Jim Jordan Considers Bonkers Punishment for L.A. Over Fires

A second administration under Donald Trump apparently looks like a free-for-all for punishing liberal-minded states for their ideological differences.

On Tuesday, Ohio Representative Jim Jordan agreed that the incoming forty-seventh president should consider moving the 2028 Olympics, currently slated to be held in Los Angeles, to a deep red state.

“I’m wondering if you think the Trump administration should seriously look at moving the Olympics to a red city where you know things are gonna be run properly, like a city in Florida, maybe Miami, or maybe Dallas in Texas, or maybe a city in your home state of Ohio,” started Newsmax host Rob Finnerty. “I’m not convinced that California can manage the Olympics, the World Cup, and the Superbowl, all within a year of each other.”

The network then cut to footage of the Los Angeles wildfires, which so far have torched an area double the size of Manhattan, killed at least 25 people, and razed more than 12,000 structures and thousands of homes around the city.

“Yeah, especially when they’re spending time quote ‘Trump-proofing’ their state, looking for ways to set up barriers and obstacles to what the American people elected us to do, particularly I think when it comes to this whole immigration and repatriation issue,” Jordan said. “So we’ll see. I’ll leave that up to President Trump and his team.

“But I do think the American people rightly see how poorly that state is being run,” Jordan added.

Republicans have transformed the national disaster into a political game, floating ideas of conditioning aid to California to force it to bend its ideological knee to conservative preferences. That could include atoning for “bad behavior” related to their land management and “broken tax policy” under a “liberal administration,” according to Iowa Representative Zach Nunn.

California operates as the single largest economy in the nation (and the fifth-largest in the world, according to the Public Policy Institute of California), contributing to 14 percent of America’s national gross domestic product.

An analysis from the Rockefeller Institute of Government showed that in 2022, California was just one of a small handful of states that gave more than it got to the federal government, contributing $83 billion more in taxes to the federal government than it received back.*

*This story originally misstated the amount California contributes in taxes relative to the federal spending it receives.

Corporations and rich donors are lining up to donate money to Donald Trump, even though he can’t run for president again.

Axios reports that Trump’s team expects the president-elect to raise about $500 million by the summer—unprecendented for a president entering their second term in office. What will the president-elect do with all of the cash? Lord it over people, of course.

“The money is just pouring in at Mar-a-Lago. Trump doesn’t have to lift a finger. Everyone’s coming to him,” one anonymous Trump adviser told the publication. According to Axios, donors are sending money to Trump’s inauguration account, the MAGA Inc. super PAC, the pro-Trump nonprofit Securing American Greatness, the Republican National Committee ,and Trump’s presidential library fund.

Donors from the cryptocurrency industry are giving as much as $10 million to $20 million, according to the adviser, causing other wealthy individuals to increase their donations.

“If the tech guys are giving big, it makes everyone give,” said another Trump adviser.

Four years ago, many corporations and wealthy donors pledged to stop donating because of Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. While many of them eventually resumed their donations, Trump made a list of those who didn’t and is reminding these donors that he still won the election without their help.

“You guys made this amount of money last year and you’re gonna make so much more now because of me,” Trump said to one company’s representatives, according to one source. “But when I needed you, where the f**k were you? You weren’t with me and maybe you were with [Kamala Harris].”

With the windfall of cash, and the ability to keep raking it in, Trump can help his allies, punish his foes, and help keep Republicans in power in Congress. He can position himself as kingmaker, not only for his four years in office, but long afterward if he so chooses. He can also keep businesses and industries from going against his agenda.

Trump having the ability to use money as leverage against anything he doesn’t want doesn’t bode well for the country. He already has escaped accountability from the legal system, and now he can further create an atmosphere where people are afraid of crossing him. Do Democrats have a plan to deal with an emboldened, wealthy Trump?

Democratic Senator Tammy Duckworth warned that in addition to being radically unqualified, Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of defense, might potentially be “vulnerable to blackmail.”

During an interview on MSNBC’s All In With Chris Hayes Tuesday, Duckworth explained why she still doesn’t believe Hegseth is suited to be the secretary of defense after his confirmation hearing earlier that day.

“If Donald Trump said to Hegseth, you know, on January 20, ‘I want you to prepare a plan to uh, you know, invade Greenland.’ Could he lead that mission? My answer is no, he’s not qualified! He wouldn’t know what was a good mission or what was a bad mission. He wouldn’t know who to put in the room to come up with the plans!” Duckworth said. Duckworth is a combat veteran who lost both her legs during a mission in Iraq.

“And you know, more importantly, I think he personally is a compromised individual whom our adversaries are watching and digging the dirt on, and this makes him somebody who is vulnerable to our adversaries, and we don’t need that person in charge.”

Duckworth went on to describe how Hegseth’s shady dealings with a woman who accused him of sexual assault in 2017 demonstrated a huge liability to the security of the United States.

“Here’s what I’m afraid of,” Duckworth said later. “He’s already had to pay off a woman who accused him of sexual assault in order to keep his last job at Fox News, right? What is he going to be willing to do to pay off the next accuser who might show up after he becomes secretary of defense and has access to the nuclear codes, and the location of U.S. troops around the world?

“What happens when he wants to keep that job and somebody comes forward? He’s already told us that he’s willing to pay off somebody.”

Hegseth’s attorney, Tim Parlatore, revealed in November that his client had paid his accuser in exchange for her signing a nondisclosure agreement in order to stop her from filing a lawsuit and to protect his position at Fox News. Duckworth argued that Hegseth “potentially is vulnerable to blackmail.”

In one humiliating moment of Hegseth’s confirmation hearing Tuesday, Duckworth had asked him to speak about the political and strategic importance of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations,or ASEAN, and he wasn’t able to conjure the name of a single member state.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries torched his Republican colleagues for considering conditions on aid to California amid a devastating wildfire season, arguing that the GOP was forgetting one obvious reason to support the economic powerhouse.

Speaking with MSNBC on Tuesday, Jeffries clarified that Democrats were not in favor of the conditions being floated by conservatives, which include atoning for “bad behavior” related to their land management and taxation system under a “liberal administration.”

“We had a discussion about this today in the House Democratic Caucus, and the consensus position, I think it’s fair to say, is that we do not support conditioning any aid to everyday Americans whose lives have been wiped out as a result of extreme weather events,” Jeffries told the network. “Homes have been destroyed, schools have been destroyed, small businesses have been destroyed.”

Further still, Jeffries argued that the idea of not supporting California—which statistically receives a fraction of the money it puts into the federal government as the single largest economy in the nation, contributing to 14 percent of the national gross domestic product—would be “unconscionable.”

“It is unconscionable that Republicans are suggesting imposing right-wing partisan conditions in order for California taxpayers to receive their tax dollars,” he continued. “California is one of those states, in fact, that sends about five times as much to the federal government every year than they get back in return.”

An analysis from the Rockefeller Institute of Government showed that in 2022, California was just one of a small handful of states that gave more than it got to the federal government, contributing $83 billion more in taxes to the federal government than it received back.* But that fact hasn’t stopped conservatives from pitching ways to make it harder for California to access its money to build back after the fires torched more than 38,000 acres around Los Angeles.

“We will certainly help those thousands of homes and families who’ve been devastated, but we also expect you to change bad behavior,” Iowa Representative Zach Nunn said Monday on Fox Business. “We should look at the same for these blue states who have run away with a broken tax policy. We want to be able to help our colleagues in New York, California, and New Jersey, but those governors need to change their tune now.”

*This story originally misstated the amount California contributes in taxes relative to the federal spending it receives.

Elon Musk is in trouble with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The government agency sued the tech mogul Tuesday for failing to disclose his purchase of 5 percent of Twitter shares in March 2022 in a timely manner, allowing him to buy the shares at artificially low prices. In its lawsuit, the SEC said that Musk underpaid for the stock and cheated investors by at least $150 million.

SEC rules require investors to disclose stock purchases above a 5 percent threshold within 10 days. The agency alleges that Musk did not disclose his purchase until April 4, 2022, 11 days after the deadline, at which point he owned over 10 percent of the social media company’s shares. It ended up being quite lucrative for Musk too: Twitter’s share price went up more than 27 percent after Musk’s allegedly late disclosure.

Musk, as expected, spent Tuesday night and Wednesday morning complaining about the SEC decision on his X (formerly Twitter) account, agreeing with his fans attacking the agency, calling the SEC a “totally broken organization,” and posting that the lawsuit is the “last gasp of Biden lawfare.”

With Donald Trump’s inauguration just five days away, one wonders if this lawsuit will continue under the new president, whom Musk helped get elected with hundreds of millions of dollars of his own money. Trump is probably going to aid his biggest benefactor and do his best to make the case disappear, as Musk can’t bear to be held accountable for any misdeed.

Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” project could very easily target the SEC for massive cuts to ensure that he and his fellow billionaires can continue to get away with these types of financial crimes. After all, what’s the point of having the president in your pocket if he doesn’t protect you from being held accountable under the law?