Trump caught on tape pressuring Wayne County officials not to certify election: Live

“What’s Trump been up to on social media overnight?”, I hear you cry.

You name it. Laying into Joe Biden and Barack Obama, insisting he is the victim of a giant neverending legal conspiracy, saying that Democrats wish death on coal miners (yup), repeating his attacks on illegal immigrants poisoning the blood of the nation and even posting choice clips from the golf course (“Now watch this drive”).

There’s really something for everyone this Christmas season.

Here’s a little more from Amelia Neath on the comedian’s takedown of the 45th president over his veneration of notorious authoritarians from the pages of history to the present day.

Late night host Seth Meyers offered a witty account of the US Constitution’s 14th Amendment this week in order to explain the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling, declaring: “The only way this amendment could apply any more directly to Donald Trump is if it said: ‘No person shall hold any office who hasn’t previously taken an oath to support the Constitution and the United States shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, including any flamboyant land-owning weirdos whose ties are too long and won’t stop complaining about how toilets don’t flush and windmills killing birds.’”

Katie Hawkinson was watching.

Florida governor Ron DeSantis has pointedly refused to join his Republican rival Vivek Ramaswamy in boycotting next year’s presidential election in Colorado.

Ramaswamy, who is vying with DeSantis for the GOP nomination in 2024, suggested on Wednesday that candidates should withdraw from the ballot unless Trump is also allowed to run.

Here’s Alex Woodward again with a look at Trump’s recent sparring with Biden, which has seen him engage in playground tactics and insist that it is really the president, not him, who is the sinister authoritarian despite his run of distinctly Hitlerian public statements.

Trump has always enjoyed projecting his own corruption onto his enemies but surely only the most conspiracy-brained could be taken by this one.

Yep. Adam Kinzinger, former Republican representative, encouraged people to “wear a mask” when they are in the presence of the former president due to his apparent odour.

Kinzinger, a vocal critic of Trump, took to his X account this week to insinuate that his enemy possesses a strong smell.

“I’m genuinely surprised how people close to Trump haven’t talked about the odour,” Kinzinger wrote earlier this week.

“It’s truly something to behold. Wear a mask if you can.”

When reached for comment about the accusation after it blew up on social media, a spokesperson for Trump returned the insult.

“Adam Kinzinger farted on live TV and is an unemployed fraud,” the spokesperson said in a statement provided to The Independent.

“He has disgraced his country and disrespects everyone around him because he is a sad individual who is mad about how his miserable life has turned out.”

Rudy Giuliani has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy days after he was ordered to pay more than $148m to a mother-daughter pair of election workers he defamed in the volatile aftermath of the 2020 presidential election, underscoring the downfall of a man once hailed as “America’s Mayor”.

His filing in New York comes one day after the federal judge overseeing his defamation case ordered him to “immediately” pay the women, pointing to his history as an “uncooperative litigant” and concerns that he will try to “conceal his assets” during any appeals.

Last week, an eight-member jury unanimously agreed that Trump’s former attorney owes Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss $16.2m and $16.99m respectively in compensatory damages, an additional $20m each for intentional infliction of emotional distress, and a further $75m in punitive damages.

Judge Howell had already found Giuliani liable for defamation in a damning pretrial ruling earlier this year. A four-day trial in Washington, DC, sought to determine how much he owed.

Moss, who was a clerical worker in a county election office, and Freeman, her mother, who had taken a temporary job to help count ballots, were subject to relentless abuse, threats and racist attacks in the wake of the 2020 election.

Alex Woodward has the latest.

Good morning! If you’re just joining us, there’s been a fresh scandal in Trumpworld.

It appears that the Republican presidential front-runner personally pressured two GOP officials in Michigan not to certify the state’s 2020 election results, according to a new report.

The then-president told the officials, both members of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers, in a 17 November 2020 phone call that they would look “terrible” if they carried out their duty.

According to The Detroit News, which obtained audio of the call, Mr Trump went on to tell the pair: “We’ve got to fight for our country.”

Trump also reportedly told the officials, Monica Palmer and William Hartmann, that his team would “take care” of them and insisted: “We can’t let these people take our country away from us.”

Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, a Michigan native, was also on the call and reportedly told the officials: “If you can go home tonight, do not sign it… We will get you attorneys.”

“We’ll take care of that,” Trump added.

Graeme Massie has the full story.

Mr Biden compared Mr Trump to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels in September 2020. Shortly before he would go on to beat him in the election that November, Mr Biden told MSNBC that Mr Trump was “sort of like Goebbels”.

“You say the lie long enough, keep repeating it, repeating it, repeating it, it becomes common knowledge,” Mr Biden said, reacting to Mr Trump trying to make his opponent out to be a socialist.

“I think people see very clearly the difference between me and Donald Trump,” Mr Biden said. “Trump is clearing protests in front of the White House that are peaceful with the military. This guy is more Castro than Churchill.”

Mr Biden also compared Texas Senator Ted Cruz to Goebbels after the 2020 election after the senator pushed Mr Trump’s lies about the election being stolen.

The then-president-elect remembered Goebbels’ exaggeration of civilian deaths during the firebombing of Dresden in the Second World War, which ran in newspapers across the globe. Goebbels argued that the bigger the lie and the more it was repeated, the likelier it was that it would come to be believed.

Mr Biden noted that both Mr Cruz and Mr Trump pushed the notion that there was something wrong with the election in the face of a complete lack of evidence to back up their claims.

“They’re part of the big lie,” Mr Biden said at the time. “When we were told that, you know, Goebbels and the great lie … when Dresden was bombed, firebombed, there were 250 people that were killed. [Or] was it 2,500 people that were killed? And Goebbels said no, 25,000, or 250,000 were killed. And our papers printed that. Our papers printed it. It’s a big lie.”

Around 25,000 civilians were killed in the firebombing of Dresden in early 1945, months before the surrender of Nazi Germany. Goebbels, known for his lies, claimed that 200,000 died.

Mr Biden was asked if Mr Cruz or Missouri Sen Josh Hawley, who also took part in the delaying of the certification of the results, should resign, Mr Biden said: “They should be just flat beaten the next time they run.”

Mr Biden said at the time that if Mr Trump was “the only one saying it, that’s one thing. But the acolytes that follow him, like Cruz and others, they’re as responsible as he is”.

“There are decent people out there who actually believe these lies because they’ve heard it again and again.”

“The American public has a real good, clear look at who they are,” he told the press at the time. “They’re part of the big lie. The big lie.”

At a fundraiser in San Franciso in November, Mr Biden slammed Mr Trump’s comments in New Hampshire, where he said he would “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections”.

“There’s a lot of reasons to be against Donald Trump, but damn he shouldn’t be president,” Mr Biden said.

“In just the last few days, Trump has said, if he returns office, he’s gonna go after all those who oppose him and wipe out what he called the ‘vermin’, quote, ‘the vermin in America’ – a specific phrase with a specific meaning,” Mr Biden said.

“It echoes language you heard in Nazi Germany in the ’30s,” Mr Biden said. “And it isn’t even the first time. Trump also recently talked about, quote, ‘the blood of America is being poisoned’ – ‘the blood of America is being poisoned.’ Again, echoes the same phrases used in Nazi Germany.”

Biden campaign spokesperson Ammar Moussa said in a statement at the time that “on a weekend when most Americans were honoring our nation’s heroes, Donald Trump parroted the autocratic language of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini — two dictators many US veterans gave their lives fighting”.