Trump leads Biden in six swing states, new poll shows – live

Donald Trump is once again under a gag order, this time in his New York criminal case over making hush money payments. But will it matter? The Guardian’s Cameron Joseph reports that it probably will not, at least when it comes to the topic of death threats. Here’s what he has to say in the Trump on Trial newsletter, which you can sign up for here:

When Judge Juan Merchan issued a gag order last week to bar former president Donald Trump from attacking potential witnesses and others involved in his pending hush-money trial in New York, he left open a loophole that Trump jumped to exploit.

The former president immediately went on the attack against Merchan’s own daughter, falsely accusing her of posting social media content that called for Trump to be jailed.

Merchan’s original gag order had covered potential trial witnesses, jurors, district attorney Alvin Bragg’s staff and Merchan’s staff while excluding the prosecutor and the judge – but hadn’t explicitly included Merchan’s and Bragg’s family members.

Merchan responded by expanding the gag order on Monday to cover their families, writing that Trump’s attacks on his daughter were part of a broader pattern of attacking family members of the judges and attorneys involved in his cases that “serves no legitimate purpose. It merely injects fear in those assigned or called to participate in the proceedings, that not only they, but their family members as well, are ‘fair game’ for Defendant’s vitriol.”

That pattern has played out in case after case – and if the past is prologue, his supporters will take it one step further. When Trump attacks those involved in his cases, death threats soon follow.

Donald Trump also campaigned yesterday in Grand Rapids, Michigan, bringing his anti-immigrant message to a city where an undocumented man is accused of murder.

During his speech, the former president said he had spoken to “some of [the] family” of murder victim Ruby Garcia. Local broadcaster WOOD reports that did not happen. Here’s more:

“He did not speak with any of us, so it was kind of shocking seeing that he had said that he had spoke with us, and misinforming people on live TV,” Ruby Garcia’s sister, Mavi Garcia, told Target 8.

Mavi Garcia, the family spokesperson, said neither Trump nor anybody from his campaign has contacted her or anybody in her immediate family. She said her family is close and she would know if that had happened.

“It was shocking. I kind of stopped watching it. I’d only seen up to that, after I heard a couple of misinformations he said, I just stopped watching it,” Mavi Garcia said.

Trump spent some of his speech on Tuesday focusing on immigration, turning to the March 22 murder of 25-year-old Ruby Garcia. Court records show Brandon Ortiz-Vite, who was in the U.S. illegally, has confessed to killing her and dumping her along US-131 in Grand Rapids.

Donald Trump has lately been doing some campaigning of his own, including yesterday in Wisconsin, where the Guardian’s Alice Herman reports he held a rally and railed against undocumented migrants:

On Wisconsin’s presidential primary election day, Donald Trump made his first campaign stop in the state, where he railed against so-called “migrant crime” and doubled down on false election claims.

“We won in 2016 – we did much better in 2020, hate to say it, we did a hell of a lot better,” the former president told the roaring crowd, nodding to the disproven and unfounded “rigging” numerous times during his speech.

“We will throw out the sick political class that hates us,” he continued later. “We will route the fake news media, we will drain the swamp and we will liberate our country from these tyrants and villains once and for all.”

Hours earlier, the rainy weather in Green Bay had turned sludgy, icy and painful as gusts of wind blew the precipitation sideways. It did not stop thousands of Trump supporters from thronging there for hours, forming a parade that snaked up and away from the venue and over the bridge crossing the Fox River two blocks away.

Trump is, according to most polling, fighting for his life in Wisconsin, a state he lost to Joe Biden four years ago. But one would never know that in the KI Convention Center, where his red and white and sequined supporters gathered to hear him speak for the first time this campaign season.

“I personally like that he’s unashamed,” said Ethan Nielsen, an 18-year-old who attended the rally with his father as he waited in line. “He believes what he believes and he doesn’t go back on what he says.”

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