Trump Wants to Give Vivek Ramaswamy a Terrifying Spot in His Cabinet

Donald Trump continues to pick the absolute worst people for the Cabinet in his potential second term, as he is now considering Vivek Ramaswamy for homeland security secretary.

Ramaswamy was reportedly on the short list as Trump’s running mate, but that is now off the table, Bloomberg reported Tuesday. Instead, Trump personally told the biotech entrepreneur that he is considering him for other roles, including head of the Department of Homeland Security.

Some Trump allies, speaking anonymously, said Ramaswamy would be perfect for the role because he has good public speaking skills and is the son of Indian immigrants, which they believe could buffer the administration against criticism of Trump’s planned draconian immigration restrictions.

If only Ramaswamy were actually good at policymaking too. The former Republican primary hopeful had some horrific plans for immigration law, including using the military as law enforcement. He promised to deport all Dreamers, of whom there are about 700,000, and force them to reapply for citizenship.

Ramaswamy also had some objectively terrible ideas for foreign policy. He said that if he were elected, he would let China invade Taiwan after 2028 and he would let Russia keep the parts of Ukraine that it currently occupies.

But Trump isn’t evaluating possible Cabinet members on their actual policy chops. He’s looking for loyalty, ideological compatibility, and potential appeal to voters, Bloomberg reported, citing anonymous sources. And in that regard, Ramaswamy is a perfect fit.

Ramaswamy modeled himself after Trump on the campaign trail, pushing baseless conspiracy theories and even using his campaign as an excuse to dodge legal battles. Although he had criticized Trump in the past, he suddenly refused to explain those comments, instead spinning them to push conspiracy theories.

Donald Trump filed a lawsuit against ABC News and one of its lead anchors, George Stephanopoulos, on Tuesday, arguing that the news network got it all wrong in the coverage of his E. Jean Carroll case—he’s just a sexual abuser.

The suit hinges on particular legal phrasing stemming from New York’s penal code. In a Tuesday filing, Trump’s attorneys argued that Stephanopoulos had wrongly cited Trump’s judgment in an interview earlier this month, in which the anchor questioned Representative Nancy Mace on endorsing Trump, even though he had been “found liable for rape.” Mace has said she’s a survivor herself.

“Given that this was the first question of the interview, combined with the intensity and persistence of the questioning engaged in by Stephanopoulos of an actual rape victim, it was clear that Stephanopoulos maliciously intended to convince his viewers of a falsity, i.e. that plaintiff had been found liable for rape,” they wrote.

It’s unclear how the verbiage will play out in court, though Trump’s unexpected specificity flies in the face of another precedent set by the court. In July, Judge Lewis Kaplan clarified that although New York penal law has a “far narrower” definition of rape, the jury still found Trump to have raped Carroll in the modern sense of the word.

“The finding that Ms. Carroll failed to prove that she was ‘raped’ within the meaning of the New York Penal Law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape,’” Kaplan wrote at the time.

“Indeed, as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that [rape, as ‘commonly’ understood].”

Trump’s sudden focus on language comes at a time when he’s scrambling to pay up on his $454 million judgment from his New York bank fraud trial, which is still on the rise, accruing more than $100,000 in interest with each passing day. In a filing to a New York appeals court on Monday, Trump’s attorneys announced that they had been unable to secure a bond to cover the massive legal penalty for committing widespread fraud related to Trump’s real estate operation. More than 30 suretors reportedly refused to accept Trump’s real estate assets as collateral, instead demanding upward of $1 billion to offer the bond—which Trump says he and his businesses just don’t have. That announcement came part in parcel with a ginormous ask by team Trump: Let Trump appeal the case without paying up at all, and maintain the stay that will allow him to continue borrowing money from New York financial institutions. We’ll see how that one works out for him.

Donald Trump appears to have cut Alina Habba out of a recent legal settlement, leaving one of his most prominent attorneys vulnerable to being sued for fraud.

Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, paid $82,500 last week to settle a lawsuit brought by former waitress Alice Bianco, who alleged that she was tricked into an unfair hush-money deal after being sexually harassed by a supervisor. The settlement contract included a bizarre and hugely significant line that stated both “parties agree that Alina Habba is not a party to this release,” The Daily Beast reported Tuesday.

This could prove dangerous for Habba, because according to the original lawsuit, she posed as a concerned friend to Bianco and offered her free legal advice about how to proceed regarding the harassment. But Habba quickly turned around, leveraging the relationship and “fraudulently inducing” Bianco to “quickly agree to unconscionable and illegal terms”—and ingratiating herself with Trump in the process, according to the lawsuit.

“My client is certainly considering suing her for fraud,” Bianco’s lawyer Nancy Erika Smith told the Beast last week. She said she was already in touch with Habba’s personal attorney.

In fact, Bianco is also gearing up to sue Bedminster again. The settlement, which Bianco signed on March 4, allows her to keep her minuscule $15,000 hush-money payment from 2021. Her lawyer won her the $82,500 settlement, and Bianco can throw out her nondisclosure agreement.

“We got everything we asked for,” Smith said. “We asked to void the agreement, that she not pay back. I didn’t want her to pay me a dime. So we got that. And she still has the right to sue Alina Habba for fraud. And she has the right to sue the club for sexual harassment.”

According to the original lawsuit, Bianco hired a lawyer to advise her about work, where a manager was trying to pressure her to have sex. She alleges Habba, one of her regulars at the club, quickly buddied up to the then 21-year-old waitress and began offering her legal advice. Text messages show Habba reached out to Bianco and met with her multiple times, denigrating Bianco’s lawyer, pushing her to keep things quiet, and promising to protect her against retaliation.

Bianco ended up signing an NDA that paid her $15,000 on the condition she never mention the harassment to anyone, not even another lawyer. If she did, she would lose it all and owe the club $1,000 a day. But eight months later, in April 2022, Bianco realized the NDA money would be taxed, significantly reducing what she’d get to take home.

When she reached back out to Habba for help, the lawyer kept Bianco at arm’s length, insisting she couldn’t provide legal advice. What Habba did not say was by that point, she was representing Trump in multiple lawsuits, including against his cousin Mary Trump and a group of New York Times journalists for their investigation into his taxes and the New York attorney general’s probe into his finances for bank fraud.

Trump lost both cases. He owes $400,000 to the Times journalists and $467 million (and counting) to the city of New York for real estate–related fraud.

The Bedminster club has sought to distance itself from Habba, insisting she wasn’t involved in the hush-money proceedings. But as Smith pointed out, “How did Habba know [the club] would pay $15,000 to [Bianco] if she was not acting on [the club’s] behalf?”

“The fact that Habba delivered a check from [the club] in the amount she suggested is a clear manifestation of the authority given to her,” Smith said in court documents.

Habba has garnered national attention for her aggressive defense tactics in Trump’s multiple lawsuits—and for how often those strategies blow up in her face. In Trump’s second trial against E. Jean Carroll, the presiding judge lectured Habba multiple times, even questioning her juridical knowledge.

In just shy of a week, Donald Trump’s $454 million judgment from his New York bank fraud trial will become collectible, either by way of liquid cash or financial assets—and it has officially sent Trump into meltdown mode.

The notoriously sleep-deprived GOP presidential nominee spent the better part of Monday night shouting into the void about the massive, half-billion-dollar judgment and his apparent inability to pay it off, bemoaning being required to follow the law before being allowed to appeal the case.

“I would be forced to mortgage or sell Great Assets, perhaps at Fire Sale prices, and if and when I win the Appeal, they would be gone. Does that make sense? WITCH HUNT. ELECTION INTERFERENCE!” Trump posted Tuesday morning.

“I shouldn’t have to put up any money, being forced by the Corrupt Judge and AG, until the end of the appeal. That’s the way system works!” he added, forgetting that he’s being held to the same standards as every private citizen.

The real estate mogul was also having a hard time letting go of one particular nagging detail from the trial: the court’s $18 million evaluation for Trump’s primary residence, the Palm Beach resort Mar-a-Lago.

“The only FRAUD in the Peekaboo James case, our failed and disgusting New York State Attorney General, was her convincing ‘Judge’ Arthur Engoron to put a value on Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, Florida, of just $18,000,000, when it is worth 50 to 100 times that amount. This was fraudulently and illegally done, working closely together in a corrupt Communist system, to set their NARRATIVE after learning that their Values and Facts were completely wrong,” Trump posted, adding that he paid $300 million in taxes—though the public will never be sure of that last point, since Trump famously refused a presidential tradition of turning over his tax returns for examination prior to entering the Oval Office.

In a filing to a New York appeals court on Monday, Trump’s attorneys announced that they had been unable to secure a bond to cover the massive legal penalty for committing widespread fraud related to Trump’s real estate operation. Attorneys for the Trump Organization told the court that over the last several weeks, they had attempted to work with four different brokers and approached 30 suretors (people or institutions willing to take on the primary responsibility of the debt) to no avail. They simply wouldn’t accept Trump’s real estate as collateral, instead accepting only liquid cash to the tune of $1 billion, which the self-purported billionaire said he and his businesses just don’t have, according to the filing.

“A bond of the size set by the Democrat Club-controlled Judge, in Corrupt, Racist Letitia James’ unlawful Witch Hunt, is unConstitutional, un-American, unprecedented, and practically impossible for ANY Company, including one as successful as mine. The Bonding Companies have never heard of such a bond, of this size, before, nor do they have the ability to post such a bond, even if they wanted to,” Trump moaned on Monday night.

MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell doesn’t seem to be so confident in his election conspiracies these days.

The floundering businessman took to Steve Bannon’s podcast on Monday to push his latest theory that the United States needs to outlaw electronic voting machines. The current suit, led by failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, is being underwritten by the pillow salesman. After admitting the effort is a total long shot and his evidence did not “shock the world,” as he had promised, Lindell decided to ask supporters if they could foot his legal bill.

“It’s an emergency injunction to expedite this case,” Lindell told Bannon. “What’s gonna come out now will be all the declarations and all the evidence to back up the case. So this is the second part of it. This was very much planned by our lawyers.”

“Because the media right now is out there,” he continued. “It hasn’t really reached the masses of the media, but the ones that are out there are trying to discredit [it]. ‘Well, there’s nothing behind this.’ It’s coming, all the declarations.”

If you see the whole hullabaloo as a totally pointless waste of money, you’d be right—especially because Arizona already uses paper ballots and requires election officials to do hand counts of random batches of votes just to make sure the ballots match the machine tallies.

The former millionaire spent months using every platform at his disposal to seed conspiracy theories following the 2020 presidential election, including against Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic, claiming the electronic voting companies were complicit in a scheme to keep Donald Trump from retaking the White House. That, however, cost Lindell $5 million and put him on the line in a $1.3 billion defamation suit brought by Dominion, in which he’s being sued not just for spreading the lies but also for attempting to profit from them. Lindell, of course, has a plan for that—he’s going to use the Supreme Court to defend himself with his new crowdfunded legal fund.

“But Steve, all this evidence, this new evidence is gonna be used far and wide,” he told the far-right host. “There’s cases out there, as you know, Mike Lindell and MyPillow getting sued for billions of dollars.”