Trump mocks Haley as key donor deserts after South Carolina loss: Live

The former South Carolina governor vowed to fight on to Super Tuesday on 5 March, as she has consistently done, but things really are starting to look beyond hopeless for her now, particularly with high-profile donors beginning to desert.

You can see more from her latest concession speech below.

Let’s recap another big weekend in Trumpworld.

The GOP front-runner delivered a rambling victory speech after sewing up his fourth straight primary win in South Carolina on Saturday night, deliberately neglecting to even mention rival Nikku Haley as he turned his sights on Joe Biden instead.

“We’re going to be up here on 5 November, and we’re going to look at Joe Biden,” Mr Trump told his audience.

“He’s destroying our country and we’re gonna say ‘Joe, you’re fired. Get out. Get out, Joe. You’re fired.’”

Here he is, courtesy of IndyTV.

Shane Gillis and the mighty James Austin Johnson were both impersonating Trump on NBC’s Saturday Night Live in a trailer for a spoof new movie version of 1992’s White Men Can’t Jump (which really was remade last year) courtesy of “Newsmax Studios”.

Donald Trump has wasted on time in deriding Nikki Haley, his rival for the Republican presidential nomination, after Americans for Prosperity Action (AFP Action), the political wing of the conservative donor network led by billionaire Charles Koch, announced it would no longer be supporting her campaign after her defeat in South Carolina on Saturday.

APF senior adviser Emily Seidel said in a memo yesterday: “With the South Carolina presidential primary this weekend and the Senate engagement really heating up, it’s time to take stock of where we are and — as we always do — make sure we’re optimising our resources for maximum impact towards our goals.“

Trump relished the news, writing on Truth Social that “Charles Koch and his group got played for suckers right from the beginning” and demoting Haley from “Birdbrain” to “Braindead”.

He has otherwise been busy engaging in the usual messaging dump of favourable polling and issuing boilerplate whines about his legal problems.

Gustaf Kilander reports from Washington, DC:

At least one member of the Republican National Committee is working to slow Donald Trump‘s attempted takeover of the organization by pushing to keep the committee neutral until Trump is officially the presidential nominee and avoid picking up his legal bills.

Two draft resolutions are being circulated by Henry Barbour, a national committeeman from Mississippi, for consideration at the RNC‘s upcoming March meeting in Houston. Barbour said support for the resolutions among RNC members is growing but he does not yet have the needed cosponsors, and any resolutions would ultimately be nonbinding.

The effort comes after Trump last week publicly called to replace the RNC’s current leaders and install one of his senior campaign advisors and his daughter-in-law Lara Trump in top roles. Lara Trump suggested earlier in the week that GOP voters would support the committee paying her father-in-law’s legal bills as he faces a raft of criminal and civil indictments.

Donald Trump claimed he is a “proud political dissident” in his CPAC speech just days after he compared himself to Russian leader Alexei Navalny, who recently died in a Siberian prison under unclear circumstances.

Mr Trump said in National Harbor, Maryland on Saturday that “Joe [Biden] and his henchmen have you trapped and it’s an express train barreling toward servitude and to ruin – it’s moving at a speed that Joe doesn’t understand because Joe … I don’t think he knows what the hell’s going on, to be honest with you, but he’s surrounded by some very bad fascists”.

“A vote for Trump is your ticket back to freedom. It’s your passport out of tyranny,” he argued. “And it’s your only escape from Joe Biden and his gang’s fast track to hell. And in many ways, we’re living in hell right now.”