Trump poses with family as Melania’s whereabouts remain a ‘mystery’: Live

Here is Donald Trump’s 2023, by the numbers, from The Independent’s Kelly Rissman:

At his campaign rallies, Trump has revealed a radical vision for overhauling the nation’s immigration laws, from implementing “the largest deportation operation in American history” to “ideological screenings” for people arriving at the southern border.

If elected, the next Trump administration would upend asylum protections for thousands of people who are legally in the US; round up undocumented people living in the US and detain them at camps before they’re expelled; and prohibit children born in the US to non-citizen parents from being granted citizenship.

Federal law enforcement is working with police in Colorado to investigate alleged threats to state Supreme Court justices who found Donald Trump ineligible to appear on the state’s 2024 presidential ballots.

Social media threats included “significant violent rhetoric” against the justices and Democratic officials, often in direct response to Trump’s posts about the ruling from his Truth Social platform, according to an analysis of social media posts in the wake of the state Supreme Court ruling.

It’s a familiar pattern that has followed Mr Trump’s indictments and courtroom challenges as he seeks the Republican nomination for president in 2024: his outrage fuels vague calls for civil war and violence among his supporters online, while law enforcement monitors threats of real-world action.

In the middle of a posting spree the day after Christmas on his Truth Social account, Donald Trump lashed out at special counsel Jack Smith and suggested his appointment in the Justice Department role is unconstitutional.

The post follows a filing to the US Supreme Court last week from former Ronald Reagan-era Attorney General Edwin Meese, whose spurious argument claims that the special counsel was illegally appointed.

Meese has also defended other Trump figures like former assistant attorney general Jeffrey Clark, who is being prosecuted in Georgia for his attempts to overturn election results – charges that Meese called a “major affront to federal supremacy.”

“Biden’s Flunky, Deranged Jack Smith, should go to HELL,” Trump wrote on Tuesday.

Trump’s attorneys asked the Supreme Court to reject the special counsel’s request to fast track a hearing on whether Trump can claim “presidential immunity” as a legitimate defence in his federal election conspiracy case. The Supreme Court turned down the special counsel’ request, and the “immunity” question will now play out at the appeals court next month.

Now Team Trump is preparing to return to the Supreme Court to ask the justices to take up an appeal of a Colorado Supreme Court decision that disqualifies him from appearing on the state’s ballots in 2024.

More on Trump’s future at the nation’s highest court:

A ruling from Colorado’s highest court earlier this month determined that the former president is disqualified from the presidency under the 14th Amendment, which bars anyone who has sworn an oath to uphold the Constitution and “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” from holding public office.

The historic 4-3 ruling, the first among any state supreme court to consider the question of his eligibility, follows a wave of lawsuits seeking to block Mr Trump from next year’s presidential election ballots for his actions surrounding the attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Donald Trump personally pressured two Republican officials in Michigan to not certify the 2020 presidential election result in the state, according to a report.

In a 17 November 2020 phone call, the then-president told the officials Monica Palmer and William Hartmann – both members of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers – that they would look “terrible” if they certified the results.

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

Mr Trump also reportedly told Ms Palmer and Mr Hartmann that his team would “take care” of them, saying that “we can’t let these people take our country away from us”.

President Joe Biden said there is “no question” that Donald Trump was responsible for fuelling an insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6. “It’s self-evident. You saw it all,” he told reporters on Wednesday.

“I’m not an insurrectionist,” the former president wrote on his Truth Social the next day. “Crooked Joe Biden is!!!”

He didn’t elaborate, but it’s the latest attempt from the frontrunner for the Republican nomination for president in 2024 to spin, or project, accusations against him towards those doing the accusing.

It’s a rhetorical device he has weaponised for years, and the projected accusations have only become more severe as the several criminal prosecutions and campaign-threatening lawsuits against him develop.

Before you click through, try and guess what it is…

California Governor Gavin Newson isn’t backing his own lieutenant’s call to remove Donald Trump from the state’s 2024 ballot after the Colorado Supreme Court determined that he was ineligible for the presidency.

On 19 December, Colorado’s highest court ruled that the former president is disqualified from the presidency and should be removed from 2024 ballots, citing his role in the January 6 Capitol insurrection.

California Lt Gov Eleni Kounalakis responded to the move by suggesting that her state should do the same ahead of its 5 March primary. But her boss Mr Newsom isn’t on board.

“There is no doubt that Donald Trump is a threat to our liberties and even to our democracy,” Mr Newsom said on 22 December. “But in California, we defeat candidates at the polls. Everything else is a political distraction.”

With testimony having wrapped up in the civil fraud trial of Donald Trump and the Trump Organization in New York, the court is now dark until Justice Arthur Engoron hears closing arguments from each side in January.

The case centres around what New York Attorney General Letitia James has described as an “astounding” level of fraud and deceptive business practices over more than a decade, during which the former president and his associates “grossly and fraudulently” inflated the value of his properties to obtain tax, loan and insurance incentives.

Ms James’s office brought the case against the former president, his two adult sons and company executives in September 2022, publishing a bombshell 222-page civil suit alleging that Mr Trump inflated his net worth to “deceive banks and the people of the great state of New York”.

She described the multiple “statements of financial condition” prepared by his former accounting firm Mazars for nearly all of Mr Trump’s marquee properties as “exaggerated, grossly inflated, objectively false, and therefore fraudulent, and illegal”.

The lawsuit follows a three-year civil investigation into at least 23 of his properties and assets, with Ms James’s office finding at least 11 of Mr Trump’s annual financial statements included more than 200 false and misleading asset valuations.