“Wait Until 2025”: Top Trump Ally Makes Terrifying Revenge Threat

A former director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement under Donald Trump has an ominous warning for a second Trump administration.

“Trump comes back in January, I’ll be on his heels coming back, and I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen,” said Tom Homan at a panel on immigration policy at the National Conservatism conference (NatCon 4) Monday afternoon. “They ain’t seen shit yet. Wait until 2025.”

Homan’s words match what Trump is promising to do if he’s elected in November, which is enlist police officers in a massive immigration crackdown and give them immunity from prosecution and lawsuits. The more he says about it, the worse it gets. Trump has claimed that there are 20 million people who will have to be deported and repeatedly compared them to horror movie character Hannibal Lecter.

Homan’s threat could also hint at the Project 2025 planning document, a 900-page playbook written by Homan and other conservative ideologues with the backing of the right-wing Heritage Foundation. It explains how a dramatic overhaul of the federal government could happen in line with Trump’s authoritarian aspirations, opening the floodgates for extreme policies to be enacted.

In recent days, Trump has tried to distance himself from the document, even as many of its authors are former staffers from his presidential administration. Even some of his current staffers have promoted it, including his campaign press secretary, Karoline Leavitt. The Biden-Harris campaign, as well as other Democrats, has pounced on the controversial document, attempting to tie it to the former president and convicted felon.

But not only are Trump’s disavowals not believable, they also are alienating some of his right-wing supporters, including extremist Alex Jones and white nationalist Nick Fuentes. That segment of Republican voters aren’t put off by the more extreme items in the Trump–Project 2025 agenda but are in fact eager for them to come to fruition.

Academy Award–winning actor George Clooney on Wednesday joined the growing chorus of voices calling for Joe Biden to drop out of the presidential race. 

Since Biden’s disastrous appearance at CNN’s presidential debate last month, many have urged him to demonstrate that his halting, confused performance was not indicative of his mental acuity. 

But in an op-ed for The New York Times, Clooney confirmed that things are exactly as bad as everyone feared. 

“It’s devastating to say it, but the Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at the fund-raiser was not the Joe ‘big F-ing deal’ Biden of 2010,” wrote Clooney, referring to a fundraiser he co-hosted for Biden last month, which raised $28 million for the president’s campaign, per Variety. “He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate.  

“Was he tired? Yes. A cold? Maybe. But our party leaders need to stop telling us that 51 million people didn’t see what we just saw. We’re all so terrified by the prospect of a second Trump term that we’ve opted to ignore every warning sign,” he wrote. 

“We are not going to win in November with this president. On top of that, we won’t win the House, and we’re going to lose the Senate,” Clooney said. “This isn’t only my opinion; this is the opinion of every senator and congress member and governor that I’ve spoken with in private. Every single one, irrespective of what he or she is saying publicly.

“We love to talk about how the Republican Party has ceded all power, and all of the traits that made it so formidable with Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, to a single person who seeks to hold on to the presidency, and yet most of our members of Congress are opting to wait and see if the dam breaks. But the dam has broken,” he wrote. “We can put our heads in the sand and pray for a miracle in November, or we can speak the truth.”

Clooney concluded that “Joe Biden is a hero; he saved democracy in 2020. We need him to do it again in 2024.”

Although a staunch Democratic supporter and donor, this isn’t the first time Clooney has broken with Biden. In May, the actor and director called a top aide at the White House to voice his opposition to Biden’s denunciation of the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant for Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. One anonymous source told The Washington Post that Clooney was concerned that sanctions on the ICC would penalize his wife, Amal Clooney, who worked on the case. 

Biden has previously relied on celebrity spokespeople, such as Robert DeNiro, to help him set the stakes for his fight against Trump. Should Clooney’s dissent spark a wave of calls from high-profile public figures to drop out, public opinion of the president could nosedive even further. 

A stunning new investigation by The New York Times exposes how Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago has become the lucrative “epicenter” of the MAGA movement, shifting from a nonpartisan venue that hosts galas for charity to a hub for the conspiratorial far right to extol Trump’s greatness and sing songs in his honor at the low, low price of $600,000 a head.

According to an analysis of evidentiary records in New York’s fraud case against the Trump Organization, Mar-a-Lago pulled in a net profit of $22 million in 2022. While the remainder of Trump’s clubs and properties also saw an increase in profits through and after Trump’s presidency, Mar-a-Lago—where Trump spends most of his time and to which conservatives flock, hoping for a glimpse of their dear leader—has seen more than double in profits, according to an analysis by the Times.

According to the Times, Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club increased its initiation fee from $100,000 in 2016 to $600,000 by 2022. With approximately 500 members, that’s roughly $12 million being given to the club Trump owns, which is effectively money straight into Trump’s pocket.

According to campaign finance filings through the first quarter of 2024 reviewed by the Times, candidates and political committees have spent more than $4.7 million at Mar-a-Lago since Trump left the White House, with Trump’s campaign and super PAC accounting for roughly a quarter of that total.

Some of Trump’s grift was known during his presidency: Mar-a-Lago collected a pretty penny from the federal government, charging more than $1.4 million for rooms rented to Trump’s mandatory Secret Service entourage during his presidency and even charging the White House for liquor consumed by his aides.

Prior to Trump’s political career, the Times notes, Mar-a-Lago was largely a venue for glitzy charity galas and few political events. In the 2014–2015 season, the last before Trump announced his run for president, the Times counted 52 fundraiser events at Mar-a-Lago, with only one being political.

After his infamous “very fine people” comment about the neo-Nazis and white supremacists at the deadly Unite the Right rally in 2017, many traditional charity events stopped using Mar-a-Lago and set up shop elsewhere, according to the Times. All but six fundraiser events abandoned the venue—and have since been replaced by far-right events, such as an annual gala hosted by Turning Point USA, a conservative group using Christian nationalism to target college campuses, which began taking place at Mar-a-Lago in 2018.

The Times identified 130 people who attended three or more events at Mar-a-Lago since Trump left office. Many are election denialists and Capitol rioters, and 44 are members of Congress, state officials, or Republican candidates running for office. Thirty-four of those candidates received endorsements from Trump after they made the pilgrimage and kissed the ring.

“We don’t do too many of these things at Mar-a-Lago,” Trump claimed in March 2022 at a fundraiser for Vernon Jones, who was running for the Republican nomination in Georgia’s 10th congressional district. “I don’t want to make it a totally political place,” Mr. Trump added.

Donald Trump’s donors are reportedly fighting with each other over the prospect of Senator J.D. Vance becoming Trump’s running mate.

The Daily Beast reports that Republican donors are sharply divided over Vance, with criticisms over his lack of political experience and business expertise. Some are also upset about one of Trump’s campaign managers, Susie Wiles, reportedly playing favorites with Vance.

“The person who’s had some outside influence here is Susie Wiles,” one GOP strategist said, based on conversions with donors, adding that “she certainly wants Vance. Vance is like her little pet.”

Donors are more inclined toward Senator Marco Rubio and North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, who demonstrate more experience, as well as safer foreign policy stances in Rubio’s case. In contrast, “J.D. Vance is a guy who wrote a book and helped with a Netflix show,” the strategist said.

Vance also underperformed in his 2022 Ohio election victory, running nearly 10 points behind the state’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine. The strategist said that this shows that many Republicans in Ohio didn’t support Vance, which may translate to other swing states.

The article did point out that Vance has the support of at least one big-time donor: Silicon Valley billionaire David Sacks, who is part of the infamous “PayPal mafia” that includes the likes of Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, among other tech moguls. Will those connections be enough to elevate Vance to be Trump’s running mate above Rubio and Burgum? Rubio’s establishment support has hurt him with some MAGA personalities, including Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. It seems the decision will come down to whether Trump wants a safe choice or an antiestablishment figure like himself.

Donald Trump’s self-proclaimed “secretary of retribution” is touting a wild plan to arrest politicians, police officers, and journalists he views as disloyal to the former president, according to a sweeping new investigation by Raw Story.

Conservative political activist Ivan Raiklin claims to have assembled a “Deep State target list” that includes high-ranking Democrats and Republicans, U.S. Capitol Police officers, officials at the FBI and other intelligence agencies, witnesses in Trump’s impeachment trials, and journalists at The New York Times, CNN, The Washington Post, and other news outlets. Their supposed crime? Being Trump’s political enemies. And Raiklin views himself as justice incarnate.

During one podcast appearance earlier this year, Raiklin said his nickname was the “deep state marauder, a.k.a. the mauler.” Raiklin’s plan for what to do with his list isn’t nearly as gruesome, but it is still terrifying. He intends to enlist right-wing sheriffs to carry out mass arrests, and in May, he declared his intention to arrange “livestreamed swatting raids.”

Raiklin reportedly claims that if he went public with all of the so-called evidence he collected on Trump’s enemies in the deep state, it would be probable cause to arrest those high-ranking officials and journalists on his list.

Those arrests would be carried out by “constitutional sheriffs,” specifically a right-wing anti-government group called the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association. Those sheriffs would then deputize the 75,000 veterans Raiklin claims were dismissed from the military for refusing to comply with Covid-19 vaccine mandates, forming a rogue army intent on revenge.

Thus far, attempts at assembling his troops have proved less than successful.

Raiklin attempted to recruit some at the group’s convention in April, where he asked a panel whether they’d “be willing to go to the maximum level to create consequences for these federal actors,” who he alleged had committed some kind of “seditious conspiracy.”

The response was underwhelming, according to Raw Story. Despite being fairly sympathetic to Raiklin, officers warned that his plot was illegal, and it would be unlikely that prosecutors would ever press charges.

Even Sheriff Dar Leaf, who gained notoriety among the far right for suggesting that the group that attempted to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer was simply attempting to make a citizen’s arrest, felt that Raiklin’s plan went too far.

“We’re not going to be able to just go out and arrest,” Leaf said. “We’ve got to do a grand jury indictment, just like the Constitution says.”

When asked by Raw Story about Raiklin’s plan, Leaf said he didn’t know who Raiklin was, and opposed political prosecutions.

Former Sheriff Richard Mack, who leads the Constitutional Sheriffs group, told Raw Story that he had severed ties with Raiklin in early June and did not approve of his rhetoric. “Quite frankly, he talks about that list of 350 people—I’m sure they can afford lawyers,” said Mack. “It reeks of lawsuits, and it doesn’t follow due process.”

Raiklin has also emailed sheriffs’ offices across the country hoping to enlist them to his cause. Not one has signed on, according to Raw Story.