Vivek Ramaswamy Blew Nearly $12K in Campaign Funds on Luxury Vacation

Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy paid for a lavish trip to Puerto Rico using campaign funds, a new report from MeidasTouch has revealed.

Ramaswamy’s campaign paid $11,898.25 to the Dorado Beach Ritz-Carlton Reserve, one of the island’s most lavish resorts, in November. Campaign finance records cite the purpose of the payment as “travel.”

Ramaswamy, who is worth $2.2 billion per Forbes, traveled to the island in preparation to give a keynote speech at ITServe Synergy, an annual conference held in early December by the tech collective ITServe Alliance.

MAGA social media users then deduced that ITServe Alliance was committing the grave sin of advocating for H1-B visas, which allow noncitizens to enter the country to work in specialized fields. Ramaswamy immediately attracted fierce, sometimes racist criticism from his fellow conservatives for speaking at the event.

Ramaswamy caved to the pressure, withdrawing from the event before it began. Bizarrely, a campaign spokesperson then told Signal Ohio that Ramaswamy had planned to be in Puerto Rico regardless of the conference.

So maybe Ramaswamy was planning to go on vacation anyway, and then spontaneously decided to speak at the conference? But wouldn’t that make the use of campaign funds for the trip even more heinous?

It speaks to the selfishness of billionaire Ramaswamy—who also wants to repeal birthright citizenship from undocumented immigrants even though he himself received birthright citizenship—that he would spend thousands in campaign money on a fancy resort so he can play pickleball with Logan and Jake Paul. No, really.

Paolo Zampolli—the man who introduced President Donald Trump to his wife, Melania—requested that Immigration and Customs Enforcement detain and deport his ex-girlfriend in an effort to win a custody battle over their son, The New York Times reported Friday. Zampolli denies the reporting.

When Zampolli, a former modeling agent, found out in June that his ex-wife Amanda Ungaro was in a Miami jail for workplace fraud, he took his chance and called David Venturella, a high-ranking ICE official. Venturella then put in a call to ICE’s Miami headquarters to grab Ungaro before she got out on bail. The Times notes that Venturella emphasized that it was a favor for a friend of the president during the call. Ungaro was later deported.

The Times reports that Ungaro may have been deported had her ex not gotten involved, but Zampolli certainly helped speed up the process.

Zampolli insists that he wasn’t asking for Ungaro to be deported. “I asked David what was going on because I did not know the process,” he told the Times.

This is yet another instance of the cronyism that has come to define the Trump administration. There’s no way civilians should be able to use ICE to send personal shots at other people just because they know the president.

The Trump administration is once again suing Harvard University, contending that “for several years, Jewish and Israeli students endured a hostile educational environment” at the Ivy League school.

The lawsuit, filed in Massachusetts federal court on Friday and first reported by The Washington Post, alleges that students were stopped from entering campus buildings by “antisemitic demonstrators” in 2023 and 2024, and that some Jewish students felt pressured into wearing baseball caps to hide their yarmulkes. The federal government cites this as evidence that Harvard violated civil rights laws and its own code of conduct by discriminating against Jewish and Israeli students.

Harvard rejected the accusations. “We will defend the University against this lawsuit, which represents yet another pretextual and retaliatory action by the administration for refusing to turn over control of Harvard to the federal government,” the university wrote in a statement.

As usual with Donald Trump, there is a monetary component to the suit. The federal government wants to “recover billions of dollars of taxpayer subsidies awarded to a discriminatory institution.”

It’s yet another battle in what has been a long-running war between Trump and the university. Since the start of his second term, Trump has denounced Harvard as an example of an institution infecting American youth with liberal ideas. This has resulted in various social media posts attacking the school, multiple attempts to freeze federal funding for the university, and, of course, frequent claims that Harvard promotes antisemitism and “anti-American” ideology.

For all the administration’s posturing, it has failed to prove in court that the university has done anything wrong.

Trump officials tried to prohibit Harvard from allowing in international students in June before a judge stopped the plan almost immediately. Harvard then won a lawsuit against the administration in September after the latter froze billions in federal funds from the school. District Judge Allison D. Burroughs criticized the administration for having “used antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country’s premier universities.”

This is the second time the Trump administration has sued Harvard this year. In February, the Justice Department sued the school for allegedly not providing it with its admissions records.

Imagine, if you will, U.S. military aircraft about to touch down in Greenland ahead of a forced annexation of the island. Suddenly, BOOM! The runway flippin’ explodes. Airplanes and helicopters are forced to pull up as fire and smoke fill the air—it’s like something out of Apocalypse Now, but with more snow.

According to DR, Denmark’s public broadcasting corporation, the world wasn’t too far from this scenario.

During a period at the start of 2026 when Donald Trump repeatedly threatened a military takeover of Greenland, the Danish military were prepared to blow up airport runways on the island to repel U.S. forces, DR reports. Blood supplies were also shipped to the island so the wounded could be treated if fighting occurred, sources in the Danish government and military told DR.

The Danes reportedly began planning for a hostile takeover after Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was captured and brought to the U.S. in a raid on January 3. Off the back of the operation, Trump stressed the U.S. “need[s] Greenland from a national security situation—it’s so strategic.” He also incorrectly claimed that “right now Greenland is covered with Russian and Chinese ships all over the place.”

A small battalion consisting of Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, French, and German soldiers were quickly flown to the island, according to DR; Denmark had made the decision to fight back if the U.S. tried to annex the Arctic island.

Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff said Thursday night that Denmark’s aggressive planning was a result of Trump’s poor foreign policy decisions.

“After years and years of this president trashing our allies, we learned today that the Danish government was preparing military options to defeat a potential American invasion of Greenland just months ago,” Ossoff told MS NOW’s Jen Psaki. “The president has treated our allies like they don’t matter, then demanded they come to his aid.”

Ossoff was referring to Trump’s repeated requests for allies to help him secure the Strait of Hormuz amid his war on Iran—requests that have all been rebuffed.

Trump’s desire for Greenland has softened since January—probably because everyone around him realized how stupid his plan was—and although Trump still brings the topic up now and then, the icy tundra is safe in the hands of the Danes for the time being. Through this reporting, though, we’ve learned that while the Danes seem a peaceful folk, it’s best not to get on their bad side.

The Justice Department is attempting to open criminal investigations into Colombian President Gustavo Petro—one of the Americas’ most outspoken opponents of President Donald Trump, as well as Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

The New York Times reported Friday that DOJ prosecutors’ offices in Brooklyn and Manhattan are working with the Drug Enforcement Agency to look into alleged meetings and financial ties to drug traffickers that Petro had. He has consistently denied any and all allegations.

Petro assumed office in 2022, becoming the country’s first ever left-wing politician. Since then, he has been a constant foil to his northern neighbors and to Trump—perhaps most notably so at the U.N. last year.

“The old societies of Europe are collapsing … and the United States is applauding its new Hitler,” he said in a speech to the general assembly. “It’s not listening to its own young people, or its older people who died in the battlefields of Europe, fighting against Hitler and against his criminal ideology. Today, the same thing is being done as Hitler did, building concentration camps for migrants, and it’s stated that migrants are of an inferior race, and they blame them just like Hitler blamed the Jews. They call them drug traffickers and thieves.”

This story has been updated.

The Swiss government is blocking its weapons companies from selling to the United States, declaring neutrality in response to the U.S.-Israeli joint war on Iran.

“The export of war materiel to countries involved in ​the international armed conflict with Iran cannot be ​authorised for the duration of the conflict,” ⁠the government announced on Friday. “Exports of war materiel to the ​USA cannot currently be authorized.”

There are a number of firearms and weapons manufacturing companies in Switzerland, including small firearms manufacturer SIG Sauer AG (which has a massive contract with the U.S. government), B&T AG, Rheinmetall Air Defence, and RUAG Ammotec.

This will likely only further anger President Donald Trump, who has spent the better part of a week oscillating between begging U.S. allies to help him protect the Strait of Hormuz and pretending everything is actually fine. The vast majority of countries called upon—Germany, Poland, Spain, the U.K., Japan, and now Switzerland—have left him to clean up his own mess.

The Washington Post revealed Thursday that the Trump administration altered a Social Security report to make call wait times appear shorter than they actually were.

The report, produced in December by the Social Security Administration’s inspector general, portrayed the average wait time for callers to speak to a representative as having dropped to under 10 minutes. SSA Commissioner and Trump loyalist Frank Bisignano cited the document as proof that DOGE layoffs and “staffing realignments” were helping to improve the department’s inefficiency.

Just one problem: An earlier draft of the report stated that the “total wait time” for callers to connect with an SSA employee averaged 46 minutes to more than two hours last year.

This key detail was deleted from the draft just prior to publication, according to the file’s version history accessed by the Post.

The tinkering gives what is meant to be an independent audit a whiff of propaganda. And it’s just one example of what has been a focused assault on inspectors general—who are meant to be bipartisan overseers of government agencies—by the Trump administration.

“After firing inspectors general at 19 agencies in an unprecedented purge in the early days of his second term, President Donald Trump has spent the past year nominating several new inspectors general with partisan backgrounds,” the Post wrote.

Social Security Watch, an advocacy group, denounced the misleading report.

“Inspectors general are the American people’s eyes and ears in these agencies,” Nancy Altman, the president of the group, said. “The Trump administration is undermining that oversight at every turn. Under this administration, the I.G. has no ability to conduct independent oversight. There is no meaningful check on the Trump administration’s Social Security sabotage.”

President Donald Trump is reportedly realizing that his sweeping, murderous “mass deportation” policy might not be a good idea.

The Wall Street Journal wrote Thursday that after speaking with advisers—and his wife—Trump has begun to cool on the draconian campaign. He’s complained about the bad press he received under Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino and former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and chief of staff Susie Wiles and border czar Tom Homan have apparently attempted to temper the federal militia optics of ICE and Customs and Border Protection. Trump has apparently realized the negative connotation of “mass deportations” and wants Republicans to talk more about “criminals.”

This supposed shift has not been accompanied by any kind of policy change, and the White House itself has maintained that it will be staying on message regarding its primary issue. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has yet to kick off another massive federal operation like in Minneapolis or Washington, D.C. And immigrant arrests have gone from 1,500 to 1,200 per day since the Minneapolis operation.

This meager trend has some immigration hard-liners concerned that Trump is going soft.

“Republicans need to turn out their base for the midterms, and not talking about President Trump’s promises, his signature campaign promise, is not the way to turn them out,” Immigration Accountability Project co-founder Rosemary Jenks told the Journal. Jenks’s organization is also part of the “Mass Deportation Coalition,” made up of conservative anti-immigration groups who are pushing for Trump to move on to “phase two” of mass deportations rather than step back.

But once again, none of these reported reversals have resulted in any concrete policy change. Even if Trump has finally realized that masked federal agents kicking down doors and killing people in the street is a bad look for the midterms, Stephen Miller is still in the room.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told the media that the families of troops killed in the war on Iran offered their full support, telling him to “finish the job.” The father of one of the U.S. service members told NBC News that that was an outright lie.

“What I heard through tears, through hugs, through strength, and through unbreakable resolve was the same from family after family. They said, ‘Finish this. Honor their sacrifice. Do not waver. Do not stop until the job is done,’” Hegseth said Thursday morning.

Charles Simmons—father of 28-year-old Tech. Sgt. Tyler H. Simmons, one of six service members who died in a refueling plane that crashed in Iraq last week—told a very different story.

“I can’t speak for the other families. When he spoke to me, that was not something we talked about,” he told NBC News later Thursday, rejecting Hegseth’s claim that he told him to keep fighting. “No, I didn’t say anything along those lines.… Who wants war? … Sometimes it’s a necessity, and I just don’t know what’s going on.”

While Simmons did note that both Hegseth and President Donald Trump extended genuine compassion and condolences to him, it’s impossible to ignore that Hegseth lied about “family after family” coming up to him to tell him to keep bombing Iran. He used flowery, sentimental language—while misrepresenting the voices of at least one grieving parent—to continue to drum up support for an incredibly unpopular war that has already killed thousands of civilians in Lebanon and Iran.

Republican Senator Katie Britt tried to claim that New York City requires identification to shovel show in an attempt to defend the SAVE Act Thursday.

At a press conference on Capitol Hill, the Alabama politician tried to argue that because many regular parts of daily life require people to produce identification, Republicans’ extreme voter ID bill is just par for the course.

“You can’t rent a home, you can’t go to work, you can’t shovel snow in New York City without an ID, and you can’t get into [Senator] Jon Ossoff’s campaign event. So, I’m pretty sure as we look to try to achieve the American dream, whether that’s getting insurance, whether that’s getting a car, whether that’s signing your kid up for school, you need an ID,” Britt said.

Leaving aside the fact that most Americans don’t have an aspirational dream of buying an insurance policy, Britt is likely piggybacking on Republicans’ jab at a specific New York City government program to help clear the city of snow.

That program hired temporary snow shovelers in severe weather, and, thanks to federal employment laws, required two forms of identification as the job pays up to $30 an hour—a living wage Britt and her fellow Republicans are unfamiliar with. You can shovel all the snow you want in the city without an ID—you just won’t get paid by City Hall.

And all of the parts of the “American dream” Britt mentioned, including getting insurance for some reason, aren’t rights enshrined in the Constitution. Voting is a right guaranteed to all eligible American citizens, and requiring people to produce their passports, passport cards, or their birth certificates, as the SAVE Act mandates, is costly, burdensome, and an illegal poll tax.