Nevada Republican caucus – live: Haley brands primary a ‘scam’ as Trump set to claim all state delegates

Republican strategist Karl Rove has blasted the “lunacy” of the “conspiratorial right” over its bizarre theories that former first lady Michelle Obama would replace Joe Biden as the Democratic Party’s 2024 candidate.

Rove, former deputy chief of staff to George W Bush, was being interviewed by Stuart Varney on Fox Business when the host brought up the idea of Ms Obama replacing the incumbent president on the ticket ahead of November’s election.

Here’s Oliver O’Connell on his response.

It certainly didn’t cost her any delegates but it wasn’t a great look, with late night host Seth Meyers joking on Wednesday night that it revealed the candidate as having “the opposite of momentum”.

Here’s John Bowden on how Team Haley has responded.

With the Iowa caucus have kicked off the 2024 Republican presidential primary season last month, Donald Trump and Nikki Haley are campaigning in the hope of picking up as many delegates as possible to secure the Republican National Committee nomination for the presidency.

Delegates are individuals who represent the majority of voters in their state or district. They can be party leaders, activists, volunteers, legislators or other people who approve of the party’s platform.

Each state is given a specific number of Republican or Democratic delegates.

This year, Republicans have allocated 2,429 delegates.

A candidate needs approximately 1,215 to secure a nomination.

Here’s Ariana Baio to explain further.

The self-help guru has announced she is ending her long-shot run to unseat Joe Biden from the Democratic nomination, which comes as not a huge surprise after she was only able to chalk up two lacklustre primary performances at great expense.

Here she is signing out in typically idiosyncratic fashion.

Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump is expected to cruise to victory in Nevada’s GOP-organised caucus today, where his only challenger is Texas pastor Ryan Binkley, picking up a further 26 delegates and further cementing his dominance in the race to secure the party’s presidential nomination.

However, Trump’s mind is likely to be elsewhere today given that the US Supreme Court will also begin hearing opening arguments on Thursday as it considers whether he should be allowed to remain on 2024 ballot papers at all.

The states of Colorado and Maine have moved to have Trump removed citing Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution, which argues that anyone found to have “engaged in insurrection” after swearing a loyalty oath should not be allowed to return to public office.

The highest court in the land, which has a conservative majority, will now consider whether that applies to Trump in relation to the Capitol riot of 6 January 2021, when his supporters stormed the legislative complex in an attempt to stop the formal certification of the 2020 election results, erroneously believing the vote to have been “rigged” in Joe Biden’s favour, as the then-president and his allies had repeatedly claimed.

Trump is not expected to attend this hearing but will instead stay at his Mar-a-Lago home in Florida before jetting out to Nevada later.

Here’s Ariana Baio on his plans for the day.

Two days after Donald Trump told a news channel that he would be recommending changes at the Republican National Committee, it appears that chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel will be heading for the exit.

The New York Times reported the news on Tuesday evening, as voters in Nevada participated in Democratic and Republican contests that were largely meaningless, albeit for different reasons. President Joe Biden coasted to another victory while Nikki Haley embarrassingly lost a primary – to “none of these candidates” – that would have netted her zero delegates anyway in her race against Donald Trump for the GOP nomination.

One of Ms McDaniel’s former rivals, Vivek Ramaswamy, had publicly called for her firing onstage at a Republican debate before his own departure from the 2024 race.

John Bowden reports:

Twitter had to explain this to Marjorie Taylor Greene:

For the first time in more than two decades, Mexico last year surpassed China as the leading source of goods imported to the United States. The shift reflects the growing tensions between Washington and Beijing as well as US efforts to import from countries that are friendlier and closer to home.

Lawsuits challenging Donald Trump’s eligibility to appear on the 2024 presidential primary ballots have sprung up in several states.

Individuals and left-wing organisations have claimed that Mr Trump violated Section Three of the 14th Amendment – known as the insurrection clause – citing his involvement in the January 6 attack on the US Capitol.

Section Three of the amendment prohibits those who take part in insurrections or aid enemies of the US government from taking office.

To date, formal challenges to Mr Trump’s candidacy have been filed in at least 35 states.

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Republican voters turned out to vote against Nikki Haley in Nevada on Tuesday, delivering the sole remaining challenger to Donald Trump’s bid for the GOP nomination an embarrassing night of headlines.

The night was essentially a worst-case scenario for Ms Haley; her campaign chose not to compete in Nevada’s caucuses, set for Thursday, and instead put Ms Haley up against three rivals who had already departed the primary before Tuesday. The result? Instead of losing to Donald Trump in a contest her team blasted as “rigged”, the former governor found herself finishing second behind “none of these candidates” as vote totals came in.

Her campaign, with apparent knowledge of how the state was trending, reminded reporters in a memo earlier this week that the campaign had not run ads or invested any serious effort in Nevada; Ms Haley herself hasn’t been in the state this year, and has instead focused her energy on campaigning in her home state of South Carolina.

“Nevada is not and has never been our focus,” Haley campaign manager Betsy Ankey had said on Monday. “I’m truly not sure what the Trump team is up to out there but they seem pretty spun up about it.”

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