Trump Gets Massive Win With Delay in Felony Sentencing

Donald Trump will now be sentenced for his hush-money case on November 26, more than three weeks after the presidential election. This is a massive victory for the convicted felon.

Judge Juan Merchan in a four-page decision ruled that the delay should help relieve any concerns that sentencing would influence the November election.

“Unfortunately, we are now at a place in time that is fraught with complexities rendering the requirements of a sentencing hearing, should one be necessary, difficult to execute,” Merchan said in his ruling.

“This is not a decision this Court makes lightly but is the decision which in this Court’s view best advances the interests of justice,” Merchan added.

The case’s sentencing ran into some procedural issues after the Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity in July. New York State Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan ominously warned just after the ruling that a sentence may never come, initially delaying the sentencing hearing until September 18.

In a court filing last month, Trump’s defense team asked Merchan to delay sentencing until after the November elections, claiming that Merchan had “appearances of impropriety” due to his daughter’s work for Democratic political candidates. Trump unsuccessfully pushed for Merchan’s recusal three times, only to be rebuffed.

Trump ally Andrew Bailey, the Missouri attorney general, sued the state of New York on his behalf, appealing to the Supreme Court following its immunity ruling to delay the former president’s sentencing. The long-shot effort failed, as the high court declined to postpone the hearing.

Bailey was also seeking to have Trump’s gag order in the case fully lifted, but the court similarly denied that request. The order had been partially lifted in June, allowing Trump to talk about the witnesses and jurors in the case, but he’s still barred from talking about court staff, prosecutors, Merchan and his family, and others connected to the case.

Trump still has attempted to skirt the gag order, which could worsen his sentence. He had his political allies act as surrogates to criticize the people he couldn’t, even editing their words at times. Some politicians, such as Representatives Bob Good and Lauren Boebert, admitted that they traveled to Trump’s Manhattan trial for this reason. Trump also criticized one of the prosecutors in the case without mentioning his name. And there are the 10 documented violations of the gag order, which Merchan has already punished Trump for to the tune of $10,000 in fines.

Trump was found guilty in May on 34 felony charges for allegedly falsifying business records with the intent to further an underlying crime in the first degree. The Republican presidential nominee covered up his affair with adult film actress Stormy Daniels before the 2016 presidential election with help from his fixer at the time, Michael Cohen. Merchan’s decision means that Trump will not face consequences at least until the end of November, if at all.

This story has been updated.

Donald Trump has completely reversed his opinion on the cryptocurrency industry, moving past calling it a “scam” to becoming a warm ally—but his sons may be screwing up the blossoming alliance.

Donald Jr. and Eric Trump’s botched rollout of their own cryptocurrency platform, World Liberty Financial, has been plagued by scams and raised alarm bells from Trump’s allies within the crypto circuit, who fear that the poor handling and bad press could damage the burgeoning sector’s reputation.

“This is a huge mistake,” Nic Carter, a Trump supporter and founding partner at the crypto-focused venture capital firm Castle Island Ventures, told Politico. “It looks like Trump’s inner circle is just cashing in on his recent embrace of crypto in a kind of naive way, and frankly it looks like they’re burning a lot of the good will that’s been built with the industry so far.”

The project was announced last month under a different name—“The Trump DeFi Project”, short for decentralized finance—as a way to platform cryptocurrencies, but actual details of the proposed platform have been scant.

That slow rollout has ushered in an onslaught of misinformation about World Liberty Financial. Fraudsters have relentlessly attacked the project, compromising the social media accounts of Republican National Committee Co-Chair Lara Trump and Tiffany Trump, and sending supporters to a fake website with inaccurate details about the platform. False Telegram channels posing as the official World Liberty Financial channel have also drawn thousands of users to a host of misinformation, thwarted only by the Trump brothers’ loose warnings not to click on unaffiliated links and avoid scams.

World Liberty representative Zak Folkman told Politico that the group behind the crypto project is “building a world-class decentralized finance platform with the absolute best of the best in the industry.”

“We take security very seriously and put it first and foremost, above anything,” Folkman told the outlet, adding that the startup is working “with the top auditing firms and security specialists in the world.”

Trump has increasingly tried to frame himself as a pro-crypto candidate in this election cycle. At a Bitcoin conference in Nashville in July, Trump promised to build out a “strategic national bitcoin reserve” if elected, according to CoinDesk. But the former president’s recent investments would show that his change of heart on the digital assets isn’t all an act.

Financial disclosures released in August show that Trump has $7.15 million coming from a source labeled NFT INT., likely referring to his NFT series. He’s also kept a stockpile of cash in the new-wave currencies, with the disclosure listing roughly $5 million in crypto.

J.D. Vance won’t change who he is in order to win the election in November. And that means aligning with frightening far-right weirdos unapologetically—even if they’re pushing pro-Nazi propaganda.

On Thursday, Vance sat down for a recorded interview with Tucker Carlson as the former Fox News host continues facing backlash for platforming a pro-Nazi podcaster. In fact, Vance joined Carlson just hours after the White House condemned the “Nazi propaganda” interview.

Carlson came under fire after inviting Darryl Cooper, host of The MartyrMade podcast, as a guest on his show—whereupon Cooper proceeded to call Winston Churchill the “chief villain” of World War II, not Adolf Hitler.

In platforming Cooper on the “Tucker Carlson Show,” the former Fox host helped MartyrMade shoot to the top of the podcast charts. This was no red flag for Vance, who still appeared at his scheduled pre-recorded interview with Carlson following this news.

“Not ideal timing. But it is what it is,” a Trump campaign official said.

It makes sense that Vance doesn’t seem to care about Cooper’s revisionist history, considering that he still follows the Hitler apologist on X.

Besides boosting white supremacists, Carlson continues to regularly promoting “the great replacement theory” and spreads election lies. Meanwhile, Vance is still set to appear alongside Carlson during a live speaking tour. They’ll be joined by the likes of Alex Jones, Donald Trump Jr., and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene.

On Friday at the U.S.-Mexico border, Vance was asked if Carlson “should be interviewing those kinds of people months before the election.”

“Tucker Carlson isn’t affiliated with the campaign,” Vance replied. “He’s going to do what he wants to do.” And so too will Vance it seems.

This story has been updated.

Donald Trump’s media company initially presented some grandiose projections to attract potential shareholders. Cut to two years later, and those projections have proved to be completely misleading, according to a Meidas Touch report published Friday. 

The original pitch deck that Trump Media & Technology Group showed to its investors in 2022, including “hundreds of thousands of retail shareholders,” per CEO Devin Nunes, contained some pretty fantastical numbers. The company projected revenue of $114 million in 2023, which would then balloon to $835 million in 2024. 

The reality of Trump’s struggling stock couldn’t live up to the fantasy that was promised.

In 2023, TMTG’s revenue was only $4.1 million, and the company reported a loss of more than $58 million. The projection fed to investors was off by a whopping $110 million—and that was before the election cycle had even really begun. Since then, things have become even more dire.  

Since spiking around the Republican National Convention, the value of Truth Social stock has steadily declined. Shares of Trump’s media stock have often corresponded with how well investors think Trump’s presidential campaign is going, according to The New York Times. 

The company’s current state is a far cry from the massive jump it was projected to make this year. By the end of the second quarter of 2024, TMTG had only taken in $836,000 and reported losses of $343 million. 

Trump’s majority stake in the company, which is 115 million shares, a roughly 60 percent stake, was once worth a whopping $6 billion. Now it’s worth only $2 billion.

TMTG stock has continued to crater this week, as it hit its lowest value since it became publicly traded, closing beneath $17 on Wednesday. 

Donald Trump apparently doesn’t care whether or not he wins in November anymore.

At a Fox News town hall on Thursday, the Republican presidential nominee revealed that his 2024 campaign strategy excludes anyone who he doesn’t believe supported him in the last election cycles.

Responding to a question from Sean Hannity about the economy, Trump spun a thread about a would-be supporter in the Republican primary who hadn’t voted for him before.

“One person who didn’t support me—he said, ‘I must admit I had the most successful four years of my life but I’m gonna vote for some—’ and now that person came back to me. I don’t want that person,” Trump said to muffled applause. “I don’t want that person.

“You know, they say you should take everybody, but that’s not the way I’m built. It’s one of those little problems,” he added.

It’s not the first time Trump has attempted to wash his hands of the labor required to win a fair election. Speaking in Detroit in June, Trump said of his campaign, “We don’t need [the] votes,” and “We got more votes than anybody’s ever had.” Instead, he argued that the campaign needed to “guard the vote” in anticipation of a “steal.”

Failing to draw more voters to his cause would, frankly, prove to be a huge problem for Trump, who finally admitted earlier this week that he actually did lose the 2020 election. The former president lost to President Joe Biden by more than seven million votes.

Neglecting to court those voters would surely spell disaster for his chances in November, especially during a fresher election season that has drawn renewed energy since Vice President Kamala Harris has taken over the Democratic ticket—though Trump may not understand the depth of the problem. While Trump’s support levels have held steady, Harris’s have slowly grown, indicating that she is picking up crucial undecided voters.

Later in the town hall, Trump made an outlandishly hyperbolic statement about his support around the country while discussing the September 10 debate on ABC News, arguing that the network better “be fair” to him or else it would alienate “75, 80 percent of the country.”