Felon Trump Drives Up Jail Time Odds With Every Word

The day after Donald Trump became the first former president to be convicted of a felony, he rushed to Trump Tower to hold a press conference proclaiming his innocence. But in doing so, he also immediately violated his gag order.

In a 30-minute speech on Friday, Trump slammed his former fixer Michael Cohen as slimy and untrustworthy.

“Again, if I wrote down and paid a lawyer—and by the way, this was a highly qualified lawyer. Now, I’m not allowed to use his name because of the gag order,” Trump said. “But, you know, he’s a sleazebag.”

“Everybody knows that,” he continued. “Took me a while to find out, but he was effective. He did work.”

Trump’s gag order—which has not yet been lifted—bars him from publicly attacking the court staff, witnesses, or jurors involved in the case. And he’s already been hit with repercussions for previous transgressions. Earlier this month, Judge Juan Merchan ruled that Trump would have to pay $10,000—the maximum penalty of $1,000 per violation—for continually breaking the order.

But that ruling came with an added threat that is still on the table. Since the court could not craft an “appropriate” financial penalty for a deep-pocketed defendant like Trump, Merchan wrote that, in order to “protect the dignity of the judicial system and to compel respect for its mandates,” the court “must therefore consider whether in some instances, jail may be a necessary punishment.”

Trump is due to be sentenced on July 11, just days before the Republican National Convention. And his words could come back to haunt him in that hearing: In criminal cases, judges often consider a defendant’s level of remorse (or lack thereof) when deciding a sentence.

Meanwhile, Cohen responded Friday in real time, posting on X that “Trump’s press conference was nothing shy of a batshit crazy avalanche of broken brain word manure,” while tagging his nickname for his former boss: “#VonShitzInPantz.”

Senator Joe Manchin is leaving the Democratic Party and registering as an independent.

Politico reports that the West Virginia politician and thorn in the side of liberal priorities has made the decision to leave, citing sources close to Manchin. Shortly after, on Friday morning, Manchin confirmed the move.

Manchin had previously announced that he would not run for reelection for his Senate seat. His change in party affiliation now means he can run as an independent for the Senate, or even for governor of West Virginia, where he’d take on Republican rival Jim Justice. He has not announced plans to do either yet. Right now, the move makes him the fourth independent in the Democratic Caucus.

It’s the latest move from Manchin in a long career of taking shots at the Democratic Party. At one time, he was a critical part of the Democrats’ majority in the Senate, which he used to his advantage. He regularly sided with Republicans on critical issues such as student loan relief and climate change. He worked to keep the Senate filibuster, despite Democratic objections, with the help of fellow Democratic (and also now independent) Senator Kyrsten Sinema. He refused to back President Biden’s Build Back Better bill, resulting in the watered-down Inflation Reduction Act. He even killed the expanded Child Tax Credit.

So what’s the reason behind this move now? Manchin already toyed with a third-party run for president before backing out. Is Manchin going to stay in politics after all, staying in the Senate or looking at the governorship? Either way, it will be, in his mind, the best decision for himself.

Donald Trump and his fans are losing big on the crypto marketplace following his guilty verdict, despite his bragging just days earlier that he was confident in cryptocurrency.

As news of the verdict broke Thursday, the TRUMP token fell 35 percent, while a memecoin for President Joe Biden called “Jeo Boden” grew 20 percent.

Trump may have personally lost money last night too. According to blockchain data tracked by Arkham Intelligence, the former president reportedly holds assets worth approximately $10 million, with sizable amounts of MAGA tokens, ethereum (ETH), and MAGA VP tokens.

Alongside these memetokens, Trump has launched three NFT collections since December 2022, including the “Mugshot Edition NFTs.” But as the hush-money trial began in late April, the first edition of the Trump Digital Trading Card’s trading volumes fell 99 percent in 30 days.

Trump has bet heavily on a cryptocurrency payoff. Earlier this month, he spent one of his few days off the trial courting NFT buyers at a dinner in Mar-a-lago. Shortly after, he vowed to “build a crypto army.” And on Thursday, just hours before the verdict, Bloomberg reported that Trump was discussing crypto policy with Elon Musk.

While Musk denied specifically talking about crypto, it does appear that the Trump campaign is looking for an advisory role for Elon if he wins a second term.

Meanwhile, Trump and his allies are losing on standard markets too, with Truth Social stocks plummeting as much as 15 percent on Thursday.

Despite Trump’s myriad monetary failures, crypto traders at Polymarket, the blockchain-powered betting site, are still banking on Trump defeating Biden—putting his odds of winning at 54 percent—even after the conviction. Traders are also placing $900,000 wagers on whether Trump will see the inside of a jail cell by November, with some saying he has a 17 percent chance of imprisonment.

Ultimately, let’s hope the only blocks and chains Trump is involved with in the next year are in a cell block.

Representative Lauren Boebert’s attempts to highlight her congressional track record may have unintentionally damaged her reelection campaign.

Fending off criticism Thursday night during a Republican debate for Colorado District 4 representative hopefuls, Boebert attempted to draw attention to her work in the House—but ended up having to admit to her minimal accomplishments.

“For Ms. Boebert, how many bills did you prime-sponsor … in the U.S. Congress that actually were signed by the president of the United States?” asked state Representative Richard Holtorf, noting that “anybody can put their name on a bill after it passes” and become a co-sponsor.

Boebert immediately attempted to dodge the question, hitting the local conservative and primary competitor for having a “failing Liberty score,” a measure of a conservative’s policy stances.

“Would you like to answer the question, or would you like to talk about Liberty scores?” pressed Holtorf. “You can answer the question, ma’am, it’s OK. I asked a very specific question, please answer it.”

“I certainly will. One of my favorite pieces of legislation that has been signed into law is my Pueblo Jobs Act that creates at least 1,000 jobs in Pueblo, Colorado,” Boebert said, not revealing that that is actually the only bill she’s prime-sponsored that has become law.

“But there are also many other pieces of legislation that I’ve passed through the House—” she continued, before getting cut off by Holtorf, who clarified that “it doesn’t matter if it’s passed through the House. If the president doesn’t sign it, ma’am, then it doesn’t get passed.”

But the debate moderators gave Boebert one more chance to elucidate her congressional scorecard after her speaking time ran out.

“So my Pueblo Jobs Act—” she started, before the moderator insisted on a number.

“That is one,” Boebert finished weakly.

Boebert’s time in Congress, instead of being spent working on legislation for her constituents, has been sprinkled and seasoned with scandal. In September, the gun-toting Republican was caught vaping, recording, loudly singing along, and fondling her date during a performance of Beetlejuice in Denver, causing her and her date to get kicked out of the theater for “causing a disturbance.” And in February, the Colorado representative’s son was arrested in the city of Rifle over a string of thefts.

Boebert has also used her national platform to call Representative Ilhan Omar a “terrorist,” joined fellow conspiracy theorist Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene in heckling President Joe Biden during his 2022 State of the Union address, and faced calls for her resignation after she tweeted out the location of Nancy Pelosi as the former speaker of the House escaped charging rioters on January 6.

Supporters of the newly convicted Donald Trump are already disseminating extensive calls for violence. According to Reuters, which reviewed numerous posts across multiple conservative platforms, users have expressed desires to attack jurors and to kill Judge Juan Merchan, as well as to kill everyone in Washington, D.C., and Democrats overall.

“Someone in NY with nothing to lose needs to take care of Merchan,” wrote one user on Patriots.Win, a far-right forum that was created after its genesis, r/The_Donald, was suspended by Reddit for hate speech.

“Time to start capping some leftys,” wrote one user on the conservative blog Gateway Pundit. “This cannot be fixed by voting.”

“1,000,000 men (armed) need to go to Washington and hang everyone. That’s the only solution,” said another.

Fanning the flames himself, Trump posted on Truth Social shortly before the verdict, calling Merchan “highly conflicted” and sowing doubt about the integrity of the jury vote process that led to his conviction. In response, Reuters reports, a user posted a photo of a noose on a hangman’s platform with the caption “Treasonous mobster of the justices system.”

Trump also published a campaign video on Truth Social after his guilty verdicts, promising to “liberate America from these villains once and for all.”

“This is the final battle,” Trump warns in the chilling video. “With you at my side, we will demolish the deep state. We will expel the warmongers from our government. We will drive out the globalists. We will cast out the Communists, Marxist, and fascists. We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country. We will rout the fake news media, and we will liberate America from these villains once and for all.”

Calls for violence from Trump supporters aren’t a new phenomenon—after all, these are the same people who carried out a violent riot at the Capitol in rejection of Trump’s 2020 loss to Biden. And Trump has been goading them on throughout his hush-money trial.

As Reuters notes, many of the threats and calls for violence circulating online don’t rise to the threshold of an actionable threat. But the intensity of hate spewing out from the MAGA cesspool following Trump’s conviction is sizable and has prompted far-right figures to urge people away from giving in to their desire to post things that will get them a visit from the FBI.