Trump says Christie was ‘right’ about Haley in hot mic moment at town hall: Live

Trump claimed during his Fox News town hall: “We have a situation which I believe the stock market goes up because I’m leading”.

“I think, if I wasn’t leading, the stock market would be 25 per cent lower. And I think frankly, if I didn’t win, I think the stock market would crash, but when there’s a crash I hope it’s going to be during these next 12 months because I don’t want to be Herbert Hoover.”

He made something similar to Lou Dobbs during his Lindell TV interview on Monday, which you can read more about below.

Speaking as someone who covered Trump almost daily between 2017 and 2021, I can tell you that this statement is red hot garbage.

The man was firing secretaries of state on Twitter OVER NIGHT!

He tried to buy Greenland and then called the Danish prime minister “nasty” when she wouldn’t sell it to him!!

His supporters ransacked Congress!!!

Without the privileges and prestige of the presidency to protect him, Mr Trump is facing serious lawsuits and criminal indictments across New York, Florida, Georgia and Washington.

Federal officials, local prosecutors and individuals are going after him for everything from his private conduct to his political maneuvering during the 2020 election.

If even one of these efforts proves successful, the US could see its first-ever former president behind bars.

What’s more, his campaign to return to the White House suffered arguably its most serious setback yet on 19 December 2023 when the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that he must be disqualified from running and should be removed from 2024 primary ballots in the state – an unprecedented order finding him constitutionally ineligible from holding office in light of his role in the insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, a violation of the oath he swore as commander-in-chief.

The state of Maine duly followed suit on 28 December and Mr Trump’s team has pledged to appeal both rulings, which could spell the end of his candidacy should such a step fail and other states decide to act accordingly.

Here, The Independent explains each major case Mr Trump is facing.

Moderator Bret Baier asked Mr Trump: “Can you say tonight that political violence is never acceptable?”

“Well, of course, that’s right,” Mr Trump said. “And of course, I’m the one that had very little of it. Take a look at wars again. I wasn’t involved in wars. We beat the hell out of ISIS … We brought our troops back home.”

The former president didn’t address the January 6, 2021 insurrection.

About Mr Biden, he said, “You have a man who can find his way off his stage after he makes his speech that lasts for about two minutes”, before calling Mr Biden’s focus on Mr Trump as a threat to democracy as a “political ploy”.

“I did a show, Sean Hannity, did you ever hear of him? He’s a very nice man. And he said, essentially, ‘you’re not going to be a dictator’ … I said I’m going to be a dictator for one day. We’re going to do two things – the border we’re going to make it so tight you can’t get in unless you come in legally. And the other is energy. We’re going to drill, baby drill. After that, I’m not going to be dictator,” he added.

Criticising the press, he said: “They cut it, they go, ‘I’m going to be a dictator’, but they cut the rest of the sentence. No, no, I am not going to be a dictator.”

President Biden on Monday warned that America is living through an era of a “second lost cause” as former president Donald Trump seeks to reclaim the White House by continuing to argue that he did not lose the 2020 election to Mr Biden three years ago. Mr Biden compared Mr Trump’s refusal to accept that result to former confederates who claimed that the US Civil War was not fought over slavery.

Mr Biden, who travelled from Washington to the historic Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, early Monday, opened his remarks by recalling the 2015 mass shooting at the church which claimed the lives of nine people including the church’s top pastor.

Speaking from the church’s pulpit, the president recalled how the convicted murderer who’d carried out the shooting had been invited into the church for bible study by the very people he killed, and said the “word of God” that day had been “pierced by bullets and hate and rage,” and “propelled” by the “poison” of white supremacy.

Andrew Feinberg has the story:

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis was subpoenaed this week to testify in the divorce case of a colleague with whom she has been accused of having an improper relationship during their prosecution of Donald Trump.

According to a legal filing seen by The Wall Street Journal, Ms Willis was subpoenaed on Monday to testify in the divorce proceedings of Nathan Wade, an attorney she hired as a special prosecutor in Mr Trump’s Georgia election interference case.

Mr Trump commented on Chris Christie’s hot mic moment in which the former governor appeared sceptical Nikki Haley has what it takes to take on the former president.

“Chris Christie was in and he got a hot mic … the biggest story wasn’t the fact that he dropped out. Nobody cared too much about that. But he had a hot mic where he was talking to somebody about the weather and he happened to say that she doesn’t have what it takes. She’ll be creamed in the election. And I mean, I know very well and I happen to believe that Chris Christie is right. That’s one of the few things he’s been right about,” Mr Trump said on Fox News in Iowa.

Former president Donald Trump on Wednesday again vowed to seize dictatorial powers if elected to the nation’s highest office once more but attempted to walk back his frequently made promise to exact retribution on his political enemies during a second term in the White House.

The disgraced former president, who is currently facing more than 90 felony charges in four separate jurisdictions and is scheduled to go on trial in March for attempting a coup to keep himself in office after losing the 2020 election, promised to spend his first day of a second term ruling as an autocrat during a town hall broadcast on Fox News ahead of the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses.

Asked by a voter in the Hawkeye State – where temperatures have dropped below freezing – how he’d respond to critics who argue that restoring to him to power would unleash untold chaos upon the country, Mr Trump replied that the chaos of his first term was the fault of Democrats in the House of Representatives and law enforcement officials who conducted investigations into his conduct.