Trump taunts Haley ahead of Nevada by saying primaries ‘seem to be over’: Live

Nikki Haley isn’t going anywhere.

At least, that’s the message her campaign is trying to get across this week as February begins and the battle for her home state of South Carolina ramps up.

Still trailing Donald Trump by a hefty margin in all national polling and most surveys of upcoming primary states, the former governor and UN ambassador is battling a perception that was born months before Iowa and New Hampshire voted: the idea that the race is over.

Trump’s rival for the Republican presidential nomination Nikki Haley says she has asked the US Secret Service for protection due to ongoing threats of violence against her.

Haley told The Wall Street Journal on Monday afternoon that she had officially applied for help from the agency, which protects senior US politicians and their families.

It comes after at least two “swatting” attempts against the former South Carolina governor, in which police were called to her house by false reports of violence.

The Republican front-runner gave an interview to Rob Schmitt of Newsmax last night in which he said, among many other things, that it is time for McDaniel to go, that the US no longer has “free and fair elections” and that the country is “pathetic”.

He also further ramped up the pressure on Congress over its proposed border bill, calling it “a trap for Republicans”.

Finally, there was also this bizarre moment, which I confess I don’t entirely understand.

Has he misheard “supply chains” somewhere?

This is rather more decent from Trump, quite a different tone from the bile he normally dumps on his social network.

Here is what President Biden had to say about His Majesty.

You can follow our liveblog on the King’s condition below, incidentally.

Donald Trump has taunted his rival for the Republican presidential rival Nikki Haley ahead of this week’s primary and caucus in Nevada, declaring on Truth Social that the nomination process “seems to be over” before pledging to “finish off a very unpopular candidate” in South Carolina later this month.

Amid a very upbeat post about his election prospects, the former president also appeared to signal the end for Ronna McDaniel’s tenure as Republican National Committee chair, unashamedly throwing his weight around as the most popular conservative in the country.

He also found time to gripe about his New York fraud trial and to ridicule Joe Biden, naturally.

Donald Trump straw-polled supporters on Truth Social this weekend over his apparent likeness to the King of Rock and Roll.

Amid preparations for the Nevada Republican caucus next week, the former president took time to ask followers on the social media platform for their thoughts on his similarity to Elvis Presley. The former president shared an image comprising half of Elvis’ face lined up with half of his own.

“For so many years people have been saying that Elvis and I look alike,” Mr Trump posted on Saturday. “Now this pic has been going all over the place. What do you think?”

Ariana Baio reports on what replies he received:

But the date, roughly one month away, dropped off the court’s calendar this week, signalling what had long been anticipated and what federal prosecutors have warned judges would happen: the former president’s attempts to evade criminal prosecution by claiming “presidential immunity” have thrown the schedule off track.

It was all but expected. After Mr Trump’s “immunity” defence was shot down by the federal judge overseeing his case, his appeal has effectively ground proceedings to a halt for the last two months.

On Friday afternoon, the judge overseeing his case made it official: his federal election conspiracy trial date is no more, and the court will set a new one at another time.

Alex Woodward is tracking Mr Trump’s legal calendar:

Attorney Roberta Kaplan represented Ms Carroll in both her defamation trials after Mr Trump repeatedly called the writer a liar and personally insulted her following the release of her 2019 memoir in which she claimed that the ex-president raped her in a Manhattan department store dressing room in the mid-1990s.

Mr Trump was found liable for sexual abuse in the first defamation trial, a ruling which was also applied to the second trial, meaning that the second jury only had to decide on damages, awarding Ms Carroll $83.3m.

President Joe Biden got another boost on Friday when the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that the US economy has added 353,000 jobs and that unemployment remains at a steady 3.7 per cent.

And jobs aren’t the only part of the economy that look great right now.

Hourly earnings grew by 4.5 per cent in the past year, outpacing inflation for the past 12 months. This means that even as prices rise, Americans are taking more money home.

Last month, the Bureau of Economic Analysis announced that gross domestic product grew by 3.3 per cent in the fourth quarter of last year. By comparison, Germany’s economy contracted in the fourth quarter of 2023 and looks like it might head to a recession while Canada’s grew by 0.3 per cent in the fourth quarter.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, who also served as chairwoman of the Federal Reserve, also said in a speech last month that, in other countries, real wages had declined and that, compared to the Great Recession of the late 2000s, labour force participation rates and employment rates have recovered fairly rapidly.

So why do people still feel so lousy when it comes to Mr Biden’s handle on the economy?

Prosecutors in the classified documents case against former President Donald Trump told a judge Friday that defense lawyers had painted an “inaccurate and distorted picture of events” and had unfairly sought to “cast a cloud of suspicion” over government officials who were simply trying to do their jobs.

The comments came in a court filing aimed at urging a judge to reject a Trump team request from last month that sought to force prosecutors to turn over a trove of information that defense lawyers believe is relevant to the case.

But special counsel Jack Smith‘s team said the defense was creating a false narrative about how the investigation began and was trying to “cast a cloud of suspicion over responsible actions by government officials diligently doing their jobs.”

“The defendants’ insinuations have scant factual or legal relevance to their discovery requests, but they should not stand uncorrected,” the prosecution motion states.

“Put simply,” the prosecutors added, “the Government here confronted an extraordinary situation: a former President engaging in calculated and persistent obstruction of the collection of Presidential records, which, as a matter of law, belong to the United States for the benefit of history and posterity, and, as a matter of fact, here included a trove of highly classified documents containing some of the nation’s most sensitive information. The law required that those documents be collected.”