Trump news – latest: Donald Trump suffers Mar-a-Lago defeat as he claims Jan 6 rioters are treated ‘unconstitutionally’

The backlash over former president Donald Trump’s pre-Thanksgiving meal with antisemitic rapper Kanye West and white nationalist Nick Fuentes has led the twice-impeached ex-president’s aides to revive a 2020-era measure used to keep him from embarrassing himself while Mr Trump is reportedly blaming the disgraced musician for the negative press.

According to a source who spoke to NBC News, Mr Trump has directed his anger at Mr West, who just two years ago waged a third-party presidential campaign aimed at siphoning votes off from Joe Biden to help the then-president win reelection.

“He tried to f*** me. He’s crazy. He can’t beat me,” the ex-president said, referring to Mr West’s stated intention to mount another campaign for the presidency with an eye towards the 2024 general election.

According to reports, it was Mr West who brought Mr Fuentes, a Holocaust denier and white nationalist who has long been one of Mr Trump’s most vocal supporters, to the ex-president’s Mar-a-Lago club last week.

Donald Trump promised to build his presidential campaign around the rioters who stormed the Capitol on 6 January, while claiming that the people facing charges and prison time over the violent insurrection are being treated “unconstitutionally”.

“What they’ve done to torment people and go after people like never before, I don’t think anything like this has ever happened in our country before certainly not to this extent,” said the former president in a video screened on Thursday night at a fundraiser for families of those charged in attacking the Capitol. “And you look at other groups which have done terrible things and virtually nothing happened to them. So it’s a very unfair situation and we’re going to be as you know looking into it and talking about it very, very strongly in the coming weeks months and over the next period of a year, year and half, during the campaign.”

“People have been treated unconstitutionally, in my opinion, and very, very unfairly, and we’re going to get to the bottom of it,” he said. The country, he cautioned, “is going communist.”

This week, the Senate voted to pass the Respect for Marriage Act to officially codify protections for same-sex and interracially-married couples across the country. It came thanks to months of hard negotiating by a bipartisan coterie, including Democrats Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, as well as Republicans Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Rob Portman of Ohio and Susan Collins of Maine.

Unsurprisingly, every Democrat present voted for the legislation (Senator Raphael Warnock was back in Georgia fighting Herschel Walker to secure a full term). But along with the three who negotiated it, more than a few Republicans present voted to codify same-sex marriage: Joni Ernst of Iowa, Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, Roy Blunt of Missouri, Richard Burr of North Carolina, Mitt Romney of Utah, Todd Young of Indiana; and Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan.

That breakdown is incredibly telling. Of the ten Republicans who voted for the legislation, three – Mr Portman, Mr Blunt and Mr Burr – are retiring at the end of this Congress. In these times, all of them count as what some today would consider “normal Republicans”.

Republicans have attacked Mr Trump’s decision to meet with Mr Fuentes, who has been a leading voice in the so-called “Stop the Steal” moment, and who attended the now notorious far right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.

“There is no room in the Republican Party for antisemitism or white supremacy,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. “And anyone meeting with people advocating that point of view, in my judgment, are highly unlikely to ever be elected president of the United States.”

House minority leader Kevin McCarthy said: “I don’t think anybody should be spending any time with Nick Fuentes. He has no place in this Republican Party. I think President Trump came out four times and condemned him and didn’t know who he was.”

Former vice president Mike Pence, who is another possible challenger in 2024, voiced a similar criticism.

“Trump was wrong to give a white nationalist, an antisemite and Holocaust denier a seat at the table,” Mr Pence said.

“And I think he should apologise for it, and he should denounce those individuals and their hateful rhetoric without qualification.”

Donald Trump announced a new run for the White House in 2024 on Tuesday evening, unmoved by some disastrous midterm elections results in which many of his most high-profile candidates lost their races.

While the Republican Party had been loudly predicting a “red wave” on Election Day, flooding the House of Representatives and Senate with conservatives in order to effectively disable Joe Biden’s legislative agenda, what actually happened was less a wave, more a light splash.

The Democrats instead retained control of the upper chamber of Congress while the GOP appears likely to obtain only a tiny majority in the House, sparking an outbreak of acrimonious finger-pointing, excuses and scapegoating among right-leaning lawmakers. Marjorie Taylor Greene has talked of a “civil war” erupting between traditional Republicans and the Maga movement, with much of the blame laid squarely at Mr Trump’s Palm Beach door.

Donald Trump once again finds himself in hot water – this time even incurring the disapproval of his fellow Republicans – for sitting down to dinner at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Palm Beach, Florida, with the increasingly wayward Kanye West and the rapper’s “campaign adviser” Nick Fuentes.

Mr West, an acclaimed rapper now going by the name Ye who recently torpedoed his music career by launching into a string of bizarre antisemitic rants on social media, causing his commercial sponsors to desert him in droves, has previously sought out Mr Trump at Trump Tower in New York City and at the White House during his presidency on a whim.

Now plotting a hopelessly unlikely presidential run in 2024 – theoretically pitching him against Mr Trump – West again sought out the one-term president and former luxury real estate magnate, this time for advice on that project.

They sat down to dinner at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday 22 November with another man in attendance, the notorious white nationalist and Holocaust-denier Mr Fuentes, whom Mr Trump has subsequently claimed not to have previously known or recognised.

Mr Trump has sought to brush off the controversy over the visit to Mar-a-Lago of the 24-year-old Nick Fuentes, a very popular livestreamer and YouTuber who often expresses views that are racist and antisemitic. He was accompanied by Kanye West, who has said several times he is suffering from mental health issues.

“I had never heard of the man,” Mr Trump told Fox News, of Mr Fuentes. “I had no idea what his views were, and they weren’t expressed at the table in our very quick dinner, or it wouldn’t have been accepted.”

The former president added that West, who has changed his name to Ye wanted to speak with him for “advice”, saying he had heard the artist and supporter had “had difficulties, including financial difficulties”.

A former elections manager who prosecutors say assisted in a security breach of voting equipment in a Colorado county pleaded guilty on Wednesday under a plea agreement that requires her to testify against her former boss.

Sandra Brown is one of two employees accused of helping Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters allow a copy of a hard drive to be made during an update of election equipment last year in search of proof of the false conspiracy theories spun by former President Donald Trump.

Brown, 45, pleaded guilty to attempting to influence a public servant, a felony, and official misconduct, a misdemeanor, but will not be sentenced until right after she testifies at Peters’ trial next year so her performance on the witness stand can be considered.

“There were things going on that I should have questioned and I didn’t,” Brown told Judge Matthew Barrett.

In August, Peters’ chief deputy, Belinda Knisley, also pleaded guilty under a deal that required her to testify against Peters. She only pleaded guilty to misdemeanor counts and was immediately sentenced to two years of unsupervised probation.

Peters gained national prominence by promoting conspiracy theories about voting machines and lost a bid to become the Republican candidate for Colorado’s secretary of state, who oversees elections, earlier this year. She is charged with three counts of attempting to influence a public servant, criminal impersonation, two counts of conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation, one count of identity theft, first-degree official misconduct, violation of duty and failing to comply with the secretary of state.

Closing arguments at the Trump Organization’s criminal tax fraud trial got off to a rocky start Thursday as a lawyer for the company was caught showing jurors portions of witness testimony that had previously been stricken from the official court record.

The tax fraud case is the only trial to arise from the Manhattan district attorney’s three-year investigation of Trump and his business practices.

The Trump Organization’s longtime finance chief, Allen Weisselberg, has admitted that he came up with the long-running scheme on his own, that he did so to save money on his own personal income taxes, and that neither Trump nor Trump’s family knew what he was doing.

Prior to the interruption, Necheles was using excerpts from Weisselberg’s three days of testimony to underscore her argument that the executive was only intending to benefit himself, not the Trump Organization, and that the company shouldn’t be blamed for his transgressions.