Trump calls Colorado ballot ruling ‘a sad day in America’: Live

Domingo Garcia, national president of the League of Latin American Citizens, has told Politico that the Republican’s recent nasty comments are, at the very least, Hitler-adjacent.

“Donald Trump’s remarks in recent days accusing immigrants of ‘poisoning the blood of America’ are reminiscent of the language of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime,” he said in a statement Tuesday afternoon.

“Trump’s words very intentionally create hatred of the other and are nothing more than fear-mongering. They play to the lowest and most sinister human emotions to incite hatred and cause harm or worse to innocent men, women, and children.”

Joining him in lashing out was Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, who warned: “We have seen this kind of toxic rhetoric inspire real-world acts of violence in places like Pittsburgh and El Paso.

“It should have no place in our politics, period. America is stronger as a pluralistic society that welcomes immigrants.”

But don’t worry Trump fans, Ohio senator JD Vance has been standing up for him.

“First of all, he didn’t say immigrants were poisoning the blood of this country. He said illegal immigrants were poisoning the blood of this country, which is objectively and obviously true to anybody who looks at the statistics about fentanyl overdoses,” he huffed, according to The Hill, insisting the ex-president had really been talking about the opioid crisis. Ingenious!

“Why do you think that Donald Trump’s language is targeted at the blood of the immigrants and not at the blood of the American citizens who are being poisoned by the fentanyl problem. This is ridiculous. If you watch the speech in context and look at what’s going on, it’s obvious that he was talking about the very clear fact that the blood of Americans is being poisoned by a drug epidemic.

“To take that comment and then to immediately assume that he’s talking about immigrants as Adolf Hitler was talking about Jews is preposterous. You guys need to wake up… It’s an absurd question. It’s an absurd framing.”

The Republican’s campaign team rarely misses an opportunity to turn adversity into lucrative advantage and wasted little time yesterday (barely more than an hour, I’m told) before using the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision as its latest pretext for firing out another round of begging letters.

A freaked-out Donald Trump has reacted rather badly to the news that he has been removed from the Colorado ballot, raging in an oddly indirect fashion about his woes in a string of posts to Truth Social this morning.

Gustaf Kilander has been scrolling through.

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“I pledge to *withdraw* from the Colorado GOP primary unless Trump is also allowed to be on the state’s ballot, and I demand that Ron DeSantis, Chris Christie, and Nikki Haley to do the same immediately – or else they are tacitly endorsing this illegal maneuver which will have disastrous consequences for our country.”

So says the Republican outsider in a long-winded post to X, attempting to make the front-runner’s cause his own.

Let’s see if the other runners and riders take the bait.

In the meantime, here’s Kelly Rissman on some of the ridicule Vivek’s gesture has attracted.

Here’s a little more context on an increasingly appalling saga as Trump predictably refuses to backdown.

The super PAC supporting Trump’s 2024 campaign has launched a television ad targeting Nikki Haley, a move her side says is a signal that the former president’s allies are worried about her.

The ad, which debuted on Tuesday, marks the first such effort by either Trump or the groups supporting him to take Haley on directly.

The spot from Make America Great Again, Inc. argues that, as South Carolina governor, Haley flip-flopped over her support for a gas tax, showing clips of State of the State addresses in which she opposed, then called for, such a measure.

“New Hampshire can’t afford Nikki ‘High Tax’ Haley, a narrator says in the ad.

Holden Culotta first caught the politics bug as a 15-year-old during the 2016 presidential election.

Four years later, he registered as a Democrat, even though he never felt at home in either the blue or red teams, and volunteered for Andrew Yang’s 2020 insurgency campaign.

After getting a taste of retail politics while canvassing for the Yang campaign in Iowa and New Hampshire, Mr Culotta ditched the Democrats to join Mr Yang’s centrist Forward Party in 2021.

When Robert F Kennedy Jr announced in April he was running against Joe Biden in the Democratic primary, Mr Culotta was drawn to the famous political scion’s promise of upending Washington DC’s tribal politics and reluctantly rejoined the party.

Now an unofficial surrogate for RFK Jr’s independent campaign, the 22-year-old University of Vermont political science student told The Independent that he had always felt a “gut level pull” towards a third-party alternative.

“People my age are fed up,” Mr Culotta said. “We’re completely disillusioned with the two-party system.”

Recent polls from the New York Times and Quinnipiac University have shown RFK Jr with the highest third party support since Ross Perot in 1992.

Bevan Hurley examines his peculiar appeal to Gen Z.

Here’s a selection of opinion about yesterday’s news from Trump loyalists.

It’s fair to say they don’t entirely agree with the majority ruling.

Was Alabama Republican senator Tommy Tuberville as appalled as everyone else by Trump’s hateful attack on immigrants?

Far from it.

“I’m mad he wasn’t tougher than that because you’re seeing what’s happening on the border? We’re being overrun,” he told our own Eric Garcia this week.

Good grief.