RNC elects Trump’s daughter-in-law as co-chair, marking his expanding party influence – as it happened

Joe Biden capitalized on his State of the Union performance by announcing campaign stops across the United States and cheering yet another month of positive employment growth. Donald Trump, meanwhile, launched a volley of attacks on the president’s annual address, which was the third of his presidency and potentially the last, if Biden does not win re-election. The former president was otherwise busy posting a bond in the massive defamation judgment author E Jean Carroll won against him, while pushing for a new trial.

Here’s what else happened today.

• The Republican National Committee made Trump’s daughter-in-law Laura Trump its co-chair, as the former president moves to install loyalists atop the party.

• The Senate is scrambling to pass a government fund package ahead of a midnight deadline to prevent a shutdown.

• No Labels is moving forward with fielding a third-party presidential ticket – but does not have any candidates lined up yet.

• Biden’s campaign responded to outcry over the president’s use of the word “illegal” to describe an undocumented murder suspect.

• Ronny Jackson, a Republican congressman and Trump ally, advertises himself as a retired Navy rear admiral, but was in fact demoted following a scathing inspector general report into his work as White House physician.

On his website, Republican congressman and former White House physician Ronny Jackson describes himself as a retired Navy rear admiral.

The Washington Post reports that’s not the case. Jackson, a Texas lawmaker and Donald Trump ally, was demoted to captain by the Navy following an inspector general’s report that documented inappropriate behavior during his time as doctor to the president.

“The substantiated allegations in the DoDIG [Department of Defense inspector general] investigation of Rear Adm. (lower half) Ronny Jackson are not in keeping with the standards the Navy requires of its leaders and, as such, the secretary of the Navy took administrative action in July 2022,” Navy spokesman Joe Keiley told the Post.

Here’s more:

Jackson is now a retired Navy captain, those people said — a demotion that carries a significant financial burden in addition to the social stigma of stripped rank in military circles.

Despite the demotion, Jackson has continued to refer to himself as a retired rear admiral, including in statements released since the Navy reclassified him as a retired captain. Former president Donald Trump and other Republicans have also continued to publicly describe Jackson using his former rank; it’s unclear if they were aware of his demotion.

Jackson’s office did not respond to requests for comment about the Navy’s 2022 personnel action and his demotion. The former White House physician has become a prominent voice in the 2024 campaign, repeatedly affirming Trump’s fitness to serve while castigating President Biden’s.

After publication of this story, the Navy provided Jackson’s service record, which shows the rank of captain retroactively applied to the date of his retirement in December 2019.

For an officer who served 24 years like Jackson, there is a more than $15,000 difference in annual pension payouts between a retired one-star admiral, the rank that Jackson held when he retired from the Navy in December 2019, and a retired captain, according to an estimate by Katherine L. Kuzminski, a military policy expert at Center for a New American Security. That payout gap is likely to widen over time as the military periodically increases its pay rates for each position.

Kuzminski also said that it was inappropriate for Jackson to describe himself as a retired rear admiral. “While it is possible that others will mistakenly refer to him as ‘Admiral’ in perpetuity, he himself should not make that mistake,” she said.

As he departed Washington DC for a campaign event this evening in Philadelphia, Joe Biden reiterated that he would sign legislation to ban social media app TikTok, if it makes it through Congress.

Legislation to force TikTok’s parent company to divest or be banned in the United States was passed unanimously by a House committee earlier this week, leading the app to encourage its users to call their congress members to speak against it.

Here’s more on that, from the Guardian’s Kari Paul:

The Senate has voted to advance a $467.5bn spending package that would fund several federal agencies, but it remains unclear whether the chamber will be able to pass it in time to avert a partial government shutdown due to begin at midnight.

The bill passed a procedural hurdle by a bipartisan vote of 63 to 35, setting up a vote on final passage. While the Senate is expected to approve the measure, progress was slow in getting the bill to a final vote and it is unclear whether lawmakers will meet their midnight deadline.

The measure, which contains six annual spending bills, has already passed the House and would go to Joe Biden to be signed into law. Lawmakers are negotiating a second package of six bills, including defense, in an effort to have all federal agencies fully funded before the 22 March deadline.

Joe Biden’s seemingly off-the-cuff use of “illegal” to describe people who are undocumented during his State of the Union address drew disappointed reactions from experts who have long argued the term is inaccurate and outdated.

Responding to heckling from conservative congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who demanded Biden mention the name of Laken Riley – a Georgia nursing student who was allegedly killed by a person who is undocumented – Biden held up a button of Riley’s face and said she was an “innocent, young woman who was killed by an illegal”.

Democrats and immigrant rights organizations said Biden’s use of “illegal” as dehumanizing. The Illinois congresswoman Delia Ramirez said she was “disappointed” in Biden’s use of what she called “dehumanizing rightwing rhetoric” to describe immigrants. “No human being is illegal,” Ramirez said. Another Illinois representative, Chuy García, added:

As a proud immigrant, I’m extremely disappointed to hear President Biden use the world ‘illegal’.

Immigration advocates have long argued that the term “illegals” is an inaccurate term, as entering the US without documents is not a criminal offense. It is also a racially charged term that can promote violence and discrimination, according to the Drop the I-Word campaign, which advocates for media organizations not to use it when describing immigrants.

Chris Sununu, the Republican governor of New Hampshire, has said he would support Donald Trump as the GOP’s 2024 presidential nominee despite his history of criticizing the former president.

Speaking to WMUR on Thursday, Sununu – who had endorsed Nikki Haley in the GOP primary – said:

I’m going to support the ticket. I’m going to support Donald Trump. But my focus is definitely going to be here in the state.

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Asked about his previous comments calling Trump a “loser” and making fun of his age, Sununu said:

Look, I don’t take any of that back, to be sure. But again, understand this is an alternative. I mean, the alternative is Biden, and I think folks are seeing a lack of management, a lack of understanding of what’s happening with immigration, a lack of fiscal responsibility.

The four-term governor, who will not be running for re-election in November, pushed back on Trump’s legal arguments, including that the president has complete legal immunity from all prosecution.

“No, no. That’s crazy,” Sununu said. “Just because you’re a politician does not put you above the law, period.”

Joe Biden is capitalizing on his State of the Union performance by announcing campaign stops across the United States and cheering yet another month of positive employment growth. Donald Trump, meanwhile, launched a volley of attacks on the president’s annual address, which was the third of his presidency and potentially the last, if he does not win re-election. The former president was otherwise busy posting a bond in the massive defamation judgment author E Jean Carroll won against him, while pushing for a new trial.

Here’s what else has happened today so far:

• The Republican National Committee appointed Trump’s daughter-in-law Laura Trump its co-chair as the former president moves to install loyalists atop the party.

• No Labels is moving forward with fielding a third-party presidential ticket – but does not have any candidates lined up yet.

• Biden’s campaign responded to outcry over the president’s use of the word “illegal” to describe an undocumented murder suspect.

It’s always a tough job to deliver the rebuttal to a president’s State of the Union address, but Republican senator Katie Britt’s response was viewed by her fellow party members as particularly bad.

Today in the Capitol, reporters asked Britt’s Alabama counterpart, Republican Tommy Tuberville, for his thoughts on her speech. He praised it, while noting Britt was asked to give the remarks because she is “a housewife”, HuffPost reports:

No Labels, the centrist group that has been fielding a third-party candidate for the November presidential election, just announced that it will be moving forward with launching a campaign – but hasn’t decided yet who will actually run.

In a statement, Mike Rawlings, No Labels’s national convention chair, said he had held discussions today with 800 delegates from across the country, who encouraged him to press on.

“Even though we met virtually, their emotion and desire to bring this divided nation back together came right through the screen. I wasn’t sure exactly where No Labels delegates would land today but they sent an unequivocal message: keep going,” Rawlings said.

“Now that No Labels has received the go-ahead from our delegates, we’ll be accelerating our candidate outreach and announcing the process for how candidates will be selected for the Unity Ticket on Thursday, March 14.”

In recent months, various Republican and Democratic politicians have been reported as potential candidates for a No Labels ticket, including Joe Manchin, the Democratic senator from West Virginia who was a thorn in his party’s side in recent years, and Larry Hogan, the former Republican governor of blue state Maryland who is seen as a leading centrist. But both men opted not to participate in whatever No Labels has planned, with Manchin instead retiring from the Senate, and Hogan launching a long-shot bid for an open seat representing his state in the chamber.

Donald Trump’s attempts to delay his criminal trials until after the 2024 presidential election – in the hope that he secures the presidency – lack solid a legal basis, according to justice department veterans.

Peter Stone reports for the Guardian:

Claims by Donald Trump and his lawyers that holding any of the four criminal trials he now faces before the US election in November would be “election interference” lack a solid legal basis and are brazen ploys to delay trials until post election, former justice department officials say.

As he campaigns to return to the White House, Trump is facing unprecedented legal and political perils: trials are pending in four federal and state jurisdictions, where he’s been charged with 91 felony counts including 17 about conspiring with allies to overturn his loss to Joe Biden in 2020.

To thwart any damaging verdicts and negative trial coverage pre-election, the former US president and his lawyers have pushed legal and political arguments by invoking election interference and presidential immunity, as they’ve sought to convince judges and courts to postpone trial dates until after November.

Trump’s drive to have trials held post-election is premised heavily on hopes of winning the presidency again, and then telling DoJ to kill the federal charges, say DoJ veterans.

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The Republican National Committee voted on Friday to appoint Michael Whatley and Donald Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump as its new chair and co-chair.

Whatley and Trump will replace the RNC’s outgoing chair, Ronna McDaniel, who announced her resignation last month after Trump endorsed a slew of loyalists for key RNC roles.

The appointment of his daughter-in-law marks Trump’s expanding influence across the GOP, despite criticisms of him from other Republicans, in addition to his mounting legal woes as the country gears up for the 2024 election.

Last month, Lara Trump vowed to spend “every single penny” of RNC funds to ensure her father-in-law’s re-election.

Speaking to Newsmax, she said: “The RNC needs to be the leanest, most lethal political fighting machine we’ve ever seen in American history … That is the goal over the next nine and a half months. If I am elected to this position, I can assure you, there will not be any more $70,000 – or whatever exorbitant amount of money it was – spent on flowers.”

“Every single penny will go to the No 1 and the only job of the RNC – that is electing Donald J Trump as president of the United States and saving this country,” she added.