Nikki Haley’s Zombie Campaign Delivers Huge Blow to Trump in Indiana

Nikki Haley is still haunting Donald Trump’s bid for the White House.

Three months after abandoning her long-shot campaign, Haley still managed to nab 128,000 votes in Indiana’s GOP presidential primary on Tuesday, according to polling results compiled by Decision Desk HQ. That constituted 21 percent of the Republican vote in the Hoosier State, meaning one in five registered conservatives still preferred Haley over their party’s presumptive nominee.

It’s the continuation of an anti-Trump GOP movement that has persisted even as Trump mows down an empty political field. Last month, Haley also managed to pull a significant portion of votes in Pennsylvania’s GOP primary—more than 158,000 votes, or 16.6 percent.

On her exit from the race, Haley skirted actually endorsing Trump as Trump’s other GOP contenders did. Instead, the ambassador suggested it would be up to the former president to “earn” the vote of all Republican and independent voters.

“It is now up to Donald Trump to earn the votes of those in our party and beyond it who did not support him, and I hope he does that,” Haley said during a speech suspending her campaign in March. “At its best, politics is about bringing people into your cause, not turning them away. And our conservative cause badly needs more people. This is now his time for choosing.“

Haley’s ability to offer an intraparty alternative to Trump’s politics proved an incredible boon to her campaign. In January CBS News/YouGov matchups between the top Republican contenders and President Joe Biden, Haley came out head and shoulders above her competition, leading with 54 percent of the vote against Biden’s 45 percent thanks to support from moderates, independents, and voters with college degrees. That was a much wider margin than Trump, who was predicted at the time to win against Biden by just two percentage points with 50 percent of the vote.

A Biden administration report that could cut off military aid to Israel has been indefinitely delayed.

The State Department was anticipated to issue the report Wednesday, but that’s no longer the case, reported Politico. The report would have defined whether Israel violated humanitarian law since its conflict with Gaza broke out on October 7. If the State Department determined Israel had broken humanitarian law, then it would have been even harder to justify continued U.S. military assistance to Israel.

In an email shared by three Senate aides and one House aide with Politico, the Biden administration notified Congress that the report would be “briefly delayed,” without any further clarification or issue of a new deadline.

But comments from the State Department itself weren’t so assuring.

“We are trying very hard to meet that deadline,” State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller told reporters Tuesday, who outright admitted that the report wasn’t finished. “It’s possible it slips just a little bit, but we are trying to get it done by tomorrow.”

Meanwhile, Israel blatantly rejected a cease-fire opportunity, launching more airstrikes onto Rafah and capturing the Palestinian side of the Rafah Crossing in the hours after Hamas agreed to a cease-fire proposal organized by Egypt, Qatar, and the United States.

“The last couple of days have proved that Israel was not really negotiating in good faith,” Omar Rahman, an expert on Israel-Palestine with the Middle East Council for Global Affairs, told Al Jazeera. “The moment that Hamas agreed to a deal, Israel was willing to blow that up by commencing their assault on Rafah.”

“The goal is to destroy Gaza in its totality,” Rahman said.

The international criminal court at The Hague is weighing whether to charge Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with war crimes as the country’s war on Gaza claims so many lives that local authorities say they can no longer keep count. More than 34,000 Palestinians have been killed, and more than 77,000 Palestinians have been injured in the conflict, according to data from the Gaza Health Ministry. Most of the victims have been women and children.

Israel has advanced its attacks on the beleaguered nation by blocking humanitarian aid from reaching those who need it. Israel has also utilized mass starvation, as well as blocked or destroyed access to critical resources such as water, food, fuel, electricity, and medical aid.

Judge Aileen Cannon, who coincidentally was appointed by Donald Trump, announced Tuesday afternoon that she is indefinitely postponing his classified documents case in Florida.

The case was originally scheduled to begin on May 20. Tuesday’s written decision says that that start date is being vacated due to concerns about classified evidence, but Cannon makes no indication of when the trial will be placed back on the calendar.

“The Court also determines that finalization of a trial date at this juncture—before resolution of the myriad and interconnected pre-trial and [Classified Information Procedures Act] issues remaining and forthcoming—would be imprudent and inconsistent with the Court’s duty to fully and fairly consider the various pending pre-trial motions before the Court, critical CIPA issues, and additional pretrial and trial preparations necessary to present this case to a jury,” Cannon’s decision reads.

In other words, Cannon says the case must be delayed because of the number of pretrial motions that remain unresolved. There’s just one problem with that justification: The motions remain unresolved because she has failed to resolve them. Cannon has dragged her feet and given concessions to Trump’s legal team at seemingly every opportunity thus far.

The latest decision means that Trump is all but certain to avoid trial in the classified documents case until after the November election. If he wins, he could instruct the Department of Justice to drop the case altogether or even try to preemptively pardon himself. Cannon has set two hearings for May 22 on Trump’s motions to dismiss the trial entirely.

In court Tuesday during Donald Trump’s hush-money trial, some new and unusual nicknames were entered into the legal record during adult film actress Stormy Daniels’s testimony.

Trump attorney Susan Necheles displayed a tweet from Daniels dated November 9, 2022, where Daniels states, “I don’t owe him shit and I’ll never give that orange turd a dime.”

Now, “orange turd” is officially part of New York case law.

In another instance, a Truth Social post containing Trump’s insults toward Daniels were entered into the public record by prosecutor Susan Hoffinger, specifically the words “Horseface” and “SleazeBag.” Daniels said that the terms referred to her.

Early on in Daniels’s testimony, she noted that the former president always called her “honeybunch,” and that she’d put his phone calls to her on speakerphone.

These aren’t the first colorful nicknames to be entered into the record during this trial. Last week, Trump attorney Todd Blanche displayed Twitter (now X) posts in court where Trump’s former attorney and fixer turned adversary Michael Cohen calls the former president “Von ShitzInPantz” and also refers to him as a “racist jackass who referred to African nations as ‘shithole countries.’”

Trump is facing 34 felony charges for allegedly falsifying business records with the intent to further an underlying crime for paying off Daniels to cover up their affair ahead of the 2016 presidential election. He has pleaded not guilty. Earlier Tuesday, Daniels’s testimony revealed  several salacious details about the affair, including Trump comparing the adult film actress to his daughter Ivanka and an excuse that Daniels used in one instance to avoid sex with the former president.

Stormy Daniels used an all-too-familiar line to get out of having sex with Donald Trump.

Recounting one instance in 2007 when the pair met at a bungalow in Los Angeles, Daniels testified Tuesday that Trump had once again tried to pressure her into sex, including putting his hand on her leg. But she knew how to shake him off.

“I told him I was on my period,” Daniels told the court.

Daniels also recalled several other sexual encounters with Trump, at times diving into great detail, which appeared to bother even Judge Juan Merchan. Those moments included their infamous initial 2006 encounter at a hotel suite, in which Daniels claimed Trump goaded her into having sex under the guise that he would advance her film career by landing her a spot on his hit reality TV show, The Apprentice. Daniels described the tryst as brief and condomless.

“I thought you were serious about what you wanted,” she recalled Trump telling her at the time, before reportedly climbing on top of her.

After rejecting Trump a year later at the bungalow, she recalled Trump calling her to reveal that he wasn’t able to get her on The Apprentice as he had promised.

Daniels’s get-out-of-jail-free card is a lighthearted anecdote in an otherwise heavy description of a relationship that stemmed from what she described as an “imbalance of power.” Daniels has previously said she was mad at herself for not seeing right away that Trump didn’t want to help her career and just wanted to have sex with her, and told the court Tuesday that she hates Trump.

Trump is accused of using Cohen to sweep an affair with Daniels under the rug ahead of the 2016 presidential election. The Republican presidential nominee faces 34 felony charges in this case for allegedly falsifying business records with the intent to further an underlying crime. Trump has pleaded not guilty on all counts.