President Joe Biden took aim at his predecessor Donald Trump in Chicago on Wednesday and referred to him as “the great MAGA King.”

“Under my predecessor, the great MAGA king, the deficit increased every single year he was president,” Mr Biden said speaking to the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.

“The first year of my presidency, I reduced the deficit by $350bn.”

While the president does not typically mention Mr Trump by name, he did so on Wednesday while defending his own economic policies amid rising inflation and an uneasy stock market.

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Donald Trump has been ordered to pay $110,000 in fines as a judge lifted the contempt order against him put in place following a dispute concerning financial documents from the Trump Organization.

New York Judge Arthur Engoron lifted the order assuming that a number of requirements would be fulfilled.

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The Trump Organization said on Wednesday that it had completed the sale of a long-term lease of the Trump International Hotel in Washington to CGI Merchant Group of Miami.

The hotel had served as a symbol of his power to GOP politicians who gathered there and of corruption to his critics during his tenure as president.

Sources said to the Associated Press that the hotel was sold for $375 million, giving the Trump family as $100 million in profit.

The new owners plan to remove the Trump name from the facade and rebrand the hotel a Waldorf Astoria.

Elon Musk has said he will end Donald Trump’s Twitter ban – adding that he thought the decision to block the then-president was “morally bad”.

In news that will celebrated by supporters of Mr Trump as enthusiastically as it is condemned by his critics, the tech billionaire who is in the process of buying the social media network, said the initial decision in January 2021 had been incorrect.

“I think it was a morally bad decision, to be clear, and foolish in the extreme,” he said at a Future of the Car event hosted in London by the Financial Times.

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Former president Donald Trump got a mixed bag on Tuesday night when one candidate he endorsed triumphed in West Virginia, but another fell short in Nebraska, showing the former president’s endorsement is powerful but not a rubber stamp for Republican voters.

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Former White House strategist Steve Bannon has vowed revenge against Mark Esper for making shocking revelations against Donald Trump in his new book.

The former defence secretary, in A Sacred Oath: Memoirs of a Secretary of Defense During Extraordinary Times, has made several astounding claims from his time at the White House when Mr Trump was president.

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Senator Rand Paul rarely targets his likely Democratic challenger by name, but the Republican’s campaign attacks in Kentucky are unmistakably aimed at Charles Booker‘s agenda — in what’s shaping up as a populist-themed battle featuring starkly different ideas to win the people over.

In his pursuit of a third Senate term, Mr Paul projects a national voice for a libertarian-leaning philosophy based on limited government and restrained spending.

Mr Booker, his ideological opposite, promotes a New Deal-style economic platform. Booker is the clear frontrunner on the Democratic side in the Bluegrass State’s primary election next Tuesday.

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Republican Steve Daines of Montana took to the floor of the US Senate on Tuesday to compare women to sea turtles and eagles in a speech advocating for the restriction of abortion rights.

“Why do we have laws in place that protect the eggs of a sea turtle or the eggs of eagles?” Mr Daines said. “Because when you destroy an egg, you’re killing a pre-born baby sea turtle or a pre-born baby eagle. Yet when it comes to a pre-born human baby rather than a sea turtle, that baby will be stripped of all protections in all 50 states under the Democrats’ bill we will be voting on tomorrow.”

Noah Berlatsky writes:

Our current copyright regime is much too restrictive. Intellectual copyright now ties up books, movies, songs, poems, and art for generations, making it difficult to impossible for scholars, critics, and other artists to push back against or expand upon relevant cultural conversations. New art is made from old art. A too restrictive copyright regime is therefore bad for art and bad for free speech.

Missouri Senator Josh Hawley has introduced a bill to reduce copyright terms. Which should be a good thing. But this is Josh Hawley, supporter of insurrection and vortex of awfulness. So his bill to reduce copyright terms does not defend free speech and support artists. It does the opposite of those things.

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Jen Psaki, whose last day on the job is Friday, has answered reporters’ questions nearly every weekday of the almost 500 days that Joe Biden has been in office.

That makes her a top White House communicator and perhaps the administration’s most public face after only the president and Vice President Kamala Harris. Her departure could complicate how Biden’s message gets out at a critical time for him, at least in the short term.