Biden calls for higher taxes on corporations and the wealthy as he unveils $7.3tn budget – US politics live

Donald Trump’s lawyers have asked the judge overseeing his impending criminal trial in New York to delay the trial until the supreme court finishes reviewing his claim of presidential immunity.

Trump is charged with 34 counts of falsification of business records tied to a hush money payment to the adult film star, Stormy Daniels, before the 2016 election.

Last month, prosecutors said they planned to introduce evidence of a “pressure campaign” by Trump in 2018 to ensure his former lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen, did not cooperate with a federal investigation into the payment to Daniels. Cohen pleaded guilty that year to violating campaign finance law.

The trial is set to begin on 25 March in a New York state court in Manhattan.

In their court filing on Monday, Trump’s lawyers said the claim of a pressure campaign was “fictitious” and argued that prosecutors should not be allowed to present evidence about Trump’s public statements about Cohen from that year because he made those statements in his official capacity as president.

The supreme court last month agreed to take up the claim that Trump has absolute immunity from prosecution in the criminal case over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. It is scheduled to hear arguments in that case during the week of 22 April.

Joe Biden unveiled a $7.3tn budget proposal aimed as election-year pitch to voters that would offer tax breaks for families, lower health care costs and higher taxes on corporations and the wealthy.

Biden’s budget for the 2025 fiscal year that starts in October includes raising the corporate income tax rate to 28 from 21%, hiking rates on people making over $400,000, forcing those with wealth of $100m to pay at least 25% of their income in taxes, and letting the government negotiate to bring more drug costs down, Reuters reported.

Meanwhile, the government would bring back a child tax credit for low- and middle-income earners, fund childcare programs, funnel $258bn to building homes, provide paid family leave for workers, and spends billions on violent crime prevention and law enforcement.

The document promises to cut annual deficit spending by $3tn over 10 years, slowing but not halting the growth of the $34.5tn national debt. Biden also renewed his demand for funding on border security, Israel, Ukraine, Taiwan and other national security issues that has been stalled by Republican congressional leadership for months.

White House budgets are always something of a presidential wishlist, and Biden’s proposal is unlikely to pass the House and Senate to become law. Biden and his aides previewed parts of his budget going into last week’s State of the Union address, and they provided the fine print on Monday, AP reported.

Martin Pengelly

Kansas Republicans were condemned as “vile and wrong” after attendees at a fundraising event beat and kicked a martial arts dummy wearing a Joe Biden mask.

Footage posted to social media showed attendees at the Johnson county Republican event kicking and beating the dummy, which was wearing a Biden mask and a T-shirt displaying the slogan “Let’s Go Brandon”, a rightwing meme mean to disparage Biden.

Dinah Sykes, the Democratic minority leader in the state Senate, told the Kansas Reflector, a nonprofit news site:

Political violence of any kind is vile and wrong, and we cannot afford to brush it under the rug when others encourage it.

Sykes called for state Republican leaders to take action against those responsible. Mike Brown, the Kansas Republican party chair, told the Kansas City Star he was not at the event, which was not organised by the state party, though he sent emails to promote it. Mike Kuckelman, a former state Republican chair, condemned the event.

Donald Trump risks another defamation lawsuit by E Jean Carroll after he repeatedly attacked her and denied her rape and defamation claims against him, despite facing nearly $90m in civil penalties over similar denials.

Trump, in an interview with CNBC, described the numerous judgments against him in New York as “the most ridiculous decisions … including the Ms Bergdorf Goodman, a person I’d never met.” He added:

I have no idea who she is, except one thing, I got sued. From that point on I said, ‘Wow, that’s crazy, what this is.

Trump was referring to Carroll, who in 2019 first publicly accused the former president of raping her in the changing room of Bergdorf Goodman, a luxury Manhattan department store.

On Saturday during a campaign rally in Georgia, Trump said Carroll “is not a believable person” and blamed the lawsuit on “Democratic operatives”. He said:

Ninety-one million based on false accusations made about me by a woman that I knew nothing about, didn’t know, never heard of, I know nothing about her.

Carroll’s lawyer has raised the prospect of a new lawsuit, the New York Times reported. In a statement this morning, Roberta A Kaplan, said:

The statute of limitations for defamation in most jurisdictions is between one and three years. As we said after the last jury verdict, we continue to monitor every statement that Donald Trump makes about our client.

Martin Pengelly

Donald Trump “will not give a penny” to Ukraine if he is re-elected US president, the far-right Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, said after a controversial meeting with Trump in Florida.

“He will not give a penny in the Ukraine-Russia war,” Orbán told state media in Hungary on Sunday.

Therefore, the war will end, because it is obvious that Ukraine can not stand on its own feet.

According to Orbán, Trump has a “detailed plan” to end the Ukraine war, which began two years ago when Russia invaded. Calling Trump “a man of peace”, Orbán said:

If the Americans don’t give money and weapons, along with the Europeans, the war is over. And if the Americans don’t give money, the Europeans alone can’t finance this war. And then the war is over.

This would likely mean Ukraine losing the war to Russia. Long seen to demonstrate deference towards and enthusiasm for Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, Trump recently suggested that if re-elected he would encourage Russia to attack US allies he deemed not to contribute enough to the Nato alliance.

Orbán and Trump met at Trump’s residence in Palm Beach, Florida, last weekend.

Joe Biden is heading to the competitive election state of New Hampshire today where he is expected to call on Congress to lower health care costs for American families before later participating in a campaign event.

The president is due to fly into Manchester this afternoon, and is scheduled to deliver a speech in Goffstown where he will call for lawmakers to apply his $2,000 cap on drug costs and $35 insulin to everyone, not just people who have Medicare, AP reported.

Biden will also seek to make permanent some protections in the Affordable Care Act that are set to expire next year, it said.

A coalition of progressive organizations has announced a fundraising, lobbying and organizing effort to counter the influx of spending by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) into primary campaigns against progressive Democrats.

The effort, called Reject Aipac, is in part a response to the ongoing congressional support for Israel’s campaign in Gaza. Among the groups involved in the campaign are the progressive group Justice Democrats, the advocacy arm of Jewish Voice for Peace and the Sunrise Movement climate organization.

“We have watched as Aipac has done everything it can to silence growing dissent in Congress against Netanyahu’s assault on Gaza,” said the coalition in a statement, “even as Democratic voters overwhelmingly support a ceasefire and oppose sending more blank checks to the Israeli military.”

Aipac has stayed out of the fray during election campaigns for most of its existence, focusing its efforts instead on shoring up bipartisan support for Israel in Congress – with a focus on military spending. That has changed in recent years. Now, the organization is expected to drop $100m during the 2024 election cycle in an effort to oust candidates it views as insufficiently pro-Israel.

Dani Anguiano

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac), the most powerful pro-Israel lobby group in the US, poured more than $4.5m into an Orange county congressional race in hopes of keeping Dave Min from advancing to the November election.

But on Tuesday, the California state senator did exactly that – outpacing his Democratic competitor Joanna Weiss to come in second in the primary for the seat of Congresswoman Katie Porter.

The seat is crucial to Democrats hoping to wrestle control of the House of Representatives from Republicans. Come November, Min will face off with Republican Scott Baugh to represent the southern California district in the House.

But Aipac’s massive spending in Orange county has perplexed analysts and Min himself.

“Why the hell did you come in against me? We’re trying to understand why,” Min said in an interview with Semafor. “Maybe AIPAC wants a rubber stamp. I’m not going to be a rubber stamp.”

Aipac has spent millions of dollars against progressive candidates who have been critical of Israel this year and in recent election cycles. But the conflict in the Middle East was not a major issue in the primary race.

Peter Navarro, a top former Trump administration official, has been ordered to report to a Miami prison on 19 March to begin serving a four-month sentence for refusing to comply with a subpoena issued by the House select committee that investigated the January 6 Capitol attack.

Navarro, 74, was found guilty in September 2023 of two counts of contempt of Congress after he refused to produce documents and testimony in the congressional investigation into the Capitol attack, claiming that executive privilege protections meant he did not have to cooperate.

The committee took a special interest in Navarro because of his proximity to Trump and his involvement in a series of efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, including to have members of Congress throw out the results in a plot he named “the Green Bay Sweep”.

But Navarro’s subpoena defiance prompted a criminal referral to the US attorney’s office for the District of Columbia, which brought the charges and ultimately asked for six months in jail because he brazenly ignored the subpoena even after being told executive privilege would not apply.

Navarro was the second Trump aide convicted of contempt of Congress charges. The former White House adviser Steve Bannon previously received a four-month sentence but is free pending appeal.

Karla Jacinto Romero, the woman whose story Katie Britt appeared to have shared in the GOP response to the State of the Union, slammed the Alabama senator for inaccurately using her story to highlight the Biden administration’s border control policies.

Asked if she felt her story had been used for “political purposes” in the US, Romero told CNN on Sunday:

I hardly ever cooperate with politicians, because it seems to me that they only want an image. They only want a photo – and that to me is not fair.

She confirmed that she was never trafficked in the US, as Britt appeared to suggest, and that she was not trafficked by Mexican drug cartels, but by a pimp who operated as part of a family that entrapped vulnerable girls to force them into prostitution.

Romero said she was kept in captivity from 2004 to 2008, when George W Bush was in office. She added that Mexican politicians had taken advantage of her by using her story for political purposes, and that it had happened again in the US.

People who are really trafficked and abused, as [Britt] mentioned. And I think she should first take into account what really happens before telling a story of that magnitude.

Good morning US politics readers. A sex trafficking victim has criticized the Republican senator Katie Britt after the lawmaker inaccurately used her story in her rebuttal to Joe Biden’s State of the Union address as part of an attack on his border control policies.

In that speech, Britt described traveling to the Del Rio sector of the US-Mexico border and cited the case of a woman who had been sex-trafficked at age 12 and raped multiple times. The senator implied these were a direct result of the ongoing crisis at the border, which Republicans have sought to exploit as a campaign issue.

Britt’s communications director confirmed that she was talking about Karla Jacinto Romero, an activist who has publicly recounted her experiences on numerous occasions at the hands of sex traffickers in her native Mexico. In May 2015, Romero testified to a congressional subcommittee describing her experiences at the hands of a trafficker who held her captive between the ages of 12 and 16, before she was eventually rescued.

Romero, in an interview with CNN on Sunday, said legislators lack empathy when using the issue of human trafficking for political purposes. She said:

I hardly ever cooperate with politicians, because it seems to me that they only want an image. They only want a photo – and that to me is not fair.

On Sunday, Britt sought to defend her comments, arguing that she had not intended to suggest that the trafficking and rape in question had happened Biden’s watch. The senator told Fox News she had recounted the victim’s story to “bring some light to” sex trafficking by cartels.

Here’s what is happening today:

• 11am. Joe Biden will deliver remarks to the National League of Cities at the Marriott Marquis in DC.

• 11.45am. Biden will depart DC for Manchester, New Hampshire

• 2.30pm. The Senate intelligence committee has an open hearing on worldwide threats. The House rules committee will meet to prepare several measures for floor consideration.

• 2.30pm. Biden will deliver remarks on lowering costs for American families in Goffstown, New Hampshire.

• 3.35pm. Biden will participate in a campaign event in Manchester.