The Shady Company Backing Trump’s Bond Somehow Just Got Even Shadier

It’s conventional wisdom that the right wing is dominated, defined, even, by “grifters all the way down.” No big surprise, then, that the insurance company footing the bill for Donald Trump’s fraud case bond is itself unscrupulous.

An investigation by The Daily Beast revealed that Knight Specialty Insurance, the company backing Trump’s $175 million civil fraud penalty payment, is not licensed as a solvent surety firm by the New York Department of Financial Services, and has not been vetted by the state’s Excess Line Association, a board of insurers that provides voluntary audits of other insurer’s finances. The reason for that: The California-based Knight does not appear to have enough money in its coffers to post Trump’s bonds.

According to the Beast, Trump’s bond accounts for a third of the company’s assets and more than its total surplus funds. Maria T. Vullo, a former New York financial regulator, has called the move to post Trump’s bond “incomprehensible for a carrier to underwrite.”

The company, for its part, seems aware of its predicament: The Beast reports that Knight has not legally promised to pay Trump’s penalty if the former president’s appeal is unsuccessful. Instead, the document Knight produced indicates, Trump would still be responsible for paying.

Knight Specialty Insurance is owned by the “king of the subprime car loan,” right-wing billionaire Don Hankey. Hankey appeared to come to Trump’s rescue after the former president loudly struggled to post in his real estate fraud case.

But now, what appeared to be a stroke of luck for Trump may actually be a case of two grifters looking to get one over on one another. If Hankey’s company in fact has not legally agreed to pay the penalty, Trump may ultimately be forced to forfeit assets if he cannot cover the disgorgement himself. New York Attorney General Letitia James has promised to seize Trump properties if he cannot pay.

In dealing with a shady businessman like Hankey, Trump, whose Department of Justice sued Hankey for illegally repossessing the cars of military veterans, might have heeded the words of one of his favorite poems: “You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in.”

Trump is bringing back his “greatest” hits on immigration in his current presidential campaign.

Remember in 2018, when he referred to immigrants from places such as Haiti as “people from shithole countries” and wondered why more immigrants weren’t coming from places like Norway? Well, at a private fundraiser over the weekend, Trump made a callback to those remarks, once again lamenting where immigrants to America come from.

At a multimillion-dollar event in Palm Beach, Florida, Trump complained that immigrants weren’t coming from “nice” countries “like Denmark,” according to The New York Times, which got an account of the event from one attendee. He even suggested that the wealthy guests at the event, hosted at a mansion owned by billionaire John Paulson, weren’t safe from nearby undocumented immigrants.

“These are people coming in from prisons and jails. They’re coming in from just unbelievable places and countries, countries that are a disaster,” Trump said, the Times reported.

“I said [in 2018], you know, ‘Why can’t we allow people to come in from nice countries, I’m trying to be nice,’” he continued, to reported chuckles from the crowd. “Nice countries, you know like Denmark, Switzerland? Do we have any people coming in from Denmark? How about Switzerland? How about Norway?”

The setting of the event was also interesting: Guests were seated outdoors at white-clothed tables under a white tent, looking out over the body of water that separates wealthy Palm Beach (98.3 percent white, according to census estimates) from the more diverse city of West Palm Beach, where nearly a third of the population is Black and almost a quarter is Hispanic.

“In fact, I don’t think they’re on this island, but I know they’re on that island right there. That’s West Palm,” Trump at one point said during his speech, gesturing across the water. “Congratulations over there. But they’ll be here. Eventually, they’ll be here.”

Trump also mentioned immigrants from the Middle East, noting that immigrants were arriving from Yemen, “where they’re blowing each other up all over the place.”

All of Trump’s rhetoric and policies have been based on racism from the time he began seriously campaigning for president in 2015. Who could forget his first campaign speech, after he descended his golden escalator? He claimed that Mexico was “sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”

Trump either fails to realize or refuses to admit that immigrants move to different countries for better lives, For example, his preferred origin for immigrants, Denmark, ranks sixth in the world in the United Nations’ Human Development Index, which is based on factors such as life expectancy, literacy rate, access to electricity, GDP per capita, income inequality, and others. In contrast, the U.S. is ranked twentieth.

Donald Trump on Monday publicly announced his long-awaited decision on a potential national abortion policy, satisfying no one and leaving both parties up in arms.

In a video posted to Truth Social, Trump boasted about the Supreme Court ending Roe v. Wade during his term, smeared Democrats as “the radical ones on this issue,” erroneously accused the left of supporting “execution after birth,” and finally staked out a position on an issue he’s said little about publicly. The big reveal: The legality of abortion should be left for the states to decide, with supposed exceptions for rape, incest, or to save the patient’s life. This is, of course, more an acknowledgment of the law as it currently exists post-Roe than a position on a potential federal abortion ban. 

Understandably, the announcement enraged abortion rights activists, who argue that Trump’s endorsement of states’ right to outlaw abortion effectively hands red state governments a blank check to pass the most extreme anti-abortion laws in the country, like those already on the books in Texas, Florida, and Idaho. Advocates have rightly argued that the so-called exceptions for rape, incest, or the patient’s health trumpeted by the Republican presidential nominee are effectively toothless window dressing, since the bans have a chilling effect on doctors who fear legal backlash for performing any abortions. As abortion rights activists also pointed out, the video left unsaid whether Trump would sign a national ban if congressional Republicans successfully brought a bill  to his desk.

But the right is also up in arms. The anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, or SBA, claimed to be “deeply disappointed” in Trump’s position in a press release. In leaving abortion to the states, President Marjorie Dannenfelser argues, Republicans “[cede] the national debate to Democrats.” Republicans who support anything less than a national ban are in bed with the “abortion industry” and want to popularize exceedingly rare late-term abortions, Dannenfelser said, echoing Trump’s false claim.

Trump had been conspicuously quiet on the abortion debate prior to Monday’s announcement, although he privately floated national 16- and 15-week bans. But even as he demurred from publicly supporting the kind of national prohibition favored by groups such as SBA (and faced criticism from other Republicans for refusing to endorse a federal ban), he has consistently taken credit for the state bans passed in the aftermath of Dobbs v. Jackson. 

Now, however, with his official position no longer a secret, and with the brutal implications of Dobbs made evident across the country, Trump can no longer play coy on the issue. And outraged though extremist anti-abortion groups may be with Trump at the moment, it’s clear that the right’s assault on abortion rights is just beginning. 

Between the 4.8 magnitude earthquake that rocked a swath of the Northeast on Friday and the total solar eclipse expected just a few days later, conspiracy theorists are abounding with fodder. But some of the people leading the mass speculation are a little too close to national politics for comfort.

Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene—who famously claimed that Jewish space lasers were the cause of the California wildfires–got dangerously religious on Friday, posting on social media that the two geological events should be heeded as an omen from God.

“God is sending America strong signs to tell us to repent,” Greene wrote on X. “Earthquakes and eclipses and many more things to come. I pray that our country listens.”

That claim was quickly amended by the platform’s community notes function, which clarified that “Monday’s eclipse was predicted hundreds of years ago, it will not have been caused by contemporary actions,” and that “earthquakes occur naturally and happen (on average) more than 30 times a day across the world, although many are too subtle to feel.” But flagging the truth didn’t stop Greene’s theory from gaining traction online and circulating through the far-right ecosystem.

Greene did not comment on what it might mean that the earthquake’s epicenter was just a few miles from Donald Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey.

But Greene isn’t the only major figure of the American right on board with this. Earlier in the week, InfoWars owner Alex Jones argued that Monday’s solar spectacle will be a government “dress rehearsal” for enacting martial law, which he predicts will occur if Donald Trump wins the election in November.

“All this is, is a dress rehearsal,” Jones said on his podcast. “No government in modern times... have ever acted like this for a solar eclipse.”

Eclipses and other seismic phenomena have conjured religious and conspiratorial speculation going back to ancient times, so, in truth, the theories—and the people attempting to profit or materially gain off them—are nothing new.

“There are so many of them,” cult mediation specialist, Patrick Ryan, explained to Salon. “There are the purveyors like Alex Jones, who make money off these, then religious folks, who put together a story that can somehow make sense of the world, and it’s not new.”

Still, it might be time to remind ourselves of the necessity of the U.S. Constitution’s establishment clause: the separation of church and state.

A group of House Democrats came up with the perfect response on Friday to a Republican-backed measure to rename the Washington, D.C.-area Dulles International Airport after Donald Trump.

Whether it was an act of sycophancy or just plain trolling, House Republicans introduced a bill last week to rename the airport to Donald J. Trump International Airport. House Democrats weren’t happy with the measure, the airport’s inducement of misery notwithstanding.

Among them was Representative Gerry Connolly, who said, “Donald Trump is facing 91 felony charges. If Republicans want to name something after him, I’d suggest they find a federal prison.”

On Friday, Connolly, whose Virginia district neighbors Dulles, decided to put his words into action, co-sponsoring a bill with Representatives Jared Moskowitz and John Garamendi to rename Miami Federal Correctional Institution in Florida to Donald J. Trump Federal Correctional Institution.

“When our Republican colleagues introduced their bill to rename Dulles after Donald Trump, I said the more fitting option would be to rename a federal prison,” Connolly said in a statement. “It is only right that the closest federal prison to Mar-a-Lago should bear his name. I hope our Republican friends will join us in bestowing upon Donald J. Trump the only honor he truly deserves.”

The name change would be fitting, considering Trump’s numerous criminal charges. He is on trial in New York for hush money payments, in Florida for mishandling classified documents, and in Fulton County, Georgia, as well as Washington, D.C., for attempting to interfere with the 2020 presidential election. In February, he was ordered to pay the state of New York more than $350 million for bank fraud.

“Everyone knows President Trump loves to write his name in gold letters on all his buildings,” Moskowitz said. “But he’s never had his name on a federal building before, and as a public servant, I just want to help the former president. Help us make that dream a reality.”

Trump’s Florida and Washington, D.C. cases happen to be in federal court, making a federal prison all the more appropriate to bear his name. At the state level, Trump only has a run down, poor excuse for a state park in New York named after him.