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Trump news – live: Ex-president makes last ditch effort to save Madison Cawthorn

As the US’s Covid-19 death toll officially hits 1 million, Dr Anthony Fauci, the senior public health adviser who became a national figure during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, has confirmed that he would not want to serve in another Trump administration.

“Would you have confidence in his ability to deal with a pandemic of this nature?” he was asked by CNN’s Jim Acosta yesterday. “Would you want to stay on at your post?”

“Well, no to the second question,” he laughed. “The first question... if you look at the history of what the response was during the administration, I think, you know, at best you could say it wasn't optimal. And I think just history will speak for itself.”

Pressed to say he would not serve with Mr Trump again, he was clearer: “Right. For sure.”

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In a separate interview, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi mused on the perverse impact Mr Trump has had on the judiciary. “Who would have ever suspected that a creature like Donald Trump would become president of the United States,” she said.

Key points

  • Fauci wouldn’t serve Trump again

  • Pelosi mourns judicial impact of “a creature like Donald Trump”

  • Ex-president’s endorsee Dr Oz faces difficult Pennsylvania primary

Biden reverses Trump’s Somalia withdrawal

18:33 , John Bowden

President Joe Biden earlier this month signed an order redeploying hundreds of US ground forces to Somalia for efforts against Al Shabab, an Al Qaeda-aligned militant group based in the region.

His decision reverses a withdrawal of those forces ordered by former President Donald Trump and completed just three days before Mr Biden was sworn in last year.

Read more in The Independent:

Biden approves ‘persistent’ US troop presence in Somalia after terrorist gains

ICYMI: Donald Trump is developing a Netflix alternative

18:05 , John Bowden

A media company started by former President Donald Trump is devloping a streaming service that it hopes will be able to challenge big services like Netflix and Hulu.

The Trump Media and Technology Group made the announcement in an advertisement on Wednesday, which stated that the streaming service currently titled “TMTG+” would “be the home for a wide variety of non-scripted, scripted, and original content” once it was up and running.

The company also runs Mr Trump’s fledgling social media venture, Truth Social, which struggled to clear a lengthy waitlist and get up and running earlier this year. The platform’s popularity has sank in recent weeks and last month ceased trending in the Apple app store.

Read more from The Independent’s Sravasti Dasgupta:

Trump media company hiring producers for ‘Maga version of Netflix’

Mike Pompeo visits Iranian resistance museum

17:39 , John Bowden

Mike Pompeo was in Albania on Monday as the former secretary of State continues to establish his brand within the Republican Party and elevate his status as a potential 2024 candidate or even running mate for Donald Trump, his onetime boss.

A photo and video posted on the Twitter feed of Iranian opposition leader Maryam Rajavi, president-elect of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, showed her meeting with Mr Pompeo at a museum dedicated to opposition efforts against Iran’s government. Mr Pompeo has long supported the NCRI and has previously spoken at the group’s events along with other hawkish Republican figures like Ted Cruz, Mike Pence, and others.

The image is a reminder that Mr Pompeo is maneuvering to launch a 2024 primary bid if his former boss does not run again, while a person close to Mr Trump told NBC News in late March that the former secretary was on a shortlist of potential running mates for the former president, who has fallen out with Mr Pence following the latter’s refusal to support his bid to overturn the 2020 election.

Ted Cruz scores a campaign finance win

17:10 , Andrew Naughtie

The US Supreme Court has ruled in favour of Ted Cruz in a case focused on the amount political candidates can lend their campaigns, removing limits on how much a candidate can pay themselves back when they loan their campaigns money.

The ruling stems from Mr Cruz’s 2018 re-election effort, during which the Texas senator loaned his campaign a total of $260,000. The campaign began to pay him back after his victory, but the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act stipulates that campaigns can only pay a candidate back for contributions for more than $250,000 within 20 days after an election, and then the money is treated as a campaign contribution. That meant that Mr Cruz’s campaign could not refund him $10,000 of his own money.

In a dissent signed by the court’s three liberals, Elena Kagan criticised the implications of the ruling. “The politician is happy; the donors are happy. The only loser is the public. It inevitably suffers from government corruption.”

Eric Garcia has the story.

Supreme Court lifts limit of how much candidates can lend themselves in Ted Cruz case

Kathy Barnette won’t support other PA candidates if they beat her

16:44 , Andrew Naughtie

Kathy Barnette, the “ultra-Maga” Republican making a last-minute surge toward victory in the Pennsylvania Senate primary, has struck a combative tone against critics pointing to her long history of open Islamophobia – and now, she’s insisted she won’t be backing either of her leading rivals if they beat her.

Until Ms Barnette’s rise – largely fuelled by a dramatic rise in coverage in the hardcore right-wing media ecosystem – Dr Mehmet Oz was the prohibitive favourite for the Republican nomination. However, despite getting Donald Trump’s coveted endorsement, he has proven unable to pull away from the field, and many conservatives find his record of liberal positions impossible to stomach.

Read more from Andrew Feinberg on Ms Barnette’s controversial comments.

GOP Senate candidate defends falsely claiming Obama was Muslim

Man who staged bomb threat near Capitol to appear in court

16:13 , Andrew Naughtie

Floyd Roseberry, who last year parked a truck on Capitol Hill that he claimed was carrying an explosive device, is set to appear in court today to ask for release from jail.

While he was found psychologically fit to stand trial, Mr Roseberry’s mental health at the time of the incident is a key part of the case. Scott MacFarlane reports that Mr Roseberry is claiming he was on the wrong medication at the time of the incident.

Poll: Should Trump be allowed back on Twitter?

15:43 , Andrew Naughtie

While there have been some hiccups in his Twitter takeover lately, Elon Musk has confirmed that in his view, Donald Trump should be allowed back on the platform.

At a recent event, Mr Musk called the move to ban the ex-president after the 6 January insurrection “a morally bad decision”, saying that £it alienated a large part of the country and did not ultimately result in Donald Trump not having a voice.”

The Independent is keen to find out readers’ views. To let us know, vote in the poll below and feel free to tell us what answer you chose and why in the comments.

Should Donald Trump be allowed back on Twitter? Have your say

Trump announces a 2020 election book

15:15 , Andrew Naughtie

Speaking at an event in Austin, Texas this weekend, Donald Trump was as ever full of complaints about the supposed theft of the 2020 election – and even announced to his assembled supporters that he will be penning a book about it.

The volume will be imperiously titled The Crime of the Century, a phrase Mr Trump has used to describe multiple separate actions he feels targeted him unfairly.

Read more from Indy100 here.

Tom Cotton sells book with ominous martial imagery

14:45 , Andrew Naughtie

Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, a hardline Republican who among other things called for troops to be sent into American cities to deal with Black Lives Matter protesters, is publishing a pre-presidential-run-style book railing against the left – and judging by the cover, its rhetoric will not exactly be conciliatory.

It comes at a time when concerns about the belligerence of right-wing rhetoric is increasingly viewed as a radicalisation threat, including among far-right-leaning former veterans who join groups such as the Oath Keepers.

Trump gets behind Madison Cawthorn

14:15 , Andrew Naughtie

Posting on his bespoke platform Truth Social, Donald Trump has weighed in behalf of Madison Cawthorn, the embattled far-right congressman who faces a slew of Republican challengers in his primary tomorrow.

According to FiveThirtyEight, polling in the race has been scant, but Mr Cawthorn’s spending has topped $3m, giving him at least one edge. Depending on how he polls in the end, he may face a single Republican challenger in a July runoff.

The GOP’s illogical embrace of racist “replacement theory”

13:51 , Andrew Naughtie

After this weekend’s Buffalo shooting, the pressure is on the Republican Party to explain its views on the racist “replacement theory” that the US is being deliberately “flooded” with non-white people to change the country’s demographic makeup – supposedly with a view to permanently installing the Democrats in power.

Eric Garcia has a rejoinder to this view:

Buffalo shooting: Liz Cheney blames House GOP for enabling racist extremism

13:15 , Andrew Naughtie

The suspected shooter in this weekend’s massacre in Buffalo, New York is increasingly thought to have followed violent racist movements and subscribed to assorted conspiracy theories, raising the question of culpability for right-wing leaders and commentators who have increasingly trafficked in such notions in recent years.

Among those now calling out top Republicans for their alleged part in this is Liz Cheney, who has lit into her party’s congressional leadership for their record of overlooking and tolerating extremism on the right.

Far-right Pennsylvania candidate defends Islamophobic tweets

12:55 , Andrew Naughtie

As she makes an unexpected late surge in Pennsylvania’s Republican Senate primary, far-right candidate Kathy Barnette is being forced to defend a rich archive of highly Islamophobic tweets sent over the course of her career.

Appearing on Fox News yesterday, Ms Barnette dismissed the tweets as relics from a “timeframe” when the US faced an influx of Syrian refugees and domestic terror attacks by Islamist extremists. She said that when she sent the tweets she was a radio host “leaning into helping the public begin to have those conversations”.

“The overwhelming majority of the tweets that are being presented are not even full thoughts, are not even full sentences.”

Among those criticising Ms Barnette for her past remarks is Fox News’s Sean Hannity, a supporter of both Donald Trump and Dr Oz – and himself a former proponent of the racist “birther” theory about Barack Obama’s birth certificate.

Mark Esper confirms story about Trump calling for 10,000 troops in DC

12:25 , Andrew Naughtie

Mark Esper, the former defence secretary whose book about Donald Trump has generated myriad headlines the last two weeks, was asked yesterday to confirm once again that Mr Trump had called on the Pentagon deploying 10,000 troops to the streets of Washington, DC in the summer of 2020 to quell Black Lives Matter protests.

Shown a video of then-attorney general Bill Barr denying the story at the time, Mr Esper stuck to his guns – saying he is “110 per cent confident about what the president was seeking that morning”.

Jan 6 cases: Oath Keepers to face sedition trials in fall

11:54 , Andrew Naughtie

Multiple members of the far-right Oath Keeepers militia group, including founder Stewart Rhodes, are facing trial for sedition – some of the most serious charges brought by federal prosecutors in the 800-plus cases involving alleged rioters. Now, the date of their trials has been set for the fall, with the first batch of defendants appearing in court not long before the midterm elections.

Nancy Pelosi calls Trump “creature"

11:25 , Andrew Naughtie

Nancy Pelosi yesterday vented her disgust at the conservative Supreme Court justices who are poised to vote to overturn Roe v Wade, describing Donald Trump’s three appointees as “dangerous to the freedoms” of the US.

“Who would have ever suspected that a creature like Donald Trump would become president of the United States, waving a list of judges that he would appoint, therefore getting the support of the far-right and appointing those anti-freedom justices to the court,” she said in an interview on CNN’s State of the Union.

Read more from Sravasti Dasgupta:

Pelosi calls Trump a ‘creature’ as she dubs Supreme Court ‘dangerous to US freedoms’

Watch: Fauci confirms he wouldn’t serve Trump again

11:02 , Andrew Naughtie

Dr Anthony Fauci appeared on CNN yesterday and confirmed he would not serve under another Trump administration should the ex-president be re-elected in 2024.

While Mr Trump did not fire Dr Fauci or fully exclude him from the administration’s Covid-19 response, he repeatedly undermined and contradicted him in public, and helped make him a hate figure among right-wing supporters who resented mask mandates, social distancing orders, and vaccine mandates.

Good morning

10:52 , Andrew Naughtie

Welcome to our coverage of Donald Trump and his influence on US politics. Stay with us for more updates.