Trump Plans “Family-Style” Candlelight Dinner to Raise Money for Co-Defendants

Donald Trump is planning a “family-style” candlelight dinner with his two adult sons at Mar-a-Lago to help pay the legal bills of his co-defendants and witnesses, according to The Messenger.

While the details of the event are still being worked out, it is expected to raise somewhere between $500,000 and $1 million for the Patriot Legal Defense Fund, a fund set up to pay the legal bills of others implicated across Trump’s four indictments.

Similar to previous fundraisers at Mar-a-Lago, the dinner will be held in one of the resort’s private dining rooms where the table can seat about two dozen attendees. “It’s a family-style dinner, very intimate and exclusive,” said one Trump official.

The Patriot Legal Defense Fund was created by a group of Trump allies led by Michael Glassner, a longtime Trump adviser. Before that, the Save America super PAC was primarily footing the legal expenses of the former president and his allies caught up in the indictments. Sources told The Messenger that Save America will primarily cover Trump’s legal expenses and work in tandem with the Patriot Legal Defense Fund.

While the Patriot Legal Defense Fund is technically separate from both Save America and Trump’s 2024 campaign, allowing it to sidestep the Federal Election Committee’s campaign finance rules, there are some ethical questions remaining. The fund’s website originally redirected clicks to “Donate Now” to Trump’s campaign website, according to The Daily Beast.

Trump is already hosting a $100,000-per-plate fundraiser on Thursday night for Rudy Giuliani, who has been embroiled in an expensive series of lawsuits that have left the former mayor broke and begging for financial assistance.

As the legal bills continue to pile up, these fundraisers will only become more frequent, and it’s possible that the number of people willing to shell out for an expensive dinner with the Trumps will wane. Either way, there is no way that $100K chicken tastes that good.

Vivek Ramaswamy is so committed to sucking up to Donald Trump that he won’t even explain his own past criticism of the former president.

Trump was banned from Twitter and Facebook days after the January 6 riot for inciting violence on the platforms. Ramaswamy criticized the tech giants’ move in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece as a violation of free speech, but he also had some choice words for Trump himself. Ramaswamy described the riot as “disgraceful” and called Trump’s actions “egregious” and “downright abhorrent” on Twitter.

But now that he is running against Trump for president, Ramaswamy is confusingly and aggressively refusing to address his comments. When MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan pressed him about the criticisms Wednesday night, Ramaswamy did everything he could to avoid actually answering the question.

“What did Donald Trump do, in your view, that was ‘downright abhorrent’? Second time I’ve asked that question,” Hasan said.

“The thing that I would have done differently if I were in his shoes, is I would have declared reelection on January 7,” Ramaswamy replied.

Hasan asked Ramaswamy to explain his comments several more times, but Ramaswamy never gave a straight answer. Instead, he kept saying what he would have done on January 6.

The interview is a clear example of how most Republican candidates are too scared to criticize Trump—even though they are running against him. Trump is the front-runner by a wide margin, and the other presidential hopefuls can’t afford to alienate his supporters if they want to peel any away from him.

Ramaswamy has also taken several pages from Trump’s playbook. The biotech entrepreneur has openly embraced making Eminem angry, pushing conspiracy theories, caving to autocratic leaders, and using his campaign to evade lawsuits.

Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville thinks that the real threat to military readiness is sailors reading poems, not his blockade on hundreds of military promotions.

The Republican senator has blocked hundreds of promotions since March in protest over the Defense Department’s policy of reimbursing travel costs for service members who have to go out of state for an abortion. The department has warned that the blockade, which has left three branches of the military without official leaders, harms U.S. national security. Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro slammed Tuberville on Tuesday for “aiding and abetting Communist and other autocratic regimes” with his misguided protest.

“Secretary Del Toro of the Navy, he needs to get to building ships, he needs to get to recruiting, and he needs to get wokeness out of our Navy,” Tuberville hit back Wednesday evening, speaking on Fox News. “We’ve got people doing poems on aircraft carriers over the loudspeaker. It is absolutely insane the direction that we’re headed in our military, and we’re headed downhill, not uphill.”

Tuberville has blocked an unprecedented 301 military promotions over the abortion policy, resulting in the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps being led by “acting” military leaders instead of confirmed ones. The Pentagon says the policy will stay in place, and multiple defense officials, including department Secretary Lloyd Austin and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Mark Milley, have warned that Tuberville’s blockade is a threat to military readiness and national security.

The senator, however, continues to falsely insist that his actions do not have a negative impact on the military. He said Tuesday that Del Toro’s comment “makes you feel bad.”

Pentagon spokesman John Kirby had a simple solution. “My best advice to the senator is, if you don’t like being criticized for this outrageous effort to hold up these promotions and advancements, then lift your hold,” he told CNN Tuesday evening.

“If it bothers you that we’re publicly talking about the impacts it’s having—and it is having an impact—then just lift the hold.”

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on Wednesday appointed the co-founder of the far-right group Moms for Liberty to the state ethics commission.

Moms for Liberty is a far-right “parental rights” organization that the Southern Poverty Law Center recently categorized as an extremist group. New DeSantis appointee Tina Descovich co-founded the group in 2021 to push back against Covid-19 restrictions in schools and against classes that teach about nonwhite history and LGBTQ rights.

Descovich tweeted that it was a “privilege” to join the Florida Commission on Ethics. The nine-member commission is tasked with investigating complaints about alleged breaches of trust by state public officers and employees.

What this appointment actually does is give Descovich even more power to target the same groups that Moms for Liberty attacks. Legal expert Alejandra Caraballo warned that Descovich will now “be able to investigate LGBTQ state employees and allies and systematically remove them from state government.”

Appointing Descovich is DeSantis’s latest attack on LGBTQ rights in Florida. He expanded his “Don’t Say Gay” law, banned drag performances in public, and prohibited transgender people from using the bathroom that aligns with their gender identity, among many other policies.

Descovich’s appointment is also a sign of how much power Moms for Liberty wields on the political right. Their recent annual summit featured multiple high-profile speakers, including presidential candidates DeSantis, Donald Trump, Vivek Ramaswamy, Nikki Haley, and Asa Hutchinson.

Ron DeSantis is continuing his spiral into loserdom as his campaign rapidly sheds its biggest donors, according to a new report from Politico published on Wednesday.

Of the 50 top donors who contributed at least $160,000 to DeSantis’s 2022 gubernatorial reelection campaign, fewer than one-third (only 16 people) have contributed to the Never Back Down super PAC. Another eight donors have contributed to DeSantis’s presidential campaign directly, but still, that’s less than half of the total donors who supported him just last year.

Former Governor Bruce Rauner was one of DeSantis’s biggest boosters, having donated nearly $1 million to DeSantis during his 2022 reelection bid. Now Rauner says he’s planning to back another Republican presidential candidate: Nikki Haley.

“I think [DeSantis]’s done a terrific job as governor of Florida, and I’ve been, as I think you know, a big supporter of him in that role,” Rauner said. “I think Nikki Haley probably has the best chance to win the general election.… I think everyone is trying to sort things out. We gotta win, we gotta win the general.”

Last month, Rob Bigelow, the biggest donor to Never Back Down and to DeSantis’s reelection campaign, said that he would hold off from writing more checks for the super PAC until DeSantis adopted more moderate policies and generated more of his own funds.

Five other donors from the list of 50 are now supporting other Republican candidates, and of those who are still donating to DeSantis’s campaign, five are splitting their donations between DeSantis and other candidates.

The DeSantis campaign is still well funded; Never Back Down had nearly $97 million in June, which far surpasses his Republican competition, including Donald Trump. But those funds aren’t from new donors. According to Politico, $82 million of those funds are actually from DeSantis’s reelection campaign.

The DeSantis campaign has been marred by a series of failures and humiliations, which may help to explain his donors’ vanishing act. In July, the DeSantis campaign cut a third of its staff, and in August it replaced its campaign manager. But despite all his attempts at a campaign “reset,” his poll numbers continue to lag. In a CNN poll published Tuesday, DeSantis now trails Trump by a whopping 34 points.