Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s right-wing president, who has received endorsements and support from Donald Trump and numerous other US Republicans, appears to be heading for a run-off in his re-election campaign against leftist former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the Oath Keepers extremist group, plans to invoke a novel legal defence in his trial for charges relating to the January 6 riots at the US Capitol: that he was awaiting orders from Donald Trump.

Mr Rhodes’s lawyers have said the militia leader believed Mr Trump would invoke the Insurrection Act and call up a militia to support him, thus justifying the Oath Keepers’ violent presence at the Capitol during January 6.

Rex Tillerson, who served as Secretary of State during the early days of the Trump administration, will be called to testify on Monday in the trial of Thomas Barrack, a former fundraiser for Mr Trump who faces charges of unlawfully acting as a foreign agent for the United Arab Emirates.

The testimony will take place on Monday, Al Jazeera reports.

During a debate on Sunday, Joe Lombardo, a Republican gubernatorial candidate for Nevada who has been endorsed by Donald Trump, disavowed Mr Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.

“It bothers me,” he said.

“I’m not shying away from that,” he added. “I don’t stand by him in that aspect.”

On the whole though, Mr Lombardo said he still stands by Mr Trump.

“You’re never going to agree with anybody 100% and everything they do. Even in my own party, there’s people that don’t agree with 100% of what I present forward, but you know, you gotta look at the totality of the person and their leadership,” the candidate concluded.

Former White House aide Alyssa Farah Griffin is one of few Republicans who has called out Donald Trump for comments he made about Mitch McConnell and his wife that struck many observers as violent and racist.

“This isn’t some crazy person on the internet, this is the GOP front-runner for President if the Party doesn’t wake up & demand better,” Ms Farah wrote on Twitter on Saturday. “He’s not even trying to hide the racism at this point. Just despicable.”

Other Republicans, like Florida Senator Rick Scott, have declined to criticise the president.

Representative Matt Gaetz voted against legislation that would have provided relief for victims of Hurricane Ian, which left a path of devastation in the congressman’s home state of Florida.

The House of Representatives voted 230 to 201 on a continuing resolution to keep the government open until 16 December on Friday. The continuing resolution also gives the Federal Emergency Management Authority the power to spend money through the Disaster Relief Fund.

DRF pays for repairs and restoration of infrastructure damaged by natural disasters, hazard mitigation initiatives, financial assistance to survivors and Fire Management Grants for large forests or grassland wildfires, according to FEMA.

Only 10 Republicans voted against the continuing resolution in the House on Friday. The bill passed the Senate on Thursday with Florida Senator Rick Scott voting against it. Senator Marco Rubio, the Sunshine State’s other US senator, was not present to vote for it.

Eric Garcia has the details for The Independent.

Lawsuits and investigations hung over Donald Trump throughout his business career, then his presidency, and have continued on through to his current post-presidency phase.

Most recently, there’s the bombshell $250m lawsuit from New York attorney general Letitia James against Mr Trump and three of his children for a host of allegedly fraudulent business practices. But there are plenty more.

Read all about them here.

So much of what Donald Trump did as president was unprecedented, but according to reporter Maggie Haberman, the former president is actually much the same as he’s always been.

Ms Haberman, who has covered Mr Trump for since the 1990s, first as a reporter for New York tabloids, and now for the New York Times, says the former president still acts like he’s a big shot real estate developer with city officials lining up to help him.

“Donald Trump is generally the same, depending on the context,” Ms Haberman, author of the forthcoming Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America, told CBS News. “And he tended to treat the White House as if he was still in a real estate office dealing with local county leaders, as if it was still 1980.”

This perspective made Mr Trump unable to confront losing the election, Ms Haberman continued.

“Whether it was his father helping navigate systems for him or helping him financially, or elected officials lining up for him, he always believed things would work out,” she said. “And after November 3, 2020, it became clearer with each passing day that that was not going to happen, and he did not know how to handle it.”

The former president saw the White House the “ultimate vehicle to fame,” she went on, just like tabloids where he was once a fixture.

Former Trump administration Attorney General William Barr is one of a number of legal observers saying Donald Trump is probably going too far by claiming executive privilege prevents investigators from examining his efforts to keep White House documents and overturn the 2020 election results.

“There is a decent argument” that making such privilege claims infringes on the powers of current preisdent Joe Biden, Mr Barr told The New York Times on Sunday.

Others interviewed by the Times said such privilege claims are in a legal grey area, as no current or former president has ever invoked executive privilege to stop other members of the executive branch, in this case the Justice Department, from accessing documents.

“This is tricky stuff,” Mark J Rozell, a George Mason University professor and author of Executive Privilege: Presidential Power, Secrecy and Accountability. “That gets to the point where the Trump era changed things and raised these kinds of questions that before were unthinkable to us.”

Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine warned about increasing violent threats against lawmakers in an interview with The New York Times, the day after Donald Trump made what some interpretted as a death threat against Senator Mitch McConnell.

The Republican senator spoke about her concerns in the wake of a man smashing a brick through her home in Bangor, Maine, and as political figures like Donald Trump and his supporters deploy increasingly incendiary language.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if a senator or House member were killed,” he said. “What started with abusive phone calls is now translating into active threats of violence and real violence.”

The threat against Ms Collins came amid escalating threats against lawmakers. In 2018, after she voted to confirm Justice Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, she received a message that featured a beheading.