Trump attacks judges in his criminal cases before first election test: Live

Donald Trump has hosted massive rallies in Iowa, speaking to hundreds and sometimes thousands of people at once. If fewer than 400 attended, it was considered a small event.

The ex-president looks likely to win Monday’s contest handily having done very little, if any, of the small-scale campaigning that used to be required to win. Iowa is no longer universally seen as the stepping stone it once was.

Eric Garcia and Gustaf Kilander explain how Mr Trump upended the state’s caucus system:

In a typical presidential election year, candidates will spend the 11 months leading up to election day shaking hands and kissing babies at rallies as the primaries unfold.

Instead, the ex-president will be forced to juggle his campaign for the White House while also defending himself in federal and state courts in four different trials that are currently set to occur between January and May.

Kicking off with E Jean Carroll’s damages trial on the same day as the Iowa caucus to his federal classified documents trial one month before the GOP convention, Mr Trump’s jam-packed schedule seemingly leaves little time for him to socialise outside of a courtroom.

How Mr Trump will manage his campaign while convincing voters he’s innocent of it all – including alleged efforts to overturn previous elections in his favour – remains to be seen.

The former president’s lawsuit against the newspaper and its reporters as well as his niece Mary Trump accused them of an “insidious plot” fuelled by a “personal vendetta” to improperly obtain tax records for a series of stories published in 2018.

Last year, New York County Supreme Court Judge Robert R Reed dismissed the case against the newspaper, finding that the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation was clearly protected by the First Amendment.

During the town hall, Mr Trump hinted that he has made his mind up about who to tap to be his running mate – but refused to spill the details to hosts Martha MacCallum and Bret Baier.

Iowa Republican Gov Kim Reynolds has been using an X account — unassociated with her official position — to roast former president Donald Trump.

The New York Times first reported the existence of the burner account, which has since been taken down. The Independent has reached out to Ms Reynolds’ office.

“When there’s a crash, I hope it’s in the next 12 months because I don’t want to be Herbert Hoover,” Mr Trump said, during a Lindell TV interview with Lou Dobbs on Monday.

The comment alluded to the 31st US president, who succeeded Calvin Coolidge at the tail-end of the Roaring Twenties before swiftly being hit by the Wall Street Crash in the autumn of 1929 and then voted out of office in 1932 as the Great Depression hit.

In his own video, posted on Thursday, Mr Biden blasted Mr Trump’s own record in office.

Former president Donald Trump on Wednesday again vowed to seize dictatorial powers if elected to the nation’s highest office once more but attempted to walk back his frequently made promise to exact retribution on his political enemies during a second term in the White House.

The disgraced former president, who is currently facing more than 90 felony charges in four separate jurisdictions and is scheduled to go on trial in March for attempting a coup to keep himself in office after losing the 2020 election, promised to spend his first day of a second term ruling as an autocrat during a town hall broadcast on Fox News ahead of the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses.

In a searing post on his social media platform Truth Social on Saturday, the former president described judge Lewis A Kaplan as “a bad person and a worse judge”, and accused him of suffering from “Trump derangment syndrome”.

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