Trump news today: Nikki Haley calls former president ‘diminished’ and ‘unhinged’

Donald Trump has doubled down after his shocking comments about leaving European members of Nato to defend themselves against Russia were widely condemned.

Could somebody please inform our uninformable President that NATO has to pay their bills! They are right now paying a small fraction of what we are for the Disaster in Ukraine which, if we had a real President, would never have happened. There is probably a $150 Billion difference. They should equalize with the U.S. - FAST! The European Nations, when combined, have approximately the same size Economy as we do. They have the money. PAY UP!

President Joe Biden called Mr Trump’s remarks at a rally over the weekend “dumb”, “shameful”, “dangerous” and “unAmerican”.

Disgraced former congressman and serial fabulist George Santos trolled the Republican party after Democrats claimed his old seat in New York’s third district.

Democratic Rep Tom Souzzi – the man who represented the district before Mr Santos won in 2022 – won back his old seat on Tuesday night in a tight race against Republican nominee Mazi Melesa Pilip.

Mr Souzzi chose not to run for re-election in 2022, instead mounting a failed primary campaign to be the Democratic nominee for governor, which he lost to incumbent Governor Kathy Hochul.

Gustaf Kilander has the story:

Fox host Shannon Bream sparred with Arkansas senator Tom Cotton on Sunday over whether the GOP had handed Joe Biden and Democrats a messaging victory by bowing to Donald Trump’s wishes and killing a bipartisan piece of immigration legislation negotiated in the Senate.

John Bowden has the story.

Republican senator minority leader Mitch McConnell has found his voice and denounced Trump’s threat to violate the Nato treaty after initially refusing to comment on the matter over the weekend.

John Bowden has this one.

In an interview with NBC’s Today show, Nikki Haley defended her past support for Donald Trump while offering some of her bluntest criticism of him yet, telling Craig Melvin of NBC News that the former president is “more diminished than he was”.

The former UN ambassador has long made the need for generational change a centrepiece of her campaign for the Republican Party presidential nomination, taking shots at both Mr Trump and President Joe Biden regarding their age.

When challenged as to how her criticism of the former president stacks up against the fact she was part of his administration, Ms Haley said: “During the time that I was in the administration, I called him out every single time.”

“If something was wrong — I had a conversation with him about Charlottesville, I had a conversation about something that he would say about women, I had a conversation with him about multiple things.

“The problem now is he is not the same person he was in 2016,” she continued. “He is unhinged; he is more diminished than he was, just like Joe Biden’s more diminished than what he was.

“We have to see this for what it is,” Ms Haley added. “This is a fact: He is now saying things that don't make sense.”

Going further with her criticism of the 81-year-old incumbent president and the 77-year-old former commander-in-chief, she said: “You've got Joe Biden, where the special counsel said he was diminished, and he's not the Joe Biden he was two years ago.”

Continuing, she said: “You've got a Donald Trump who's unhinged, and he's more unhinged than he ever was. And why are we settling for that when the country is in disarray and the world is on fire?

“We don't want these two old men running. We want someone who's going to go and fight for us and work for us, with no drama, no vendettas.”

The former ambassador has been focused on trying to break through the Trump-dominated primary with the next state up being her home state of South Carolina, where she served as a popular governor for two terms.

“We're going to be competitive in South Carolina, then we're headed to Michigan, then we're headed to Super Tuesday,” she said, before acknowledging calls from Mr Trump and some others in the Republican Party to drop out, thereby handing the former president the nomination.

“We don't pick kings. We don't do coronations. We have a democracy where people vote,” Ms Haley said. “Why would I get out as long as we keep it competitive?”

The Never Trump Republicans obviously enjoyed being branded “perverts” by their nemesis on Truth Social the other night and have wasted no time in recirculating the ad that so infuriated him.

...sort of.

No, just another early morning all-caps rant.

Perhaps the former president is finally realising that he is only four years younger than the incumbent, as Nikki Haley has been stressing.

Donald Trump has hit out at New York Republican candidate Mazi Pilip, branding her a “very foolish woman” for not appealing to his MAGA brand – after she lost the race for George Santos’s former seat to Democrat Tom Suozzi.

Mr Suozzi won the special election in the Big Apple’s 3rd congressional district on Tuesday night, which comprises eastern Queens and the Long Island suburbs of Nassau County.

The Democrat picked up 53.9 per cent of the vote to Ms Pilip’s 46.1 per cent.

Joe Sommerlad has the story:

Ocasio-Cortez stuck up for Joe Biden on CNN last night, the young progressive significantly backing a man with whom she has not always seen eye-to-eye “one on most successful presidents in modern American history.”