Trump Jr.’s Wife Says Putin Ally Didn’t Pay for Wedding—Just the Party

Donald Trump Jr.’s new wife defended her husband’s “dear friend” Umar Kremlev, a Russian oligarch in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle, following a bombshell report that he dropped hundreds of thousands of dollars on their wedding.

In a post on Instagram Monday, Bettina Trump claimed that it was merely a coincidence that the lavish weekend getaway had turned into a last-minute wedding celebration.

“The weekend that followed had actually been planned well in advance as a fun weekend with friends. It was never intended to be our wedding weekend. When our original wedding plans changed, we simply decided to get married before it and arrived at an already planned weekend as newlyweds,” she wrote. (Her post included a picture of a personalized matchbook inscribed for “Don & Bettina”— a thoughtful detail for a supposedly impromptu wedding party.)

“Our dear friend Umar very generously hosted two nights of celebrations for us AFTER our wedding. It was an extraordinarily generous wedding gift from a friend, and something for which we were and remain incredibly grateful.”

Of course, it really couldn’t matter less whether it was intended to be their actual wedding weekend or not. It was still a wildly expensive vacation on a Russian oligarch’s dime—one who’s deep in Putin’s pocket.

The original ProPublica report specified that Kremlev was not present at the private 18-person wedding ceremony, but he and a sizable delegation of Russians were attendees to the roughly 50-person afterparty. Kremlev rented out a private island where the reception was held, and guests were housed for $100,000 per night. He paid an estimated $70,000 for a massive fireworks display, and his team even helped plan the festivities.

Bettina insisted it was all innocent fun. “Friendship doesn’t require a political motive. Generosity doesn’t automatically come with an agenda. And sometimes a wedding gift is simply a wedding gift,” she wrote on Instagram. When it comes to Russian oligarchs rubbing elbows with the president’s son, that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Florida will likely send a neo-Nazi to its state House of Representatives.

Florida state House of Representatives nominee Marshall Rawson marched in the 2017 neo-Nazi “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. 

New reporting from Talking Points Memo Monday revealed that Rawson and his wife marched in the racist parade as part of the League of the South, a neo-Confederate, pro-secessionist group. He can even be seen in video near James Alex Fields Jr., the Nazi who drove his car into a crowd of counterprotesters and killed Heather Heyer. 

Rawson, 34, also ran a violently racist anonymous Twitter account, and has been involved with the League of the South since at least 2014, when he was a college student at Shorter University. In 2023, he advocated for a religious justification for slavery.

Once he did run for office in 2026, he got $15,000 in donations from individuals who identified as or had ties to white nationalists, according to an analysis from TPM. He even received $200 from Kristine Duke, the daughter of infamous Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke. Now he will likely win the general election in Florida’s 10th district in November. 

The League of the South is an extremely racist organization. Its leader Michael Hill has called for the group to “restore the South as White Man’s Land” and has long advocated for succession. 

“I pledge to be a white supremacist, a racist, an anti-Semite, a homophobe, a xenophobe, an Islamophobe, and any other sort of ’phobe that benefits my people, so help me God!” Hill wrote in 2016.

Two years earlier, he posted a picture of Rawson at a League of the South event, while writing that “Southern Nationalism is the cutting edge and the wave of our future for Southern youth.” 

Rawson claims to have ended his relationship with the League of the South, even as he continues to receive donations from white supremacists, uses his campaign to elevate white nationalist dog whistles, and pledges to “stand up to the radical left and protect our heritage and values.” 

The Florida GOP fully supports Rawson in all his bigotry, and has yet to comment on TPM’s report. Rawson did offer a statement. 

“Over the entire span of my adult life, I’ve been very active defending historical monuments from destruction or removal, and I feel that way about almost all monuments, not just those associated with southern history,” he told TPM. “I don’t screen my donors, and I put in tens of thousands of requests for donations by email, text, and phone. I’ve been extremely transparent about my campaign agenda, and any donation to my campaign is presumably an endorsement of my agenda and not my campaign’s endorsement of a donor’s views or agenda.  Obviously, I’m not privy to any conversation you reportedly had with any donors and cannot speak to those conversations.

Donald Trump thinks JD Vance is “terrific,” but he still isn’t ready to endorse his number two guy in the 2028 race.

Speaking with reporters on the tarmac of Shannon International Airport in Ireland Sunday, Trump claimed that it was “too early” to throw his weight behind Vance’s highly probable bid for president.

“I think he’s terrific, he’s got so many terrific people,” Trump said as the engines of Air Force One blared nearby. “I just think they’re all very good, but JD is fantastic.”

Vance is the early Republican front-runner in the 2028 race, though he has not yet formally announced his candidacy. Despite playing coy, the vice president received widespread support for his potential bid at the Republican midterm convention last week, where the attending crowd repeatedly chanted, “JD! 48!”

Vance has stressed that his decision hinges on the results of the midterm election cycle.

“We got to take care of business this November. Then we’ll worry about what comes next,” Vance said at the convention.

Other Republican presidential contenders include Secretary of State Marco Rubio (who last ran for America’s highest office against Trump in 2016) and former Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Some prediction sites—including City & State and Kalshi—are including Trump in the lineup as well, despite the fact that he is term-limited.

Vance, however, has an extra edge above his conservative competitors as the heir apparent to Trump’s MAGA movement.

A national polling average compiled by Race to the White House found that—as of September—Vance has a 40.6 percent chance of beating out the rest of the GOP field. Rubio is behind him, with a 21.9 percent chance, while Donald Trump Jr. is in third, with an 8.8 percent chance of winning.

Industry leaders in artificial intelligence are sounding the alarm over the catastrophic risks of unchecked progress—but President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance insist that everything is fine.

On Sunday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for the AI industry to reduce the speed of its work, following insiders’ concerns that the race to develop self-improving superintelligence could cause a mass extinction event. More than 1,000 employees of AI companies have called for increased government regulation.

Unfortunately, the Trump administration has bet big on data centers to drive the president’s so-called “Golden Age” of industry. Plus, the president clearly gets a kick out of posting AI slop.

“The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!” Trump wrote on Truth Social Monday morning. “The Trump Administration has stopped AI ‘people’ from doing bad, or potentially bad, ‘things,’ like Dario (Anthropic!), who is now pretending to be a ‘perfect little angel’—and we will continue to do so!”

Trump claimed there was a sick “conspiracy” against AI and data centers—even though the warnings were coming from within the industry itself—and implied that only China stood to benefit from a slowdown. “Conspiracy Theorists, Treasonists, Traitors, and Leakers, BEWARE!” he added.

Vance, whose rise to power was bankrolled by right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel and his network of tech billionaires in Silicon Valley, also came out against the industry’s request for more guardrails.

“I feel a little bit weird about the fact that you have so many frontier AI tech companies kind of coming to the company, and begging the government to regulate them,” Vance told reporters Monday. “It feels a little bit to me like a bit of a Trojan horse. So I think we just have to be careful about this.”

The vice president’s comment suggests he is concerned that large firms hope to extract favorable terms over their competitors.

President Trump’s allies claim the Kennedy Center for the Performing Center will collapse unless he gets to take it over and put his name on the building.

The Washington Post reports that Trump’s handpicked officials leading the center are claiming that “within a matter of weeks,” they won’t be able to pay employees or fulfill regular maintenance contracts, and that giving Trump the recognition he wants could secure the funds that would keep the center alive.

The center is in structural danger as well. A severe storm caused a four-by-five-foot section of ceiling plaster to fall in the building’s Grand Foyer, sending debris near the Concert Hall entrance, Trump’s handpicked executive director Matt Floca told trustees. Water damage is reportedly widespread throughout the building.

The officials recommend that the center close immediately, saying that keeping it open would put lives at risk. If the board approves the recommendations, which were laid out in a 57-page document distributed to the center’s board of trustees, the center could close on Tuesday, when the board meets next.

The document all but says that Trump’s support is contingent on receiving public credit. The financial resolution proposed to the board states that Trump has offered to “raise the necessary funds to keep the center from bankruptcy” while the building gets a major renovation, but he is unlikely to provide “fundamental oversight” to rescue the building without “appropriate recognition.”

Trustees are being given 10 different text options to put on the building’s exterior underneath its name. One of them is “Renovation Restoration and Endowment overseen by President Donald J. Trump and the Trump Kennedy Center Fund.” That’s very similar to another plan the board approved less than a month ago to inscribe “Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump” on the building’s facade, which is being challenged in federal court.

One of the trustees is Democratic Representative Joyce Beatty, who sued to remove Trump’s name from the building, and her lawyers blasted the proposal in a statement to the Post.

“This constant effort to add Donald Trump’s name to the Kennedy Center facade is the definition of insanity,” attorneys Norm Eisen and Nathaniel Zelinsky said. “This is now the third attempt to deface this sacred memorial and turn it into a vanity project for one man’s ego.

“Worse still, now Trump is taking the Center hostage and threatening to in effect kill it unless he gets his way,” Zelinsky and Eisen added. “This has to stop.”

Trump has threatened to demolish the Kennedy Center if he can’t have his name on it, and his attempted takeover has led to performers canceling their engagements at the center and ticket sales plummeting with fundraising drying up. He proposed closing the building earlier this year, but that was blocked by a court challenge. One wonders how much of this latest news is an attempt to force through his takeover.