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

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Trump again calls Canadian prime minister Trudeau ‘governor’ and pledges to make good on tariff promise

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.

Key events

Donald Trump has nominated Harmeet Dhillon to lead the justice department division that handles civil rights cases. As the Guardian’s George Chidi reports, her qualifications for the job seem to consist mostly of denouncing the sorts of culture war issues that are cornerstones of Maga thinking:

Donald Trump plans to tap a loyalist whose civil rights resume largely consists of culture-war battles over campus free-speech issues and attacks on diversity initiatives to helm the justice department’s civil rights division. The move puts at risk hundreds of active investigations, from police misconduct to employment and housing discrimination to abuses in jails and prisons.

Trump intends to replace the assistant attorney general, Kristen Clarke, the current chief of the civil rights division and the first Black woman to lead the division, with Harmeet Dhillon, a Maga darling and fixture in rightwing media.

The history of the justice department’s civil rights division is the product of lynchings, aged patients dying of neglect, and police officers murdering people in the street. It is the legacy of Matthew Shepard and Breonna Taylor and Emmett Till.

When local authorities would not investigate civil rights violations – or were violating rights themselves – communities have had to rely on federal investigators to fill the gap in justice. The question these communities will ask over the next four years is who the civil rights division under Donald Trump will protect.

“I talk to people who are depressed because the outcome of the election, and I have to remind them, this is not our first lynching,” said the Rev Gerald Durley, a contemporary of Martin Luther King and pastor emeritus of Pastor of Providence Missionary Baptist church in Atlanta. “During the early days, when real lynches were occurring, we took the body down, we buried it, we kept on moving, and we kept on marching.”

Donald Trump is pursuing his claim against the Des Moines Register and its pollster Ann Selzer in a court system that the public has a decreasing amount of confidence in, the Guardian’s Anna Betts reports:

Americans’ confidence in the US judicial system and courts dropped to a record low this year, according to newly released data.

A new Gallup poll, published on Tuesday, reveals that only 35% of Americans surveyed in 2024 expressed confidence in their country’s judicial system and courts – representing a decline of 24 percentage points since 2020, marking one of the largest national level drops for the courts measured globally by Gallup since 2006.

Few countries and territories have experienced larger drops in confidence – speaking in terms of percentage points – in their judiciary systems over a similar four-year period than the US, the poll states.

Among the few countries listed by Gallup are Myanmar, which faced a 46-point decline following its return to military rule in 2021; Venezuela, which saw a 35-point drop between 2012 and 2016 amid economic and political turmoil; and Syria, which experienced a 28-point decline from 2009 to 2013 during the early stages of its civil war.

Between 2006 and 2020, Americans’ perceptions of their country’s courts generally aligned with the median confidence level of the 38 member countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which was 55%.

At the time of Tuesday’s poll release, there was a 20-point gap in confidence between the US and the median of OECD nations, marking the largest gap since Gallup began tracking those trends, the survey states.

Trump sues newspaper and pollster over inaccurate Iowa survey released on election eve – report

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 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:

Donald Trump’s presidential election victory ended the federal prosecutions against him for allegedly hiding classified documents and trying to overturn the 2020 election. But it hasn’t got him out of his conviction on 34 felony business fraud charges, at least not yet. Here’s the latest on that case:

A judge on Monday ruled that Donald Trump’s conviction for falsifying records to cover up a sex scandal should stand, rejecting the president-elect’s argument that it should be dismissed because of the US supreme court’s recent ruling on presidential immunity, a court filing showed.

Manhattan judge Juan Merchan’s decision eliminates one potential off-ramp from the case ahead of Trump’s return to office next month. His lawyers have raised other arguments for dismissal, however.

In a 41-page decision Merchan said Trump’s “decidedly personal acts of falsifying business records poses no danger of intrusion on the authority and function of the executive branch”.

Trump’s lawyer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Prosecutors have said there should be some accommodation for his upcoming presidency, but they insist the conviction should stand.

Trump accolytes float possibility of unconstitutional third term

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:

Trump again calls Canadian prime minister Trudeau ‘governor’ and pledges to make good on tariff promise

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.