Closing summary
In a defiant speech ahead of South Carolina’s Republican presidential primary on Saturday, Nikki Haley vowed not to drop out the race, saying: “I have no fear of Trump’s retribution.” Polls show Donald Trump is favored to win Haley’s home state, as well as the 15 states voting in the crucial Super Tuesday contests on 5 March. Haley said people calling for her to quit wanted “a Soviet-style election”, and denied aspiring to be Trump’s running mate or plotting a future presidential campaign.
Here’s what else happened today:
The Trump campaign released a memo saying “the end is near” for Haley’s campaign, while the two campaigns’ spokespeople did battle on X.
The supreme court opted not to hear a case that could have given its conservative majority the chance to weigh in on school diversity policies.
Scholars ranked Joe Biden as the 14th best president, and Trump as the worst ever.
Haley also addressed Trump’s attacks on her husband, Michael Haley. The former president has claimed he is “gone”, when in fact he’s deployed in Djibouti with the South Carolina army national guard.
Biden declined to weigh in on whether he’d rather face Trump or Haley in November.
Among the South Carolina politicians endorsing Donald Trump is Republican senator Lindsey Graham, who, the Guardian’s Martin Pengelly reports, has also been blacklisted by Russia for unrelated reasons:
The Republican senator Lindsey Graham, a key ally of Donald Trump, has been added to a list of “terrorists and extremists” kept by Russia’s state financial monitoring agency.
Tass, the state-run news agency, first reported the move by Rosfinmonitoring, which allows authorities to freeze Russian bank accounts, though in Graham’s case is likely to be chiefly symbolic.
The agency’s list includes more than 12,000 individuals and more than 400 companies, as well as domestic and foreign terrorist entities and Russian political opposition groups, according to the website opensanctions.org.
Meta, the parent company of Facebook, was reportedly added to the list in October 2022, for supposedly tolerating “Russophobia”. Its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, and other Meta employees have been banned from Russia or added to “wanted” lists.
Graham, a South Carolina senator and foreign policy hawk who has long advocated arming Ukraine against Russian invaders, has also been subject to a Russian arrest warrant, for making “Russophobic statements” during a visit to Kyiv.
