Trump news live: Trump calls prosecutors ‘maniacs’ as he tears into Republican rival Ron DeSantis

A former official in the Trump administration said the one-term president kept such close ties with Fox News that he would sometimes have aides call the network to pressure employees to turn whatever was irking him into news stories.

Stephanie Grisham, the former White House Communications Director under Donald Trump, recalled her interactions with Fox News during an interview with CNN’s Jim Acosta.

During the discussion, Acosta said he recalled seeing Fox News personalities like Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham being openly invited in to meet with White House officials despite the fact they were ostensibly members of the press.

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Mr Trump’s rally has now concluded.

A second audience question about trans rights gave Mr Trump the perfect opportunity to engage in his trademark cruel mockery.

The former president’s derisive impressions of rivals and disabled people have adapted pretty well to trans people. Here he targeted an unnamed swimmer who is presumably a trans woman, though Mr Trump simply referred to her as a man throughout.

“[She’s] a monster,” he said, mocking various features of her body such as her supposed height.

Mr Trump says it should be a priority for Republicans to depose Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell, prompting cheers from the audience.

“We do have to do something about Mitch McConnell. He’s a disaster. He gets his ten guys and they give Biden whatever they want. There’s something going on, it doesn’t make sense,” he says in response to an audience questions.

Other questions have stuck largely to Mr Trump’s key talking points from his speech (perhaps because they were selected by aides on that basis).

A member of the conservative lobby group Moms For Liberty, which has sought to ban certain books about Black civil rights and LGBT+ life from schools, asked how he would stop schools “sexualising our children” and go “back to basics”.

Another question was about the rising price of fuel and fertiliser, as well as the “activist” Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and climate activists who have “demonised” farmers. Mr Trump said he would bring the prices down and rein in the EPA “so fast your head will spin”.

Mr Trump has now finished the main section of his speech, and is taking questions.

“We will end woke. We will crush the deep state. We will save our economy. We will defend our farmers. We will evict Joe Biden from the White House, and we will make America great again.”

It wouldn’t be a modern GOP rally without a section on transgender rights, and Mr Trump has embraced the topic with gusto this year.

Vowing to cut all federal funding for schools that teach “critical race theory” or trans rights, he vilified consensual transition healthcare for minors as “mutilation” and said he would “keep men out of women’s sports”.

“If I was a basketball coach, I’d be the greatest coach in history. I’d have a woman’s team but I’d have all men,” he said. “I’m not a fan of LeBron James, I don’t like LeBron, but I’d say, ‘hey LeBron, you ever think of becoming a woman?'”

Since announcing his 2024 run, Mr Trump has positioned himself to the right of even many red states on trans children, claiming he would push Congress to pass a nationwide ban on all transition treatments for under-18s.

Mr Trump promises to direct the Department of Justice to “go after Marxist prosecutors to make them pay for their illegal race-based enforcement of the law”.

That seems to be a reference to left-wing prosecutors that he sees as soft on crime, whom he has previously accused of “abolishing cash bail and refusing to charge criminals”.

It could also be a nod to the various investigations against him and the January 6 rioters, which he has often criticised.

Trump declares that he will “prevent World War 3” – something he’s said before at previous rallies.

That, at least, is a campaign promise anyone can get behind (or at least most people).

Of course, this is nothing new for the real estate billionaire.

Inflation time. Mr Trump claims that we could be on the brink of a recession due to “rampant” price hikes and the general “shambles” Joe Biden has made of the US economy.

“If you look at what inflation over 200 years has done to countries that have suffered, it destroys the country like cancer,” he says.

He then tells a story about a voter who told him that he’d always gotten stick from his wife for being an awful investor, but that under Trump she gave him the biggest kiss in years because their 401k plan was up by 59 per cent during the remarkable bull market of 2020 and 2021.