merchan has so little respect for the Constitution that he is keeping in place an illegal gag order on me, your President and President-Elect, just so I cannot expose his and his family’s disqualifying and illegal conflicts….”

Merchan on Monday ruled that Trump’s hush-money conviction cannot be dismissed on the grounds of immunity because the actions he was found guilty of—falsifying business records regarding hush-money payments he made during his 2016 campaign to adult film actress Stormy Daniels, with whom he had an affair—were part of his personal, not presidential, life.

The Supreme Court’s immunity decision made it so that former presidents are protected from prosecution for official acts. But Trump’s actions took place well before he was even elected.

“I am the only Political Opponent in American History not allowed to defend myself - A despicable First Amendment Violation! … It is time to end the Lawfare once and for all, so we can come together as one Nation and, Make America Great Again,” Trump wrote.

Indiana Representative Victoria Spartz has announced she will be stepping away from the “circuses” of doing what she was elected to do—governing—so that she could join forces with a fake advisory group that wants to dismantle the government.

Spartz pledged her services Monday to the Department of Government Efficiency, led by technocrat Elon Musk and failed presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy.

“I will stay as a registered Republican but will not sit on committees or participate in the caucus until I see that Republican leadership in Congress is governing,” Spartz wrote in a post on X. “I do not need to be involved in circuses.”

Spartz wrote that she would rather spend her time in office not carrying out the functions of that office but helping DOGE and Representative Thomas Massie, who similarly committed himself to working with DOGE, “to save our Republic.”

Spartz currently serves on the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee, including two subcommittees: the Subcommittee on the Administrative State, Regulatory Reform, and Antitrust, as well as the Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement. She also holds positions on the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe and the Republican Policy Committee.

Apparently, DOGE’s mission to gut federal funding to essential services is far more important than any of those things. Musk and Ramaswamy have floated plans to slash the budgets of public broadcasting, Planned Parenthood, and “entitlement programs” such as Medicare and Medicaid—with the hopes of cutting government spending by $2 trillion by July 2026.

This isn’t the first time Spartz, who was elected in 2020, has tried to get out of doing her job.

In October 2023, Spartz criticized Congress’s approach to the national debt and threatened to resign. “If Congress does not pass a debt commission this year to move the needle on the crushing national debt and inflation, at least at the next debt ceiling increase at the end of 2024, I will not continue sacrificing my children for this circus with a complete absence of leadership, vision, and spine,” she warned. “I cannot save this Republic alone.”

Spartz’s latest move reportedly comes in response to the House Republican Steering Committee declining to give her a post on the Ways and Means Committee. Her decision could further imperil the caucus’s already razor-thin majority in the chamber.