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.”

Senator Marco Rubio doesn’t think that Russia paying off right-wing influencers is a big deal.

The ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was asked on Fox News Thursday about the Justice Department revelation that several conservative commentators were paid by assets of the Russian government to produce propaganda and disinformation. Rubio defended the influencers, calling them “victims.”

“We are talking about preexisting political opinions in the United States. These are preexisting political opinions that have existed well before any Russian engagement or involvement or what have you,” Rubio said to Sean Hannity. “These people that they say that were being funded by the secret donor that was hiding their true identity, they already had these opinions, they already believed in these things.”

“They legitimately believe in the views that they’re espousing,” Rubio added. “They were victims, they were targets of a fraud in which someone posing as just a regular investor had Russian money behind them.”

Rubio is joining his fellow conservatives in defending the commentators at Tenet Media, which the DOJ revealed Wednesday was secretly funded by Russian state media employees in “a scheme to create and distribute content to U.S. audiences with hidden Russian government messaging.” These influencers included Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, Lauren Chen, and Benny Johnson. One right-wing media organization, Blaze Media, has already fired Chen as a result of the indictment.

Not surprisingly, these commentators described themselves as victims in the scheme, a point that was not only echoed by Rubio, but also by MAGA Republicans like Representative Matt Gaetz, pundit Ben Shapiro, and even Donald Trump. But, how do they explain that these “preexisting ideas” popular among Republicans right now seem to be exactly what Vladimir Putin’s government wanted to fund?

Previous Russian operations in the United States appear to have been aimed at promoting conflict and discord to undermine faith in the country’s institutions, such as the electoral process, and promote foreign policy favorable to Russia. It stands to reason that funding conservative influencers had similar aims. Right-wing figures like Rubio, Trump (whose political rise has been very useful to Putin), and Gaetz have to ask themselves if the ideas they’re espousing can really be good for America if Putin himself wants to put money behind them.

The Russian disinformation plot revealed in a Justice Department indictment this week may just be the tip of the iceberg, according to newly unsealed court documents.

On Wednesday, the DOJ announced it would seize 32 internet domains linked to a larger Kremlin scheme to promote disinformation and influence the 2024 election. The Russian campaign, known as Doppelganger, uses AI-generated content to create “fake news” boosted through social media with the aim of electing Donald Trump.

“Today’s announcement exposes the scope of the Russian government’s influence operations and their reliance on cutting-edge AI to sow disinformation,” FBI Director Christopher Wray said in a statement about the charges. According to records, the plan was well known at even the highest levels of the Russian government—and Russian President Vladimir Putin himself may have been aware of the campaign.

Of particular note, the documents released Wednesday included an affidavit that noted a Russian company is keeping a list of more than 2,800 influencers world wide, about one-fifth of whom are based in the United States, to monitor and potentially groom to spread Russian propaganda. The affidavit does not mention the full list of influencers, but is still a terrifying indicator of how deep the Russian plot to interfere in U.S. politics really goes.

The Doppelganger program and its “Good Old USA Project” aimed to mimic mainstream media outlets to push pro-Russian policies through fake social media accounts. Documents show that the Kremlin specifically targeted Trump supporters, minorities, gamers, and swing-state voters by spreading far-right conspiracies and capitalizing on existing divisions in U.S. politics.

​​”They are afraid of losing the American way of life and the ‘American dream,’” Ilya Gambashidze, an architect of the project, wrote, outlining his scheme. “It is these sentiments that should be exploited in the course of an information campaign in/for the United States.” To do so, the Russian government would emphasize that Republicans are “victims of discrimination of people of color” and promote conspiracies that white middle-class people are being discriminated against.

The “guerrilla media” plan needed to not only plant falsehoods, but also spread them far and wide. They targeted gamers and chatroom users, who they described as the “backbone of the right-wing trends in the US segment of the Internet,” and monitored social media influencers. The Russians planned to build relationships with prolific posters who were “proponents of traditional values, who stand up for ending the war in Ukraine and peaceful relations between the US and Russia, and who are ready to get involved in the promotion of the project narratives.”

“We need influencers! A lot of them and everywhere. We are ready to wine and dine them,” wrote Gambashidze in a note from a meeting with Russian government officials.

Though this specific campaign has no official link with recent findings about Tenet Media’s work with Russian state media network RT, the goals are the same: “To secure victory for [Donald Trump].”

J.D. Vance completely fumbled his response to Wednesday’s mass shooting at Apalachee High School in Georgia, in which he resigned to school shootings as a bleak “fact of life.”

“Now look, the Kamala Harris answer to this is to take law-abiding citizens’ guns away from them. That is what Kamala Harris wants to do,” Vance said during a rally Thursday in Arizona.

“Look, I don’t like this. I don’t like to admit this. I don’t like that this is a fact of life,” Vance said. “But if you’re—if you are a psycho and you want to make headlines, you’d realize that our schools are soft targets.”

“We’ve got to bolster security so that if a psycho wants to walk through the front door and kill a bunch of children, they’re not able to,” Vance said, sharing his fatalistic view of what are entirely avoidable tragedies. There is just no way to prevent young people from committing gross acts of violence with tools that the government already supposedly regulates. Just no way!

Vance’s limp policy idea imagines public schools as the only venue for a mass shooting—increased security there would not prevent, say, a shooting at a university campus, church, grocery store, mall, or really anywhere else. Plus, even he admitted he didn’t like the idea of beefed up security around his children.

“And again, as a parent, do I want my school to have additional security? No, of course I don’t,” Vance said. Then why did he just pitch it? “I don’t want my kids to go to school in a place where they feel like they’ve got to have additional security. But that is increasingly the reality that we live in.”

Vance’s cynical response to the deadly shooting, which killed four people and injured nine others, is particularly grim in light of Kamala Harris’s response: “It doesn’t have to be this way.”

The fallout from last week’s Arlington National Cemetery fight is still plaguing the Trump campaign.

The Trump staffers reportedly involved in accosting a cemetery official are Justin Caporale, a deputy campaign manager for Donald Trump’s reelection bid, and Michel Picard, a member of Trump’s advance team, NPR reported Thursday evening.

Caporale had previously worked under former First Lady Melania Trump, and served under Florida Governor Ron DeSantis as director of external affairs, according to the Tampa Bay Times. Caporale was also listed as an on-site contact during the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. He was, at the time, a project manager for the Women for America First rally, before some of the crowd stormed into the halls of Congress.

Trump’s decision to film at the military graveyard—and in Section 60, where recent military casualties are buried—violated federal law, which prohibits politically related activities in the cemetery such as taking photos and videos in support of a political campaign. The criminal behavior sparked a verbal and physical fight between Trump’s surrogates and an Arlington National Cemetery official who attempted to rein in the politico’s videotaping.

The Trump campaign claimed that they had been given permission to videotape by the families of fallen service members, but unfortunately for Trump, that doesn’t change federal law. In a rare statement last week, the Army said that it considered the case closed but sided with the cemetery official, writing that they believed the official had been “abruptly pushed aside” and “unfairly attacked” by Trump staffers.

Trump has even begun this week to insist the fight did not happen at all, making the involvement of a senior campaign staffer all the more damaging. Trump’s campaign has repeatedly promised to release video exonerating both him and his staffers, but no video has appeared.

The Republican presidential nominee’s anti-military rhetoric has been a point of contention with current and former service members in recent weeks. In August, the reputed Vietnam-era draft dodger came under fire for arguing that the Presidential Medal of Freedom he awarded to one of his billionaire donors was “much better” than the nation’s highest military honor, the Medal of Honor. That comment struck a nerve with veterans, who connected Trump’s disrespectful rhetoric to a 2020 Atlantic report that caught the former president repeatedly referring to fallen soldiers as “suckers and losers.”

The Republican Party is in trouble this election, and may lose its majority in the House of Representatives—so says Texas Representative Tony Gonzalez, a Republican himself.

Speaking at the Texas Tribune Festival on Thursday, the congressman said he believed the party would lose in November due its own actions.

“What’s frustrating me is I firmly believe that House Republicans are going to lose the majority—and we’re going to lose it because of ourselves,” Gonzales said.

Gonzalez said that a culture of blame had taken hold of his party, as well as the Democrats, pointing to a cycle of oversight hearings opposed to whichever party was in power.

“It’s not rocket science here. You know the economy, it’s really real. I mean, more and more middle-class Americans are falling further and further behind in access to quality health care,” said Gonzalez. “Are we talking about this? Are we talking about some of these kind of kitchen table issues? No—it’s all about who we’re going to impeach.”

Gonzalez was censured by the Texas state Republican Party earlier this year for voting for gun safety legislation, and increasing same-sex marriage protections. He also directed some of his criticism toward Democrats, who failed to break through for a major victory in the state.

“Texas Democrats are failing to deliver the message. They are stuck in all-or-nothing, and guess what? They’re getting nothing,” Gonzalez said. “That works out well for Republicans.”

Texas Democrats “haven’t evolved into going, ‘How do I win a race? How do I deliver a message for the general population, and not just my base?’” Gonzalez added. “And anytime you get stuck in that, you’re going to lose.”

Gonzalez hasn’t shied away from criticizing his party in the past, attacking Representative Matt Gaetz for “paying minors to have sex with them at drug parties” and Representative Bob Good for endorsing his opponent, “a known neo-Nazi,” in a CNN interview in April.

“These people used to walk around with white hoods at night. Now they’re walking around with white hoods in the daytime,” Gonzalez said at the time.

The Texas congressman isn’t the only member of his party who has been critical of the GOP’s lack of results recently. Last November, Representative Chip Roy yelled at his colleagues for failing to accomplish anything significant, and in January, Representative Andy Biggs complained on Newsmax that his party has accomplished “nothing” since winning control of the House in 2022.

Gonzalez isn’t likely to win over many of his colleagues, though: The National Republican Congressional Committee immediately issued a statement saying that they “disagree” with him.