“Blockbuster Trump Story”: Witness Reveals How Hush-Money All Began

A major witness in Donald Trump’s hush-money trial confirmed a key text message that set off the controversial payments.

Keith Davidson, who was previously the lawyer for both Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, took the stand in Trump’s trial on Tuesday. Davidson, notably, was also responsible for transferring the $130,000 hush-money payment to Daniels.

During the trial, Davidson read aloud some texts he sent in June 2016 to Dylan Howard, then National Enquirer’s editor in chief and chief of content for its parent company, American Media Inc.

“I have a blockbuster Trump story,” Davidson texted Howard at the time, referring to the story of Trump and McDougal’s affair.

“Talk first thing,” Howard replied. “I will get you more than anyone for it, you know why.”

Three days later, Howard followed up. “Did [Trump] cheat on Melania?” he texted Davidson. “Do you know if the affair was during his marriage to Melania?”

“I really cannot say yet. Sorry,” Davidson replied.

“OK. Keep me informed,” Howard texted.

The text messages between the two also reveal that Howard flew out to meet McDougal and Davidson for an in-person meeting just a few days later to discuss the story.

The most interesting part of Davidson’s testimony? Howard’s text message: “I will get you more than anyone for it, you know why.” As previous witnesses have also confirmed, the Enquirer was willing to pay handsomely to bury the McDougal story, all to help Trump just before the election.

Donald Trump is mad at his attorney Todd Blanche, and is complaining about him constantly.

The New York Times, citing four anonymous sources, reports that the former president is mad that Blanche isn’t following his instructions closely in his hush-money trial, and isn’t being aggressive enough. Trump reportedly wants to see Blanche attacking witnesses, the judge, and even the jury pool in the case more often.

But if Blanche isn’t being aggressive, it might be for a good reason. The attorney has already been reprimanded once for trying to defend Trump against a gag order, claiming that Trump’s posts on Truth Social didn’t violate the order. That drew the ire of Judge Juan Merchan.

“Mr. Blanche, you are losing all credibility with the court,” Merchan warned last week.

The Times article mentions that Trump often vents about not having someone like Roy Cohn, his former infamous lawyer who had a reputation for ruthlessness and dirty tricks. Trump’s complaints track with the rest of his poor record with lawyers. Trump has a history of failing to pay his lawyers, who also tend to quit often. The top lawyer in his classified documents case, Evan Corcoran, quit just a few months ago. Two other lawyers left his legal team last year amid reports of infighting. At least one lawyer on his legal team, Alina Habba, says she was chosen for her looks over her intelligence, and her bizarre defenses of the former president seem to confirm that.

Blanche, a white-collar criminal defense lawyer and former federal prosecutor, has been representing Trump since June, and has previously represented other figures in Trump’s orbit, such as his 2016 campaign manager Paul Manafort and Igor Fruman, an associate of Rudy Giuliani. He has a tall order in defending Trump from 34 felony charges for allegedly paying off adult film actress Stormy Daniels to cover up an affair prior to the 2016 election. If he’s not performing to Trump’s liking, he might not last much longer.

While even top GOP lawmakers are yielding to the will of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, at least one Republican who used to work in Trump’s White House says she has to vote for the other guy.

Former White House deputy press secretary Sarah Matthews torched Trump and the dissenting conservatives who’ve bent their knee to him in recent months, telling MSNBC that it’s “really frustrating” because “a lot of Republicans” that she has spoken to, including top elected officials, “will bash him privately, but many of them will not even say it publicly.”

“A lot of times what they often say is that they’re supporting him because of the policies, that they want the conservative agenda. And where I get really frustrated is that they’re treating this like it’s a normal election, a normal Republican candidate, and a normal Democratic candidate. Well, this couldn’t be anything further from the case,” Matthews said Monday night.

But when push comes to shove, conservative policy arguments don’t matter when the GOP presidential nominee is someone who refuses to acknowledge that he lost the last election, and who has not set aside the possibility of utilizing mob violence for his own political gain in November. For that reason, Matthews explained, she will be voting for President Joe Biden.

“With Donald Trump, you have a candidate who tried to overturn the last election, who spread conspiracy theories because he couldn’t accept the fact that lost the last election. And then those theories helped inspire an insurrection on our nation’s Capitol,” she said. “And to this day, Donald Trump refuses to admit that he lost that election and has not shown any remorse for what happened on January 6. So, of course, I would love for us to be having a debate of policy ideas in the 2024 election. But when we have a candidate on the ballot who will not uphold the Constitution, then I feel like I have to put policy aside, and I want to support the person who is best suited to defeat Donald Trump.”

She then called out Trump’s Attorney General Bill Barr, who in May 2023 explained during a City Club of Cleveland event that Trump was not fit to return to the Oval Office.

“If you believe in his policies—what he’s advertising as his policies, he’s the last person who could actually execute them and achieve them,” Barr said at the time. “You may want his policies, but Trump will not deliver Trump policies. He will deliver chaos.”

But just last week, Barr endorsed Trump, earning himself a massive barrage of mocking from his former boss.

Matthews stressed Barr’s point from last year to MSNBC: “Even if you want a conservative agenda, Trump is not the person who will deliver that,” she said.

Former Representative George Santos may be pulling off another charity scam.

He announced Monday that he was bringing his long-denied drag alter ego Kitara Ravache to Cameo, offering up $350 videos, for which 20 percent of the proceeds would be donated to two charities: 10 percent to the Tunnel to Towers Foundation, which supports first responders and military veterans, and another 10 percent to the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews. But now one of the charities is claiming that he has never contacted them.

“We have not engaged in any conversations with Rep. Santos or his team. The Foundation did not know about his planned donation before his post on X,” the Tunnel to Towers Foundation said in a statement provided to New York Times reporter Michael Gold.

Santos has been on the Cameo platform, which offers personalized messages from certain celebrities for sale, since December, and he has made a lot of money from it, likely more than he ever earned as a member of Congress. He also has a history of pocketing money that he claimed was for charity: Santos allegedly took money from a GoFundMe meant to pay for surgery for a veteran’s service dog in 2016. It makes a lot of sense that Santos would come up with a charity-based scheme to rake in more money from Cameo, perhaps to pay for more Botox or OnlyFans.

Is the former congressman simply desperate for cash? He recently dropped a bid to return to the House of Representatives after raising zero dollars, and he still has to come up with funds to pay his various legal fees. Santos currently faces 23 federal charges for unemployment fraud, aggravated identity theft, and credit card fraud.

Donald Trump hasn’t quite let go of the possibility of utilizing mob violence if he loses the next election.

In a sprawling interview for Time magazine, Trump hinted that leveraging political violence to achieve his end goals was still on the table.

“If we don’t win, you know, it depends,” he told Time. “It always depends on the fairness of the election.”

And from Trump’s perspective, that’s winning rhetoric. According to him, his incendiary comments supporting a mob mentality, his early warnings of forthcoming abuses of power, and his threats to be a dictator on “day one” are only inching him closer to the White House. “I think a lot of people like it,” Trump told Time.

Recent poll numbers would suggest he’s correct—or that people actually don’t seem to mind his aggressive, democracy-defying verbiage, at the very least. In a Harvard CAPS/HarrisX poll published April 25, Trump performed seven percentage points better than President Joe Biden when the two were matched up alongside independent presidential candidates Robert F. Kennedy, Jill Stein, and Cornel West. And in a batch of state-based polls published on Monday by Emerson College, Trump took every battleground state.

Meanwhile, the trial that will determine Trump’s level of involvement on the day that his followers actually attempted to overthrow Congress’s certification of the 2020 vote has been indefinitely waylaid by the former president’s claim of presidential immunity. The Supreme Court heard arguments for that case last week. It is currently unclear how the justices will decide the case, though they are expected to issue an opinion sometime between the end of June and early July.