“Belongs in Jail”: Billionaire Republican Donor Warns Against Trump

A hedge fund billionaire and GOP megadonor has a message for voters: Stay clear of Trump.

Leon Cooperman, chairman and CEO of Omega Advisors, blasted the former president in a call with CNN last week, insisting that Trump cannot return to the Oval Office.

“It would be terrible for the country if Donald Trump were reelected,” Cooperman told CNN in a phone interview late last week. “He’s a divisive human being who belongs in jail.”

Trump is currently staring down 91 felony charges across four criminal cases, including 44 federal charges and 47 state charges. Trump has denied wrongdoing in all of them.

It’s not the first time that Cooperman has gone on the attack with Trump. Last year, the CEO told the PBD Podcast that he would rather take a chance with progressives than put a “would-be dictator into a second term where he has no allegiance to anybody but himself.”

Cooperman admitted he “reluctantly” voted for President Joe Biden in the 2020 election, but he has a long history of supporting the political ambitions of right-wing candidates, including the late Senator John McCain, Senator Marco Rubio, former President George W. Bush, and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, according to OpenSecrets.

Cooperman also said that both Biden and Trump are “bad choices,” making a long-shot prediction that neither of them will be their party’s nominee this time next year. If they reach the ballot, however, he told CNN he won’t vote.

Instead, the executive is hunting for a more centrist option. According to Federal Election Commission records, in August Cooperman donated $1,000 to the 2024 presidential campaign of former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who himself has come out in full force against Trump’s candidacy.

President Joe Biden’s stance on Israel has caused his support levels among Arab Americans to plummet, a result that could cost him a key swing state (or several) in the 2024 presidential election.

Since fighting broke out between Israel and Palestine, Biden has pledged total support to Tel Aviv. He only recently changed his stance to call for a humanitarian pause—instead of a complete cease-fire—so that aid can enter Gaza and foreigners can evacuate.

His position could cost him dearly. A poll conducted by the Arab American Institute following the outbreak of violence in Palestine and Israel found that support for Biden among Arab Americans has more than halved since 2020.

Just 17 percent of Arab American voters support the president, down from 59 percent during the previous election cycle—a 42 percent drop. Two-thirds of Arab Americans disagree with Biden’s response to the violence in Israel and Palestine.

“This is the most dramatic shift over the shortest period of time that I’ve ever seen,” James Zogby, the founder and president of the Arab American Institute, told Time.

This shift could cost not just Biden but the entire Democratic Party the election in 2024. The largest Arab American community lives in Dearborn, Michigan, a crucial battleground state. There are smaller populations in Pennsylvania and Georgia, both of which are still larger than Biden’s 2020 margin of victory in those states.

More than half of Arab Americans voted for Biden in 2020, but now, community leaders are turning on him. “Just changing his tone—that’s not enough,” Sami Khaldi, the president of the Dearborn Democratic Club and a former 2020 Biden delegate, said to Time about Biden’s new call for a humanitarian pause.

“Every president comes here and says the best solution for the Middle East crisis is to have a two-state solution, but you don’t see anyone have the courage to do it. We need him to do that.”

Vivek Ramaswamy’s recent take on Ukraine was enough to boggle Piers Morgan’s mind.

In an interview released Monday, the GOP presidential candidate claimed that if elected, he would give Russian President Vladimir Putin “a deal” that would effectively hand over the annexed sections of Ukraine.

“Here’s the deal: He has to exit his military alliance with Xi Jinping. End the Russia-China military alliance,” Ramaswamy said. “In return, what they get is a hard commitment that NATO will not admit Ukraine to NATO.”

“And then, here, we’d freeze the current lines of control,” Ramaswamy quickly threw in.

That idea shocked even the controversial news host, whose eyes shot wide open.

“You would give Putin everything he’s stolen?” asked Morgan.

“I’m not going to give him anything, I’m giving him a deal,” Ramaswamy retorted, vaguely justifying the notion by noting that those regions are predominantly Russian-speaking while acknowledging that Putin is an “evil dictator.”

Recent polling shows that Ramaswamy’s hypnotic hold over some GOP voters is beginning to fade. A Des Moines Register poll published Monday found that the share of Iowa voters who view him unfavorably shot up from 20 percent to 37 percent.

“Anecdotally, several voters I’ve talked to in New Hampshire say that they were considering Ramaswamy early on but the more they hear from him the less they like him,” tweeted The Washington Post reporter Meryl Kornfield.

Senate Democrats have finally taken the first steps to address the ethics crisis rocking the Supreme Court.

The Senate Judiciary Committee announced Monday that it will seek to subpoena Republican billionaire megadonor Harlan Crow and ultraconservative activist Leonard Leo. Both men feature prominently in the ethics scandal for their relationships with Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. The committee will also seek to subpoena wealthy GOP donor Robin Arkley II.

“The Supreme Court is in an ethical crisis of its own making,” the committee said in a statement. “In order to adequately address this crisis, it is imperative that we understand the full extent of how people with interests before the Court are able to use undisclosed gifts to gain private access to the justices.”

All three men have so far either refused to cooperate with the committee’s investigation or offered to share an insufficient amount of information. The committee could authorize the subpoenas after a vote as soon as next week.

Crow, a Republican billionaire megadonor and Nazi memorabilia collector, has repeatedly lavished Thomas with expensive gifts. These include island-hopping yacht vacations, private school tuition for Thomas’s nephew, and buying and renovating a Thomas family property, where Thomas’s mother still lives.

Thomas has also been Crow’s guest at Bohemian Grove, which ProPublica describes as a “secretive all-men’s retreat in Northern California” that attracts major corporate and political players. It costs thousands of dollars for a member to bring a guest to the Grove, but Crow has reportedly brought Thomas there almost every year for the past two decades.

Thomas’s visits to the Grove helped him develop a relationship with the Koch brothers. Thomas has participated in events for the Koch donor network for at least a decade. All of his appearances were arranged with the help of dark-money king Leo.

In addition to securing Thomas’s goodwill, Leo also helped organize a luxury vacation that Alito went on. Neither Thomas nor Alito have disclosed any of these lavish gifts on their financial statements.

The Supreme Court does not have a formal code of ethics. Since the Thomas and Alito scandals broke, many people have called on the court to establish an ethics code to help prevent such situations in the future. Six of the justices have resisted such a move, with Alito being one of the most vocal. But Elena Kagan, Amy Coney Barrett, and Brett Kavanaugh have all backed implementing such a code.

The Senate Judiciary Committee advanced a bill in midsummer that would require the justices to adopt a code of ethics, create new financial disclosure rules, and establish a process for submitting and investigating ethics complaints against the justices. But the bill has not yet gone up for debate, and it will have a hard time passing the chamber, where Democrats have only a razor-thin majority.

Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has a message for Republican voters holding out for Donald Trump: It’s time to stop.

Christie’s warning comes days after news that Mark Meadows, Trump’s last chief of staff and so-called “special friend,” flipped against his former boss, dishing dirty details on election fraud claims in exchange for immunity. It’ll be Meadows’s testimony, according to Christie, that seals Trump’s fate.

“This is deadly. It’s done. He’s going to be convicted. It’s over,” Christie told MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough on Tuesday, describing Meadows as someone “velcroed to Trump’s hip” through the entire 2020 campaign and beyond.

In several alleged meetings with special counsel Jack Smith’s team this year, Meadows told federal investigators that Trump knew he was lying when he claimed he won, mere hours after the polls closed on election night. To this day, Meadows said he has yet to see any evidence of election fraud.

“I think everybody watching needs to understand from somebody who did this work for seven years, you don’t give Mark Meadows immunity unless the evidence he has is unimpeachable,” Christie noted.

And Christie believes Trump knows it too. The 2024 GOP presidential candidate pointed to a flurry of Trump’s recent gaffes and verbal slipups on the campaign trail as evidence of heightened stress following the news of Meadows’s deal.

“I want all Republican voters to understand this, what’s going to be happening in March,” Christie said. “He’s going to be sitting in a courtroom in Washington, D.C., with Mark Meadows 20 feet away from him, saying, he committed crimes in front of me, on my watch.”

A onetime Trump attorney thinks the former president’s social media addiction might be the end for him in his legal trials.

Throughout October, Trump has been slapped with multiple gag orders for threatening and insulting court staff and witnesses in his various legal cases—though that hasn’t been enough to stop him.

So far, Trump has been fined twice for violating the gag order in his $250 million New York bank fraud trial, but he also faces the real possibility of being jailed if he continues his antics, warned Judge Arthur Engoron.

Meanwhile, in his federal election subversion trial in Washington, D.C., Trump slammed Judge Tanya Chutkan and a potential witness, former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr, just hours after his gag order was reinstated on Monday. In posts to Truth Social, Trump described Barr as “​​dumb, weak, slow-moving, lethargic, gutless, and lazy.”

That kind of behavior will probably be enough to lock him up, according to Ty Cobb, a former Trump attorney and current partner at the law firm Hogan Lovells.

In an interview with CNN, Cobb argued that the violations in the New York trial, which are a civil matter, aren’t as “consequential” as the criminal conspiracy charges he faces in D.C.

“I think she’ll come in with a much heavier penalty and, ultimately, he’ll spend a night or a weekend in jail,” Cobb said.

“I think it’ll take that to stop it,” he added.

Ty Cobb was a part of the Trump administration legal team from July 2017 until May 2018 and managed matters related to special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. Cobb later described Mueller as an “American hero.”

Cobb has since commented several times on Trump’s ongoing legal woes—in August, the attorney told CNN that the evidence against the former president is “so overwhelming” in the classified documents case, describing it as “tight.” In September, Cobb likened Trump to a “mob boss.”

Ron DeSantis was knocked back on his heels by a new allegation, and his attempts to sidestep the matter failed miserably.

The Republican presidential hopeful has for weeks sparked theories that he’s wearing lifts inside his cowboy boots to make himself appear taller. Internet users and shoe experts alike point to the bizarre fit of DeSantis’s boots and his apparent struggle to walk in them. The Florida governor’s campaign team has vehemently denied the accusations.

But DeSantis was caught flat-footed Monday during an appearance on the PBD Podcast. Host Patrick Bet-David brought up the internet’s theory and showed DeSantis some videos that internet jokesters had edited to show how they thought DeSantis was essentially standing on tiptoes in his boots.

“What are they—I don’t even—I haven’t seen that,” DeSantis said, a little too fast.

Bet-David then produced a pair of flat designer shoes, which he said he had bought for DeSantis so the governor could try them on and prove how tall he is.

“I don’t accept gifts. I can’t accept it,” DeSantis said in an awkward monotone.

If DeSantis and the 1999 Yale baseball roster are to be believed, DeSantis is 5-foot-11. It’s also understandable why he would want to appear tall at all costs. Taller candidates generally (although not always) perform better, but more importantly, DeSantis is facing off against Donald Trump. Trump loves to describe people as “little” as a form of, well, belittlement.

Unfortunately, this could be a massive missed opportunity for DeSantis. If he is shorter, he could embrace his short king status, call Trump out for body-shaming, and seek to prove that good things come in small packages. If the shoe fits, wear it, right?

Instead, whatever he’s doing is just creating an incredibly strange, clown-like effect. As menswear expert Derek Guy wrote in Politico, whether or not he has lifts in his boots, DeSantis is still wearing really terribly fitting boots. Guy spoke with three bootmaking-industry veterans, and all  agreed that DeSantis’s boots are far too wide around his calves. The heels are low and the toes turn up abnormally high. The boots bulge and crease in weird places.

All of these things could be signs that DeSantis simply needs to get his feet re-measured—or that he shoved some lifts into his boots.

House Republicans tacked on a pretty unusual addendum to their aid package for Israel: In exchange for $14.3 billion to the U.S. ally, the GOP wants to cut $14.3 billion from the IRS budget.

The spending cut is not just an unusual addition to an emergency aid package, it will also likely backfire for the party platform as it may very well increase the national deficit. Democrats are expected to reject the bill outright.

The effort, however, underscores exactly how extreme the Republican Party has gotten, particularly under Speaker Mike Johnson’s new leadership.

“We’re going to have to pay for it. We’re not just going to print money and send it overseas,” Johnson told Fox’s Kayleigh McEnany, arguing that standing with the “innocent” in Israel is more aligned with the national interest than “IRS agents.”

As it stands, the bill would gut additional IRS funding allocated in the Inflation Reduction Act. The cuts would target parts of an IRS expansion that include tax enforcement, operations support, free filing for taxpayers, an office of tax policy, and tax court, reported The Washington Post’s Jeff Stein. The Congressional Budget Office has repeatedly warned that cutting IRS funding will encourage tax cheating and increase the deficit. The CBO has also estimated that the Inflation Reduction Act’s $80 billion IRS expansion will actually reduce the deficit by more than $100 billion.

“The IRS has recovered over $100 million in unpaid taxes from the wealthy and well-connected in the last month. Yet, in the chaotic world of my Republican colleagues, they view this funding as a never-ending well to promulgate their whims of ‘fiscal responsibility,’ protect billionaires and wealthy corporations, and ultimately, cost taxpayers more,” Representative Richard Neal told Fox News’s Chad Pergram.

Senate leadership also torpedoed the bill, arguing that apart from the unlikely spending cut, Congress should be focusing on passing an all-inclusive emergency aid package for U.S. allies around the globe.

“We believe, our Democratic Caucus, we should be doing all of it together: Israel, Ukraine, South Pacific, etc. And obviously a pay-for like that makes it much harder to pass,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, according to Politico.

House Speaker Mike Johnson turned heads on Monday when a website hosting his podcast and church sermons suddenly vanished. Still, Johnson hasn’t been able to completely scrub his prior social media presence, with some evidence of his lectures still floating around online, including a three-hour sermon organized by his wife’s ministry that blasts the newly elected’s Christian fundamentalism.

The contents of his evangelical musings—which he apparently wants to hide—offer revealing details about the little-known congressman, including that he doesn’t really believe in democracy.

“By the way, the United States is not a democracy. Do you know what a democracy is? Two wolves and a sheep deciding what’s for dinner. You don’t want to be in a democracy. Majority rule: not always a good thing,” Johnson said at the First Baptist Church of Haughton, Louisiana, in 2019.

Johnson has also attacked the idea of social services, claiming that the only entity entitled to provide care is the church, not the government.

“I was in South America two weeks ago and they were talking about how … the Catholic Church used to provide soup kitchens and orphanages and do all this stuff and it doesn’t do it anymore and now they’re just willfully, everybody’s willfully, having the civil government take all these responsibilities over. And it’s just a sad development because that’s not how it’s supposed to work,” Johnson said.

In other comments, the Louisiana congressman claimed that the “immigration crisis” is because refugees won’t “assimilate” to the “rule of law”—as in, gaining citizenship—while failing to acknowledge the complicated, lengthy, and expensive process required to become a U.S. citizen. Ultimately, according to Johnson, the failure falls on the refugees’ lack of Christian faith.

“The reason that illegal immigration is such a crisis, such a problem is because you have a lot of God-fearing folks and rule-abiding people who are following the law,” Johnson said, going on to celebrate America’s long history of immigration.

“That’s our origin. But at some point, if the rule of law is eviscerated in that process, the whole system topples. And we’re dangerously close to that right now, because why? We ain’t following the Bible’s rules on this,” Johnson added.

Johnson earned the gavel by a unanimous vote from House Republicans on Wednesday. The resolution came after 22 days of congressional chaos and several failed votes to elect more prominent party members to the role, including Representative Jim Jordan and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, who failed to unify the party.

Ohio Republican officials purged the voter registrations of almost 27,000 residents, just weeks before the state was set to vote on whether to enshrine the right to abortion in the Constitution.

Secretary of State Frank LaRose ordered that 26,666 voter registrations be purged in late September. He did not publicly announce his decision at the time and only acknowledged it when local outlets began reporting it last week. Those who were purged cannot re-register to vote in time for the abortion ballot measure on November 7. The deadline to register for the upcoming election was October 10.

LaRose had told county boards over the summer to pause any purges ahead of an August special election, in which Republicans sought to raise the threshold for ballot initiatives to 60 percent of votes. After that attempt ended in resounding failure, LaRose charged ahead with purging voter registrations.

Democratic state Representative Bride Rose Sweeney slammed LaRose’s move as “a purge of choice.”

“Since you insist on purging voters, the very least you can do is wait until after the election to do it,” she said in an October 26 letter to the secretary of state. “You even stopped the purge before the August 2023 election, but now that our reproductive rights, our very lives, are on the November ballot, you have rushed to purge voters.”

LaRose pushed back, insisting on October 26 that they had only removed inactive registrations “after we’ve learned a voter has moved & not been active at that address for more than FOUR YEARS.”

But LaRose’s refusal to be transparent around his decision should come as no surprise. He and his fellow state Republicans have been actively working to undermine local democracy over the abortion referendum.

Abortion is currently legal in Ohio until about 22 weeks, although not for lack of GOP efforts after Roe v. Wade was overturned. Next week’s amendment would allow people to decide for themselves about all reproductive health.

Republicans initially tried to raise the threshold for constitutional amendments to a 60 percent vote, instead of a simple majority. This would have paved the way for minority rule in the state. The state GOP argued the amendment was needed to protect the state Constitution from the influence of special interest groups, but LaRose later admitted the move was “100 percent” about blocking the abortion amendment.

LaRose is running to win the Republican nomination for Senate against Democrat Sherrod Brown. His campaign has also begun to indicate it might be open to extremist stances on election integrity. LaRose endorsed Donald Trump earlier this year—a departure from his strategy in 2020.

His campaign recently appeared to issue a veiled threat to Trump, urging him to endorse LaRose back. A source close to LaRose’s campaign, speaking anonymously, hinted to HuffPost that it would behoove Trump to back LaRose.

“If you are the president and you are fighting four legal battles, most of them centered around the validity of the election—and you’re most likely going to be on the general election ballot in a state you cannot win the White House without—are you going to do anything to antagonize the guy counting the votes?” the person said.

This article has been updated.