Trump news today: Grand jury in New York case against ex-president will be dissolved,

As she awaits a decision on whether she is allowed to hold public office, Marjorie Taylor Greene has opined that Christians who helped undocumented people cross the Mexican border into the US are agents of the devil.

“What it is,” she told a far-right Catholic interviewer, “is Satan’s controlling the church… “We are supposed to love one another, but their definition of what love one another means, means destroying our laws. It means completely perverting what our Constitution says. It means taking unreal advantage of the American taxpayer. And it means pushing a globalist policy on the American people and forcing America to become something that we are not supposed to be.”

Bevan Hurley has the story.

Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter has fired up the hopes of QAnon followers and influencers who have been banned from the platform over the last several years, with some of them surmising that since the platform is no longer controlled by “deep state entities” it will now become a haven for them once again.

In the aftermath of the attacks on the US Capitol on 6 January, 2021, Twitter removed more than 70,000 accounts that promoted QAnon-related content, but many of those who still subscribe to the amorphous, often racist and sometimes violent theory are still exchanging information on apps like Telegram.

Read more from Alex Woodward below.

Donald Trump’s endorsement of JD Vance in the Ohio Senate race has left many Republicans scratching their heads given the Hillbilly Elegy author’s long history of anti-Trump apostasy, as well as his corporate ties.

Right-wing TV and radio host Mark Levin, who has made a reputation as a devoted Trump ally in recent years, has now joined the opposition, instead sticking with another MAGA-courting right-winger, hitherto frontrunner Josh Mandel.

But as Axios’s Jonathan Swan pointed out in response, Mr Levin hasn’t always taken the pure Trump line.

Marjorie Taylor Greene last night got the chance to talk to Fox News’s Laura Ingraham about her texts to Mark Meadows around the time of the 6 January riot, messages in which the hardcore congresswoman appeared to relay other members’ requests that the Trump administration impose what she rendered as “Marshall law”.

And for whatever reason, the producers on Ms Ingraham’s show seemed inclined to let Ms Greene’s words speak for themselves.

Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns’s This Will Not Pass continues to make news, and not just on the 6 January front. In an extract shared by CNN’s Manu Raju, the two authors recount how some of the Republicans’ less extreme Senators made an effort to get Joe Manchin to defect to their side. And the reason he didn’t, the authors write, was Mitch McConnell.

As JD Vance apparently vaults to the top of the Ohio Senate primary field after receiving Donald Trump’s endorsement, Rolling Stone has a head-spinning story on how the president was lobbied to persuade someone who had previously criticised him as “America’s Hitler” in the making.

According to the magazine, Fox News’s Tucker Carlson lobbied hard on Mr Vance’s behalf, and spent a lot of effort impression on Mr Trump that a major Republican campaigner backing another Ohio candidate, Josh Mandel, was essentially a pervert:

Among the many legal probes into Donald Trump and his affairs, the Manhattan District Attorney’s investigation into fraud allegations is among the more troubled, with current officeholder Alvin Bragg apparently unconvinced of the case’s strength despite years of work.

Now, reports are saying that the grand jury empanelled to hear evidence in the case is to be dissolved. According to ABC News, it hasn’t even heard any evidence since January.

Read more below from John Bowden.

Despite pleas from the right to Elon Musk to let Donald Trump back on Twitter, the ex-president has so far insisted he will remain on his own bespoke social network platform, Truth Social, despite its disastrous decline in engagement and the fact that he has only posted on it once.

Now, Mr Musk has a suggestion for a Truth Social rebrand: “Truth Social (terrible name) exists because Twitter censored free speech,” he tweeted. “Should be called Trumpet instead!”

The same name was also suggested by Georgia Congressman Andrew Clyde in 2021 after Mr Trump was first kicked off Twitter.

Former president Donald Trump said he feared irate protesters would hit him with “very dangerous” fruits at his campaign rallies.

“I wanted to have people be ready because we were put on alert that they were going to do fruit,” Mr Trump said in the October 2021 deposition, according to a transcript of the proceedings filed in the court on Tuesday.

The 45th US president said that “tomatoes are bad” and that “some fruit is a lot worse”, The Washington Post reported.

“But it’s very dangerous. … I remember that specific event, because everybody was on alert. They were going to hit — they were going to hit hard,” he said.

Mr Trump was testifying in a civil lawsuit filed by a group of protesters alleging they were assaulted by his security guards in 2015.

The Independent has compiled data from Federal Election Commission filings since the beginning of 2021 to the end of March 2022, which shows that Republican candidates spent $1.28m at Mr Trump’s properties in Florida, New York, California, Washington DC and Las Vegas.

One of the biggest sources of revenue was Mr Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club, where the former president has de-camped.

Since 2021, candidates have spent more than $700,000 at the Palm Beach club – some of them after receiving his endorsement, as was the case with Representative Ted Budd, who is running for Senate in North Carolina.