Trump tells Biden ‘you’re fired’ in rambling South Carolina victory speech: Live

Gustaf Kilander reports from Washington, DC:

At least one member of the Republican National Committee is working to slow Donald Trump‘s attempted takeover of the organization by pushing to keep the committee neutral until Trump is officially the presidential nominee and avoid picking up his legal bills.

Two draft resolutions are being circulated by Henry Barbour, a national committeeman from Mississippi, for consideration at the RNC‘s upcoming March meeting in Houston. Barbour said support for the resolutions among RNC members is growing but he does not yet have the needed cosponsors, and any resolutions would ultimately be nonbinding.

The effort comes after Trump last week publicly called to replace the RNC’s current leaders and install one of his senior campaign advisors and his daughter-in-law Lara Trump in top roles. Lara Trump suggested earlier in the week that GOP voters would support the committee paying her father-in-law’s legal bills as he faces a raft of criminal and civil indictments.

Donald Trump claimed he is a “proud political dissident” in his CPAC speech just days after he compared himself to Russian leader Alexei Navalny, who recently died in a Siberian prison under unclear circumstances.

Mr Trump said in National Harbor, Maryland on Saturday that “Joe [Biden] and his henchmen have you trapped and it’s an express train barreling toward servitude and to ruin – it’s moving at a speed that Joe doesn’t understand because Joe … I don’t think he knows what the hell’s going on, to be honest with you, but he’s surrounded by some very bad fascists”.

“A vote for Trump is your ticket back to freedom. It’s your passport out of tyranny,” he argued. “And it’s your only escape from Joe Biden and his gang’s fast track to hell. And in many ways, we’re living in hell right now.”

Donald Trump claimed Black voters like him because of his many indictments and mug shot during a speech at the Black Conservative Foundation gala on Friday evening.

Katie Hawkinson has the story:

The continued presence of Donald Trump on the US political scene has longtime allies concerned over whether the US can be a reliable security partner, former National Intelligence Officer and Trump administration National Security Council official Fiona Hill has said.

Speaking at the Principles First summit, a gathering of anti-Trump and pro-democracy conservatives in Washington, Ms Hill was asked to opine on how Mr Trump would have reacted to the killing of Russian dissident Alexei Navalny on his watch.

She told attendees the twice-impeached, disgraced ex-president, whose performance during a 2018 Helsinki press conference alongside Russian leader Vladimir Putin was so bad that she considered pulling a fire alarm to end it, might actually have reacted negatively to Navalny’s death if he thought it made him look bad.

“It’s really about how it reflects on him,” she said.

The former president has yet to officially lock up the party’s nomination but is widely considered to be on the verge of doing so following this weekend’s win in the South Carolina primary, and very favourable polling ahead of Tuesday’s contest in Michigan.