Trump 2024 GOP rivals pledge to pardon him if elected: Live

The leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination faces 91 criminal charges, nearly half of which are at the federal level. And yet his two main GOP rivals have said they would pardon him if they’re elected.

He faces another 34 felonies in New York, where he is accused of falsifying business records stemming from hush money payments to Stormy Daniels, and another 13 in Georgia, where he is accused of leading a criminal racketeering enterprise to overturn the state’s election results.

In recent days, Mr Trump’s leading Republican challengers have vowed to pardon him if convicted on federal charges.

Alex Woodward has the details…

Most new years are shrouded in a fog of mystery, like an area on a video game map that you haven’t explored yet. The unknown means possibility, and possibility means opportunity. That comes with its stresses and anxieties, but can also be cause for excitement.

This new year will be very different. We already know how much of it is going to play out – and that it has the potential to end with seismic, zeitgeist-altering change.

In 2024, the UK and US will have general elections, the first time this has happened since 1992. Both administrations could be thrown out. Will they prove to be known unknowns, or unknown knowns?

To underscore how much Iowa means to Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor was unwilling to put his campaigning there on hold even in the waning hours of 2023.

At a New Year’s Eve event in a Sheraton Hotel ballroom in West Des Moines, jeans and cowboy boots outnumbered tuxedos and cocktail dresses, and Miller Lite seemed more popular than champagne.

But the modesty of the affair, where roughly 200 people turned out for the last campaign event of the busy year in Iowa, belied its the importance to the host, who has wagered the future of his Republican bid for president on the leadoff Iowa caucuses, just two weeks away.

“Are you ready to work hard over these next two weeks and win the Iowa caucuses?” DeSantis asked supporters who turned out at the suburban hotel Sunday evening.

The band Green Day changed the lyrics to their hit “American Idiot” during ABC’s New Year broadcast on Sunday night, with Billie Joe Armstrong singing: “I’m not a part of the MAGA agenda.”

Donald Trump is laying the ground to claim election fraud again in 2024, baselessly suggesting in his New Year’s message that the Biden administration is allowing immigrants to enter the US to vote.

“As the New Year fast approaches, I would like to wish an early New Year’s salutation to Crooked Joe Biden and his group of Radical Left Misfits & Thugs on their never ending attempt to DESTROY OUR NATION through Lawfare, Invasion, and Rigging Elections,” Mr Trump wrote in the afternoon of 30 December.

“They are now scrambling to sign up as many of those millions of people they are illegally allowing into [our] Country, in order [so] that they will be ready to VOTE IN THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 2024,” he added.

Mr Trump’s New Year’s screed followed a previous post just after midnight early on Saturday, in which he wrote, “It’s becoming more and more obvious to me why the ‘Crazed’ Democrats are allowing millions and millions of totally unvetted migrants into our once great Country”.

“IT’S SO THEY CAN VOTE, VOTE, VOTE. They are signing them up at a rapid pace, without even knowing who the hell they are. It all makes sense now. Republicans better wake up and do something, before it is too late. Are you listening Mitch McConnell?” he asked of the Senate Republican leader.

NBC legal analyst Joyce Alene wrote on X that “Trump is preparing to claim the 2024 election was stolen from him when he loses”.

Sarah Matthews, 28, was appointed as the White House Deputy Press Secretary in June 2020. She left on January 6, 2021, the day of the Capitol riot. She later testified before the January 6 House Select Committee.

One of the star witnesses for that panel was Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. The 27-year-old corroborated some of the more startling accounts of Mr Trump’s actions on the day of the insurrection.

Mr Trump was removed from their GOP primary ballots because of the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot when his supporters attempted to stop the certification of President Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory in their false and baseless belief that the election had been stolen.

While Mr Trump has been charged with wrongdoing in relation to the Capitol riot, his allies often make the point that he hasn’t been criminally charged with “insurrection”.

The Trump team is set to file a challenge in a Maine state court to the secretary of state’s decision to block Mr Trump from appearing on the ballot, while the ruling by the Colorado Supreme Court to remove Mr Trump will be challenged in the US Supreme Court.

The former president appointed three of the six conservative justices on the court. The three liberals were appointed by Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden. The remaining three conservatives were appointed by George HW Bush and George W Bush.

Section 3 of the 14th Amendment states that any officer who has taken an oath to uphold the Constitution cannot “have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof”.

Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows told a local CBS station on Friday that “every state is different”.

Trump backers report being even more worried about democracy than those who oppose him. Normally members of the party out of power feel like democracy isn’t working as well for them, but Trump’s situation is different. He’s the first president in history to face prosecution and is promoting the narrative that he’s being persecuted by his likely general election opponent.

Trump says the criminal cases and separate attempts to bar him from the ballot under the insurrection clause of the Constitution are a form of election interference.

The Colorado Supreme Court found his role in the Jan. 6 attack was sufficient grounds to remove him from the state’s ballot under the 14th Amendment, a ruling Trump’s campaign said it will appeal soon to the U.S. Supreme Court, where three of his nominees help form the conservative majority. On Thursday, Maine’s Democratic secretary of state struck Trump from that state’s primary ballot, becoming the first election official to take such action. Shenna Bellows suspended her ruling until Maine’s court system rules on the case.

While campaigning, Trump has adopted an “I’m rubber and you’re glue” approach, accusing Biden of being the actual threat to democracy.

In November 2022, every swing state candidate who backed Trump’s effort to overturn his loss and who was running for a statewide office with a role in elections lost.

“There’s little doubt our democracy has gotten dinged up in a couple of moments of late, but we have decided we like it compared to the alternative,” said Justin Levitt, who served as adviser for democracy and voting rights for two years in the Biden White House and is now a law professor at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.

Election deniers have been able to make gains in one area — offices where they simply have to win a Republican primary. That’s meant they have taken power in local governments in many rural areas, often disrupting elections and embracing conspiracy theories or procedures such as hand-counting, which is less reliable and more time-consuming than tabulating thousands of votes on machines.

They also have been able to expand their power within Republican legislative bodies from statehouses to Congress. U.S. Rep. Mike Johnson of Louisiana, who helped organize a brief supporting the quickly thrown-out lawsuit to overturn Biden’s victory, is now the House speaker.

If Johnson retains his speakership in January 2025, he could be in a position to disrupt certification of a Biden victory. Republicans more willing to subvert democracy also could have greater sway in state legislatures.

Former GOP lawmaker Adam Kinzinger has revealed new details about Donald Trump’s alleged bad odour, claiming that he reeks of a combination of several unsavoury scents including “armpits, ketchup, a butt”.

Speaking on The MeidasTouch Network on Thursday, Mr Kinzinger reignited the claims around the former president’s “not good” smell and launched into a lengthy description of it.

“It’s not good. The best way to describe it… take armpits, ketchup, a butt and makeup and put that all in a blender and bottle that as a cologne,” he said.

“That’s kind of that. I’ve been amazed that everybody is just kind of learning about this now,” he added.

The Independent has reached out to a Trump spokesperson for comment.