Trump accused of pressuring Wayne County election officials as Giuliani files for bankruptcy: Live

At a fundraiser in San Franciso in November, Mr Biden slammed Mr Trump’s comments in New Hampshire, where he said he would “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections”.

“There’s a lot of reasons to be against Donald Trump, but damn he shouldn’t be president,” Mr Biden said.

“In just the last few days, Trump has said, if he returns office, he’s gonna go after all those who oppose him and wipe out what he called the ‘vermin’, quote, ‘the vermin in America’ – a specific phrase with a specific meaning,” Mr Biden said.

“It echoes language you heard in Nazi Germany in the ’30s,” Mr Biden said. “And it isn’t even the first time. Trump also recently talked about, quote, ‘the blood of America is being poisoned’ – ‘the blood of America is being poisoned.’ Again, echoes the same phrases used in Nazi Germany.”

Biden campaign spokesperson Ammar Moussa said in a statement at the time that “on a weekend when most Americans were honoring our nation’s heroes, Donald Trump parroted the autocratic language of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini — two dictators many US veterans gave their lives fighting”.

The White House and Mr Biden appear to be using the image of Hitler, the most reviled figure in modern history, to go on the offensive against the former president in an effort to remind voters and the coalition that brought him to power in 2020 of why they ousted Mr Trump in the first place.

The president likes to quote his dad when criticising his predecessor: “Don’t compare me to the Almighty. Compare me to the alternative.”

Mr Biden is telling voters that even if they don’t like him, take a good look at who he’s up against. The Biden campaign appears to want voters to believe that they must re-elect the president, or witness the rise of fascism in America.

Mr Biden’s focus on the fate of global democracy was clear after he entered the White House as he hosted a “Summit for Democracy” within a year of becoming president “to renew democracy at home and confront autocracies abroad”.

But the threats Mr Biden saw in 2020 haven’t gone away. If anything, they have worsened. Mr Putin is more confident than ever that he can outlast the Western world after the less-than-stellar start of his invasion of Ukraine, and Mr Xi recently became the first Chinese leader to begin a third term atop the Chinese Communist Party since the death of Mao.

At home, Mr Trump is going further than ever, bringing his admiration for dictators and strongmen into public view, using the criticism of left-of-centre leaders to whip up his base and attempting to paint himself as borderline messianic, saying again and again that he’s being targeted because he’s standing up for the ordinary American.

Mr Biden has even said that he’s unsure he would run again if he wasn’t facing Mr Trump, whose GOP nomination is seen by most observers as a foregone conclusion.

After the Colorado Supreme Court booted Mr Trump from the state’s ballot this week for his part in the Capitol riot, Mr Biden was asked on Wednesday if Mr Trump is an insurrectionist.

“It’s self-evident. You saw it all. Now whether the 14th Amendment applies, I’ll let the court make that decision. But he certainly supported an insurrection. There’s no question about it. None. Zero,” Mr Biden said.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Viktor Orban in Hungary, the recently ousted Law and Justice Party in Poland, ex-President Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Narendra Modi in India, and most importantly Vladimir Putin of Russia and Xi Jinping of China, are all examples of leaders who have based their leadership on the idea that we are in a new age of strongmen.

Many of them Mr Biden will have known personally from his time as vice president and senator atop the Foreign Relations Committee.

Mr Biden has made clear that the cataclysm that led to his decision to run in 2020 was the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 after which Mr Trump said there were “very fine” people on both sides – both among the counter-protesters and among the violent white supremacists carrying tiki torches and chanting “Jews will not replace us”.

A former high school classmate helped the FBI identify a Minnesota man who was among the crowd that stormed the US Capitol on January 6.

The tipster contacted the FBI a day after the 2021 riot to report that his former high school peer, 43-year-old Martin James Cudo of Lakeville, had participated in the riot, according to court documents viewed by The Independent.

Mr Cudo was subsequently arrested and charged with knowingly entering or remaining in a restricted building without lawful entry, disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building and in a Capitol building and parading, demonstrating or picketing in a Capitol building.

The day after the Capitol riots, the FBI received the tip from the former classmate with a selfie Mr Cudo took inside the Capitol building that he posted on social media, the complaint said.

The FBI later received more information from another person who said he was Mr Cudo’s employer, who also identified him in photographs from the day of the riots.

Mr Cudo was interviewed by the FBI a week after the riots, the document said, after he was identified in the tip-offs and he confessed that he was at the riots and only “realised the trouble he may be in” when he returned to his hotel after the insurrection.

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Less than 24 hours after Donald Trump’s attorneys told the US Supreme Court to reject a fast-tracked consideration of his “presidential immunity” defence, special counsel Jack Smith urged the justices for an “immediate” review and a “definitive” decision.

A filing with the nation’s highest court on Thursday responds to the former president’s attempts to slow down the special counsel’s appeal that asks the justices for the final word on whether he can claim “immunity” from prosecution in a federal election conspiracy case.

The federal judge overseeing the case has rejected those arguments, and Mr Trump has vowed to appeal.

Mr Trump “agrees that the question whether a former President of the United States enjoys absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for a conspiracy to overturn an election, and thereby prevent the lawful winner from taking office, is an issue of great constitutional moment,” prosecutors with Mr Smith’s office wrote in the filing.

But the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican nomination for president is “incorrect” to believe that the nation’s highest court “should wait” to weigh in, they wrote.

“This court’s immediate review of that question is the only way to achieve its timely and definitive resolution,” they added. “The public interest in a prompt resolution of this case favors an immediate, definitive decision by this court. The charges here are of the utmost gravity. This case involves – for the first time in our nation’s history – criminal charges against a former president based on his actions while in office.”

And “not just any actions,” they added.

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The US Supreme Court could determine whether Donald Trump is immune from criminal prosecution for crimes connected to the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, and whether his name can be removed from ballots because of them.

Those two major constitutional questions before the nation’s highest court – where three of the nine justices were appointed by the former president – arrive in the middle of the 2024 race for the presidency, and could have resounding impacts beyond Mr Trump’s campaign.

The Supreme Court is considering whether Mr Trump has “presidential immunity” from charges connected to his attempts to subvert the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, including his failure to stop a mob of his supporters from breaking into the halls of Congress to stop the certification of the results.

His campaign also pledged to go to the Supreme Court following a Colorado ruling that bars him from appearing on 2024 ballots under the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution, which prohibits candidates who “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” from holding public office.

Those questions underscore the massive role that courtrooms have played in Mr Trump’s brutal campaign for the White House in 2024, a campaign that frames the 91 criminal charges, fraud lawsuits and sexual abuse and defamation claims against him as evidence of a conspiracy to keep him away from the presidency. Mr Trump has promised vengeance against his political enemies if he wins another White House term.

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Former president Donald Trump has spent much of 2023 dealing with a mountain of legal battles across the country. Let’s unwrap the details of those legal challenges.

How do the numbers stack up? He is facing or has faced nine separate cases, four trials, one mugshot, and one brutal ruling in Colorado, disqualifying him from the presidency in the state.

How many counts does Donald Trump face? The former president has been charged to the tune of 91 felony counts across numerous criminal cases.

In how many states did the cases concerning him take place? Five: New York, Florida, Colorado, Georgia, and Washington DC.

What’s Mr Trump’s character archetype? “Artist with Real Estate.”

Top artist? Probably Kanye West.

His top-played song? “Justice For All” featuring Mr Trump and the J6 Prison Choir.

Here is a deep dive into Mr Trump’s year in court dealings:

Joe Biden beat Mr Trump by 154,000 votes in Michigan, paving the way for him to win the White House.

Colorado’s secretary of state says she has received “hundreds if not thousands” of threats since a lawsuit was filed challenging Donald Trump’s eligibility to appear on the 2024 presidential election ballot in the state.

“I’ve been concerned about violence and threats of violence since Donald Trump incited the insurrection,” Jena Griswold told HuffPost on Wednesday. “Within three weeks of it being filed, I received 64 death threats and over 900 non-lethal threats of abuse. I stopped counting after that.”

On Tuesday, Colorado’s highest court issued a majority 4-3 ruling finding that the former president is disqualified from appearing on the state’s ballots in 2024 for his role in the violence on 6 January 2021, when a mob of his supporters stormed the seat of American democracy in a bid to overturn the 2020 election.

The case was brought by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) on behalf of six voters who argued that Mr Trump should be barred from ballots under the text of the 14th Amendment, which prohibits anyone who has sworn an oath to uphold the constitution and “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” from holding public office.

Ms Griswold’s office was sued due to her role as Colorado’s chief elections official.

She told The Independent: “I did not file this case. I’m part of this case because I’m the secretary of state.

“So yes, I’m extremely concerned. It just underlines that Donald Trump is a major threat to American democracy, elections and stability,” she said. “He uses threats and intimidation against his political opponents. When he doesn’t win elections, he tries to steal them. He is a dangerous leader for this country.”

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