It’s been a strange few months for Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson.

The right-wing president and the right-wing anchor were often mutually supportive throughout the Trump presidency, but things got a bit dicier during the Dominion Voting Systems defamation suit against Fox News, Mr Carlson’s former employer.

Internal communications shared as part of the suit quote Mr Carlson saying he “passionately” hated Mr Trump and looked forward to the day he no longer had to cover him.

Mr Carlson later walked back the comments, but for a while it seemed the two allies might at odds with each other.

Not so now, however.

In a Truth Social post on Sunday, Mr Trump was back to praising the anchor, who recently went on a lengthy monologue about why the former president is the best candidate for the White House in 2024.

“Thank you Tucker,” Mr Trump wrote in response. “We miss you!”

As the ex-president’s loyalists continue to offer a wide scope of defences for their leader ranging from arguments that Mr Trump was allowed to designate the materials as personal records for his own safekeeping to the idea that the prosecution is merely a politicised weaponisation of the Justice Department, former Defense Secretary Mark Esper has offered his own assessment on the situation.

On Sunday, he joined CNN’s State of the Union with Jake Tapper, and flatly stated that his ex-boss’s actions were “illegal and dangerous”.

John Bowden reports.

Paul Ryan doesn’t think the future of the Republican party lies with Donald Trump.

The former House Speaker told the New York Post this weekend if the GOP goes with Trump, it will result in another four years of a Biden-Harris administration and Democrats in Congress.

“I think the electability argument is going to become more salient with this event,” he said.

“He’s going to cost us the Senate again, he’s going to cost us House seats, and we want to win.”

Ron DeSantis was in Nevada on Saturday, trying to peel support away from Donald Trump in a battleground state Joe Biden narrowly carried in 2020.

At a jamboree near the Sierra Nevada mountains, the Florida governor took some not-so-subtle shots at Donald Trump, talking about the disappointing success rate of the Republican party during the Trump years

“We’ve developed a culture of losing in this party,” Mr DeSantis said, adding, “You’re not going to get a mulligan on the 2024 election.”

However, Mr DeSantis did take Trump’s side at one point, seeming to reference the special counsel investigation of the forme president.

“We are going to end the weaponization of this government once and for all,” Mr DeSantis said.

The Republican party is preparing for a bruising 2024 primary with a huge field of candidates.

During these fights, the party asks its candidates to commit to a loyalty pledge and support whoever emerges as the winner.

However, it seems at least two major candidates, Donald Trump and Chris Christie, probably won’t stick to that script.

“I’m going to take the pledge just as seriously as Donald Trump took it in 2016,” the former New Jersey governor said on CNN today.

“As you’ll remember, Reince Priebus had to go up to Trump Tower to get him to sign it, to ask him to do so,” he added. “He did and then we went to a subsequent debate and we were all asked if we would reaffirm our support of whoever the nominee was going to be by raising our hand. There were 10 of us on the stage, nine of us raised our hands. The one who didn’t was Donald Trump.”

A nuclear document was among the classified materials Donald Trump took with him after he left the White House, according to prosecutors.

Even compared with the rest of the documents he took, making off with this file was especially problematic, according to experts, because nuclear documents can only be declassied by the Departments of Energy and Defense under the Atomic Energy Act.

“The claim that he could have declassified it is not relevant in the case of the nuclear weapons information because it was not classified by executive order but by law,” Steven Aftergood, a government secrecy expert with the Federation of Atomic Scientists, told Reuters.

When it comes to presidential politics these days, the insults can be as revealing as any policy platform.

Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, for his part, has taken recently to calling Donald Trump a ‘loser,’ pointing to the former president’s single-term in office and poor showing for the Republican Party while he was in the White House.

“I will do what I need to do to be up on that stage to try to save my party and save my country from going down the road of being led by three-time loser Donald Trump,” Mr Christie recently told CNN’s State of the Union.

“Loser in 2018 by losing the House, loser in 2020 by losing the White House and the United States Senate, and the worst midterm performance we have seen in a long, long time, led by Donald Trump-selected candidates with Donald Trump as the main issue in many of those races. Loser, loser, loser,” he added.

The former governor and 2024 Trump rival rolled out the memorable attack line at a CNN town hall earlier this month.

A new poll out from JL Partners underscores major weaknesses for the three men most likely to be sworn in as president on 20 January 2025, with little good news to soften the blow.

With the GOP primary now in full swing, Americans are getting a good look at the alternatives the Republican Party will present to the re-election of President Joe Biden, who was already the oldest president ever to take office when he did so in 2021.

But the top contenders in the GOP, former President Donald Trump and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, each have debilitating labels to overcome if they have any shot of picking up ground with a general election audience, according to the survey. For Mr Trump, voters were most likely to describe him in one word as a “criminal”; others were even less flattering, such as “disgusting”, “liar”, “evil” and “dangerous” (though “patriot” also made a top-10 appearance).

John Bowden reports.

Former Trump administration attorney general Bill Barr says Donald Trump’s legal arguments in the classified documents investigation are way off base. “The legal theory by which he gets to take battle plans and sensitive national security information as his personal papers is absurd,” Mr Barr told Face the Nation. “It’s just as wacky as the legal doctrine they came up with for the vice-president to unilaterally decide who won the election.”

The former attorney general said federal law only allows presidents to take purely private documents with them once they leave office.

“Obviously these documents are not purely private. It’s obvious,” he added. “They’re not even now arguing it’s purely private. What they’re saying is the president just has sweeping discretion to say they are.”

The separation of migrant families at the U.S.-Mexico border has always caused Isabel Allende pain: When she saw it during the Trump administration, her first impulse was to help reunify children and parents through her foundation. Then, the legendary Chilean author thought, she had to write a book.

“The Wind Knows My Name,” which grapples with immigration, violence, solidarity, and love, is the latest novel by the award-winning writer who — with more than 77 million books sold — is considered the world’s most widely read Spanish-language author. Released earlier this month, it is available at bookstores in the U.S., Spain, and Latin America.

For Allende, 80, the separation of children from their parents at the border evoked similarly wrenching historical moments, such as when children of enslaved or Indigenous families were wrest from their parents.

More details in our full story.