Trump leads Biden in six swing states, new poll shows – live | US politics

Voters in Oklahoma have kicked out a local official who has ties to white nationalist groups.

The Guardian’s Ed Helmore reports:

Voters in Enid, Oklahoma, have decisively kicked out a city council member with a history of ties to white nationalist groups from the elected body almost a year after he was admitted.

Judd Blevins lost his position as Enid’s ward 1 council member, according to Oklahoma’s state election board. The move comes months after Blevin was shown to have attended a deadly neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 and was later shown to have led an Oklahoma chapter of the white nationalist group Identity Evropa.

Blevins denied he was or ever had been a white supremacist, and said he was motivated by “the same issues that got Donald Trump elected in 2016”.

A small group of 36 Blevins supporters had won him election last year, but he lost Tuesday’s vote to fellow Republican candidate Cheryl Patterson who had campaigned on a platform of returning Enid to “normalcy” and appears to have defeated Blevins by a 20-point margin, or 268 votes.

For the full story, click here:

In a new interview on Jimmy Fallon, Hillary Clinton told voters who are upset over Joe Biden and Donald Trump being the two presidential choices to “get over yourself”.

Clinton, who ran against Trump in 2016, said:

“It’s kind of like, one is old and effective and compassionate, has a heart and really cares about people. And one is old and has been charged with 91 felonies.”

She went on to add:

“I don’t understand why this is even a hard choice. Really, I don’t understand it … Hopefully, people will realize what’s at stake because it’s an existential question. What kind of country we’re going to have? What kind of democracy we’re going to have. People who blow that off are not paying attention because it’s not like Trump, his enablers, his empowerers, his allies are not telling us what they want to do. I mean, they’re pretty clear about what kind of country they want.”

The day so far

Trump Media went public last week, boosting the former president’s wealth as he deals with civil judgments and legal fees connected to his criminal indictments. But the business almost didn’t make it, and had to be rescued two years ago by a businessman with connections to Russia and a checkered past, the Guardian’s Hugo Lowell reports:

Donald Trump’s social media company Trump Media managed to go public last week only after it had been kept afloat in 2022 by emergency loans provided in part by a Russian-American businessman under scrutiny in a federal insider-trading and money-laundering investigation.

The former US president stands to gain billions of dollars – his stake is currently valued at about $4bn – from the merger between Trump Media and Technology Group and the blank-check company Digital World Acquisition Corporation, which took the parent company of Truth Social public.

But Trump Media almost did not make it to the merger after regulators opened a securities investigation into the merger in 2021 and caused the company to burn through cash at an extraordinary rate as it waited to get the green light for its stock market debut.

The situation led Trump Media to take emergency loans, including from an entity called ES Family Trust, which opened an account with Paxum Bank, a small bank registered on the Caribbean island of Dominica that is best known for providing financial services to the porn industry.

Through leaked documents, the Guardian has learned that ES Family Trust operated like a shell company for a Russian-American businessman named Anton Postolnikov, who co-owns Paxum Bank and has been a subject of a years-long joint federal criminal investigation by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) into the Trump Media merger.

Independent presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr walks back saying Biden ‘much worse threat to democracy’ than Trump

Shifting now to a completely different country, Taiwan is recovering from the strongest earthquake to hit the island in 25 years.

We have a live blog dedicated to covering this developing story, and you can read it here:

Americans may not be able to agree on who they want as president, but an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll released today shows they generally agree on what it means to be a citizen of the country.

The major area of disagreement is over the right to bear arms, the survey finds. It also shows a worryingly small number of people believe the country’s democracy is functioning well.

But the rest of the findings are comparatively reassuring. Here’s more, from the AP:

The poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that about 9 in 10 U.S. adults say the right to vote, the right to equal protection under the law and the right to privacy are extremely important or very important to the United States’ identity as a nation. The survey also found that 84% feel the same way about the freedom of religion.

The results, which included perspectives on a number of different freedoms and rights, have only small variances between Republicans and Democrats except on the right to bear arms, which Republicans are more likely to see as core to the nation’s identity. The overall findings are striking because they come at a time of extreme partisanship when political agreements seem rare and concerns are heightened over the potential for violence during a volatile presidential election year.

“If you get a bunch of normal people at random and put them in a room together and chat about issues, there’s a lot more convergence than you might imagine,” said Michael Albertus, a political science professor at the University of Chicago.

A more pessimistic assessment of the country was reflected in another finding — that only about 3 in 10 Americans believe the nation’s democracy is functioning well. About half say the U.S. is a poorly functioning democracy, while 14% say the U.S. is not a democracy.

The tension between the broad consensus on the country’s fundamental values and discontent with how well its form of government is working is not a surprise, experts say.

“Part of it is really our leaders are not reflecting the electorate, and they behave in a way that’s much more polarized than what the electorate is,” said Lilliana Mason, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University.

Another poll released today from Gallup shows that about a third of Americans each think only Donald Trump, or only Joe Biden, would perform well as president.

As for the remaining third, they believe neither man will do a good job, Gallup finds.

As you can see from the precise breakdown, Trump has the slight edge in this survey, with 35% preferring only him, compared with 30% for Biden. The group that likes neither man comes in at 29%.

Perhaps most relevant to Biden’s re-election prospects is the poll’s finding that those who say only Biden would make a good president is six percentage points lower than it was in 2020, while the other metrics are about the same.

Donald Trump is once again under a gag order, this time in his New York criminal case over making hush money payments. But will it matter? The Guardian’s Cameron Joseph reports that it probably will not, at least when it comes to the topic of death threats. Here’s what he has to say in the Trump on Trial newsletter, which you can sign up for here:

When Judge Juan Merchan issued a gag order last week to bar former president Donald Trump from attacking potential witnesses and others involved in his pending hush-money trial in New York, he left open a loophole that Trump jumped to exploit.

The former president immediately went on the attack against Merchan’s own daughter, falsely accusing her of posting social media content that called for Trump to be jailed.

Merchan’s original gag order had covered potential trial witnesses, jurors, district attorney Alvin Bragg’s staff and Merchan’s staff while excluding the prosecutor and the judge – but hadn’t explicitly included Merchan’s and Bragg’s family members.

Merchan responded by expanding the gag order on Monday to cover their families, writing that Trump’s attacks on his daughter were part of a broader pattern of attacking family members of the judges and attorneys involved in his cases that “serves no legitimate purpose. It merely injects fear in those assigned or called to participate in the proceedings, that not only they, but their family members as well, are ‘fair game’ for Defendant’s vitriol.”

That pattern has played out in case after case – and if the past is prologue, his supporters will take it one step further. When Trump attacks those involved in his cases, death threats soon follow.

Donald Trump also campaigned yesterday in Grand Rapids, Michigan, bringing his anti-immigrant message to a city where an undocumented man is accused of murder.

During his speech, the former president said he had spoken to “some of [the] family” of murder victim Ruby Garcia. Local broadcaster WOOD reports that did not happen. Here’s more:

“He did not speak with any of us, so it was kind of shocking seeing that he had said that he had spoke with us, and misinforming people on live TV,” Ruby Garcia’s sister, Mavi Garcia, told Target 8.

Mavi Garcia, the family spokesperson, said neither Trump nor anybody from his campaign has contacted her or anybody in her immediate family. She said her family is close and she would know if that had happened.

“It was shocking. I kind of stopped watching it. I’d only seen up to that, after I heard a couple of misinformations he said, I just stopped watching it,” Mavi Garcia said.

Trump spent some of his speech on Tuesday focusing on immigration, turning to the March 22 murder of 25-year-old Ruby Garcia. Court records show Brandon Ortiz-Vite, who was in the U.S. illegally, has confessed to killing her and dumping her along US-131 in Grand Rapids.

Donald Trump has lately been doing some campaigning of his own, including yesterday in Wisconsin, where the Guardian’s Alice Herman reports he held a rally and railed against undocumented migrants:

On Wisconsin’s presidential primary election day, Donald Trump made his first campaign stop in the state, where he railed against so-called “migrant crime” and doubled down on false election claims.

“We won in 2016 – we did much better in 2020, hate to say it, we did a hell of a lot better,” the former president told the roaring crowd, nodding to the disproven and unfounded “rigging” numerous times during his speech.

“We will throw out the sick political class that hates us,” he continued later. “We will route the fake news media, we will drain the swamp and we will liberate our country from these tyrants and villains once and for all.”

Hours earlier, the rainy weather in Green Bay had turned sludgy, icy and painful as gusts of wind blew the precipitation sideways. It did not stop thousands of Trump supporters from thronging there for hours, forming a parade that snaked up and away from the venue and over the bridge crossing the Fox River two blocks away.

Trump is, according to most polling, fighting for his life in Wisconsin, a state he lost to Joe Biden four years ago. But one would never know that in the KI Convention Center, where his red and white and sequined supporters gathered to hear him speak for the first time this campaign season.

“I personally like that he’s unashamed,” said Ethan Nielsen, an 18-year-old who attended the rally with his father as he waited in line. “He believes what he believes and he doesn’t go back on what he says.”

Biden campaign touts busy March spent engaging voters, raising funds

Biden campaign’s hopes for turnaround hampered by new poll showing Trump leading in swing states