Trump news today: Giuliani and Lindell attend Trump’s new year party even as his own children skip it

A profile on the rising Republican in The New York Times reports that third-ranking House Republican Elise Stefanik has earned a reputation for her diligence “in advancing the party’s message” and her “unabashedly transactional” relationships to gain support as she advances in the lower chamber of Congress.

But sources close to the former president told The Times that any stories casting her as a “potential running mate [to Trump] are regarded as clumsy plants by her own team, and inspire bemusement and mockery.”

“Trump liked her, they said, and liked watching her defend him. But even he didn’t trust her,” according to the report.

The Times chronicles the rapid evolution of Ms Stefanik, a staunch supporter of the former president, from a relative moderate to a prominent figure on the GOP’s far-right flank with a self-described “ultra-MAGA” agenda, adopting Mr Trump’s baseless narrative of election fraud and embracing conspiracy theories that appeal to a reactionary base.

Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson, who has not yet made a decision about entering the 2024 presidential race, says Trump is disqualified from office after the events of 6 January, 2021.

He told ABC’s This Week on 1 January that the Republican Party and Republican National Committee should “move beyond” Trump in 2024.

“I do not believe that Donald Trump should be the next president of the United States,” he said. “I think January 6 really disqualifies him for the future. And so we move beyond that.”

He said it would be a “mistake” for the RNC to force candidates to unify behind a singular candidate, if Trump ultimately wins the nomination.

“Let’s not put up obstacles to one unified party,” he said.

Donald Trump donated nothing to the Department of Health and Human Services during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, despite claiming publicly to have done so, his tax returns revealed on Friday.

The picture painted by the recently released documents is crystal clear: He claimed zero charitable donations throughout 2020, meaning that his tax burden was not reduced at all (at least in that regard). He would still go on to pay $0 in income tax for the year in total.

If his returns are accurate, they would directly contradict a statement made by his chief White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, in March of 2020.

Adam Kinzinger, one of two Republicans on a House select committee investigating the attack on the US Capitol, blamed GOP leader Kevin McCarthy for giving Donald Trump a political lifeline after the insurrection, opening the door for “crazy elements” in the soon-to-be Republican-controlled House of Representatives.

“He is the reason Donald Trump is still a factor,” Mr Kinzinger told CNN on 1 January. “He is the reason that some of the crazy elements of the House still exist.”

The release of Trump’s tax records show that the former president had foreign bank accounts in China, the UK, Ireland and St Maarten during his presidency, and in his first year in the White House paid more foreign tax than US.

The sheer complexity of the former property mogul’s business empire means it will take time to pore over the nearly 6,000 pages of figures in detail but what is immediately clear is that he actively pursued legal but creative accounting strategies to ensure his federal tax contributions were kept as low as possible.

While Mr Trump paid $641,931 in federal income tax in 2015, he paid just $750 in 2016 and 2017 and none whatsoever in 2020.

He did pay almost $1m in 2018 and $133,445 in 2019 but, as a proportion of his earnings, those are small amounts.

The Independent’s Joe Sommerlad explains how he did it.

George Santos is scheduled to take office this week as a newly elected Republican congressman from New York, joining a new GOP majority in the House of Representatives.

But he will be entering office facing a wave of allegations that he has fabricated a bulk of his resume and filled his profile with bogus claims about his life and career. Questions about his employment history, personal finances, allegations of fraud and whether he lied about the death of his own mother have only continued to mount in recent weeks.

One of these allegations includes a 2008 claim that Mr Santos, then 19 years old, stole a checkbook and was charged with making fraudulent purchases in Brazil.

The Independent’s Eric Garcia breaks down some of the highlights from hundreds of pages of long-anticipated tax documents involving the former president.

We learned Trump did not make any charitable contributions in his final year as president, despite his pledge, had foreign bank accounts while in office, and claimed taxable income or losses in China, Israel, Canada and other foreign countries.

A statue of the late congressman and prominent civil rights figure John Lewis will replace the space where a confederate monument once stood in Georgia.

A 16-ft-tall statue will be erected in the congressional district in Decatur that Lewis represented for 17 terms. Previously in that location, there was a Confederate Obelisk standing there for more than 100 years until it was removed in 2020.

In 2010, Trump’s eldest son started Titan Atlas Manufacturing, which provided cast panels for prefabricated homes. But the company fell deeply into debt by 2017. That led to the former president setting up a company called D B Pace to take over.

The release of his tax returns show that the president suffered a $1m loss bailing out his son’s beleaguered venture.