Democrats are watching their hopes of flipping Iowa’s 3rd District evaporate as Sarah Trone Garriott’s own record keeps surfacing, so the Des Moines Register rode to the rescue with a “fact check.” One small problem: the internet remembers things the Register would rather it didn’t.
Nobody’s shocked to see this kind of cover job from a Democratic operative like Laura Belin. But this is the Register — the paper of record that still insists it plays it down the middle. After this “fact check,” it’s not even bothering to pretend anymore.
Let’s go claim by claim.
The wedding. The Register’s big rebuttal here is a technicality: Trone Garriott wasn’t ordained yet, so her supervising pastor technically officiated while she “just” picked the scripture reading. Fine. But that’s not really the point, and the Register knows it. Trone Garriott didn’t tell this story to confess a regrettable compromise — she told it to the Des Moines Register’s own Storytellers Project, under the headline “This Iowan’s first wedding was to a pair of satanists,” as a warm parable about her own open-mindedness. She used presiding over the marriage of self-described nonbelievers to establish distance from what she’d consider “radical religious folks.” Whether she personally said the vows or just chose the reading isn’t really the issue — she went along with it, and then turned it into a badge of enlightenment. That tells you plenty about the kind of politician she is. The Register can quibble about the org chart of who blessed the union. It doesn’t change what the story was for.
“She never called Christian schools segregation academies.” The Register’s defense is that Trone Garriott was using a historian’s term for schools founded specifically in the 1950s and ’60s, not branding today’s Christian schools racist. That’s a nice distinction — except she’s not out there at Methodist churches giving guest lectures on mid-century desegregation history. She’s a sitting state senator running for Congress, telling a congregation in 2023 that Christian schools were built to create a “White enclave.” Iowa parents sending their kids to Christian schools today aren’t running a 1960s history seminar in their heads when they hear that. They’re hearing themselves and their kids’s school described as a racial retreat. The “historical context” defense only works if you believe the audience filed it away as a footnote instead of an accusation.
“9/11 didn’t shape her views on anti-Muslim bigotry more than the attack itself.” Her own op-ed says what it says: the day after 9/11, her focus was “rising anti-Muslim bigotry and its harm,” full stop. She’s since told the Register the contrast is “unfair,” that “one doesn’t cancel out the other.” Maybe not. But she wrote it, she published it, and no amount of after-the-fact “context” un-writes it. She doesn’t get a do-over on the framing just because it’s inconvenient in a general election.
The rest of it — Christians as “threatening,” Iowa’s leadership as too White and male, discomfort with White people — the Register barely bothers to fact-check these at all. There’s video of her saying Christians in public life feel “very threatening.” There’s video of her complaining Iowa’s leaders are too “White, Christian, and male.” There’s video of her describing discomfort around White people. Instead of disputing any of it, the Register spends paragraph after paragraph explaining why it’s fine, actually.
RNC spokesman Zach Kraft summed it up bluntly: “Sarah Trone Garriott made a habit of insulting Iowans and smearing the values they cherish. She might regret that her radical views are being brought into the open and kneecapping her quest for power, but don’t worry, we have the receipts and there is more where that came from.”
The Register can keep calling this a smear campaign. But when the “debunking” boils down to technicalities and historical footnotes, the only thing actually getting fact-checked is the Register’s own credibility.
