Trump claims AI is making him look ‘bad and pathetic’ ahead of town hall: Live

During a rally in Ankeny, Iowa on Saturday, the leading candidate for the 2024 Republican nomination for president justified his demands to “go into” cities with the same baseless allegations that surrounding the 2020 presidential election.

He falsely claimed that “they cheated like hell, they know it, and you’ll never find out all the ways but we don’t need all the ways,” adding that the “most important part of what’s coming up is to guard the vote.”

An appeals court judge has rejected Donald Trump’s request for a fast-tracked appeal of his gag order in his New York fraud trial, days before he is scheduled to return to the witness stand before his attorneys bring their case to a close.

The latest decision effectively guarantees that Trump will remain under a gag order through the final days of his defence team’s presentations in a civil trial that could imperil the family’s vast real estate empire.

Donald Trump took to Truth Social on Monday night to accuse his rivals of using artificial intelligence in attack ads against him.

“The perverts and losers at the failed and once disbanded Lincoln Project, and others, are using A.I.(Artificial Intelligence) in their Fake television commercials in order to make me look as bad and pathetic as Crooked Joe Biden, not an easy thing to do,” he wrote.

“FoxNews shouldn’t run these ads, just as low ratings CNN & MSDNC will not, under any circumstances, run negative ads on Biden or the Democrats. They are, after all, in-kind campaign contributors to the Dems!”

There is no known evidence of AI being used in attack ads.

Ahead of the fourth GOP debate in Alabama, Donald Trump is in his most comfortable polling position yet.

The ex-president remains atop the GOP field in a major way, having consolidated support from six in 10 Republican voters nationally according to a NewsNation/Decision Desk HQ poll released on Monday.

Trump is skipping another debate, leaving only three candidates left on the stage

Four candidates for the GOP’s nomination for president have qualified to appear at the next primary debate scheduled for Wednesday night.

Trump is among them, but he won’t be there, as usual. Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy will be the only three candidates on the stage.

Trump’s call to his supporters to “guard” and “watch” ballot counting in cities with large Black populations has raised alarms among elections officials and voting rights advocates bracing for more threats to elections fuelled by his bogus narrative of widespread fraud.

“The most important part of what’s coming up is to guard the vote, and you should go into Detroit, and you should go into Philadelphia, and you should go into some of these places – Atlanta – and you should go into some of these places, and we gotta watch those votes when they come in,” he told supporters in Iowa on Saturday.

He then falsely claimed that ballots are “shoved around in wheelbarrows and dumped on the floor”.

The president of the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund called his comments “lawless intimidation,” and a grim reminder of 2020.

Democratic officials and Joe Biden are leaping on Donald Trump’s revived threats to dismantle the Affordable Care Act.

The Independent’s Eric Garcia writes:

Last week, Robert De Niro criticised Trump from the stage of the Gotham Awards, delivering a stinging rebuke from the stage with what he said was the unedited version of his remarks that were previously cut off from the event.

Trump “can’t hide his soul,” he said. “He attacks the weak, destroys the gifts of nature and shows his disrespect for example using Pocahontas as a slur.”

Days later, Trump fired back on his Truth Social: “Robert De Niro, whose acting talents have greatly diminished, with his reputation now shot, must even use a teleprompter for his foul and disgusting language, so disrespectful to our Country.”

North Dakota’s Governor Doug Burgum ended his campaign for the presidency on Monday ahead of the fourth Republican primary debate in Alabama.

Burgum, 67, poured millions of his own money into his presidential bid but after an initial meetup of the candidates in August failed to reach the polling requirements necessary for attendance at successive GOP primary debates. He sought to run on his record as governor, but had little name recogniton at the national level.

His departure from the race for the GOP’s 2024 nomination for president winnows a field that Donald Trump hopes to dominate.