Trump Straight-Up Admits He Pardons People to Get Something in Return

When Donald Trump gives, he expects something in return.

The revelation came amid an attack Wednesday night against Texas Representative Henry Cuellar, who Trump apparently believed should have become a Republican after he received a presidential pardon last year.

Speaking at a campaign rally in San Antonio, Texas, Trump insisted that he never expects quid pro quos when it comes to presidential pardons. But he then proved that untrue minutes later.

“I made no deal,” Trump declared, recalling his exchange with Cuellar. “I didn’t say, ‘Oh, I’ll give you the pardons if you turn Republican.’ I didn’t say that. No, I could have done that very easily but—where a crooked politician would have done that.

“But I thought there would be a good chance that Cuellar might say, ‘Wow, he did something really wonderful, you know, somebody has a heart.’”

The president then suggested Cuellar had been villainized by the Democratic Party and that he would have been welcomed into the Republican Party with open arms “if we asked.”

Just moments later, Trump mused about how Cuellar’s daughters had “begged” the president to pardon their father, and wished that they had used the “same level of charm to convince their mother and father to do the right thing.”

“I guess I expected maybe he wouldn’t run, or maybe he’d run maybe as a Republican, I don’t know,” Trump said.

Trump had shared similar thoughts on Truth Social hours prior when endorsing Cuellar’s opponent. The president accused Cuellar of a “tremendous act of disloyalty” and said Cuellar was an “extremely ungrateful person.”

“Henry Cuellar is a LOSER who, right now, should be serving a long-term jail sentence with his wife in a top level penitentiary,” Trump added.

The FBI raided Cuellar’s home and office in 2022 as part of a federal probe into the Texas Democrat’s ties to Azerbaijan. Cuellar and his wife faced a dozen charges of bribery, money laundering, and conspiracy—including allegations that they improperly accepted $600,000 in bribes from the central Asian country—before Trump intervened. At the time, Trump chalked up the charges to an improper intervention by the Biden administration, suggesting that his predecessor had weaponized the legal system to punish Cuellar for criticizing America’s immigration processes.

President Donald Trump clearly gets a kick out of imagining Iran destroying American cities.

Speaking at a rally in San Antonio Wednesday night, Trump doubled down on the outlandish fallacy that anyone complaining about high gas prices should consider the alternative: that Iran could strike Los Angeles or San Diego.

“But you wanna see trauma? You wanna see problems? And I said it the other day, let them hit a missile into San Diego or Los Angeles on the way. Let them hit—you wanna see a horror show, you wanna see problems? Let them hit San Diego. Let them hit Los Angeles. And you wanna see some bad things happen. You wanna see a country that would be in free fall,” Trump said. “We’re not gonna let that happen. We protect our cities, we protect our country.”

Trump made a similar remark at a rally in Nebraska earlier this week, where he said, “They can take out a city. Let them take, let them take out Los Angeles; let them take out San Diego. That’s—this is a very small price to pay, and it’s going to be over with very soon.”

Some viewers believed that Trump had issued an invitation to Iran to destroy two American cities. The rally crowd even burst into cheers when the president evoked the imminent destruction of California, a consistent target of his administration. But Trump’s team insisted that his comment was simply taken out of context: His “let them” comment was a warning of what could happen if the United States did not intervene, and that the “small price to pay” referred to high prices of goods and services.

“He was clearly stating U.S. cities would have been threatened if a nuclear Iran hadn’t been stopped,” White House communications director Steven Cheung wrote on X.

Trump’s decision to revisit his controversial comment clarifies everything: Clearly he likes to evoke the destruction of these blue cities in order to illustrate his nonsensical point about high gas prices to crowds in red states. His dramatics are just another way to sidestep blame for high prices.

It’s worth noting that Trump’s fallacy is a false one. Multiple former Trump administration officials have contradicted the president’s claims that Iran’s nuclear program presented any imminent threat to national security. Trump himself claimed earlier this week that Iran’s nuclear program had been obliterated in June 2025, a full eight months before he ordered attacks in March 2026.

Kimberly Guilfoyle begged a donor to send her $100,000 without leaving a trace as part of her pay-to-play grift—in the midst of her confirmation process last year to become U.S. ambassador to Greece.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Guilfoyle urged Trump donor and former congressional candidate Eric Deters to send her hundreds of thousands of dollars, and in exchange she’d make sure the administration took special care of Deters and his personal tax issues. Guilfoyle is also the former wife of California Governor Gavin Newsom and ex-fiancé of Donald Trump Jr.

“You could just send it here. It won’t show up anywhere if you wire money to American Express, that’s all that will show,” Guilfoyle wrote to Deters on July 3, 2025. “Please. And I have you down as one of my special guests for my hearing in DC on Wednesday.... I can get you in for a meeting on the matter we discussed please get back to me ASAP.”

“Honey please I need you to get this done for me today,” she said, referring to the payment. Guilfoyle was confirmed as ambassador just months later in September.

Deters claimed that while he and Guilfoyle exchanged texts and promises for months (“I will be your Trump ride or die, forever and ever,” she told him at one point), he never sent her any money.

Deters is the same former Kentucky GOP gubernatorial candidate who hosts the new defunct Freedom Fest in Kentucky. Guilfoyle was one of the event’s earliest headliners, as Deters paid her $300,000 to speak there starting in 2020. In 2024, Deters sought out Guilfoyle’s help with an extradition request for Abubakar Atiq Durrani, an Ohio doctor who fled to Pakistan after he was charged with defrauding insurers with unnecessary spinal surgeries on kids. Deters, who was representing the families of the children, ran into a problem with Durrani’s malpractice insurer, MedPro, which held it wasn’t liable for his actions. MedPro instead sued Deters for “a calculated scheme to extract payments” from the company, “at first through abusive litigation, and by ultimately outright extortion through threats of violence and murder and by blackmail against the company’s CEO.” The accusations—which Deters denies—led him to reach out to Guilfoyle, even telling her he’d pay her $1 million to get him a spot on Tucker Carlson’s show to draw attention to his situation.

Guilfoyle and Deters began to speak more frequently after her nomination as ambassador.

“Eric, I really wish you would stop papering all these things,” Guilfoyle wrote in one message to Deters. It’s really dangerous … and you could simply just call me on signal.” She even chastised him for speaking to a producer on her podcast about their deal, saying that “it’s unbelievable when we have a private arrangement with you that you would now CC a producer talking about money.... Do not say we have any arrangement. What a nightmare you’ll literally cost me my ambassadorship stop writing.”

Deters claims he didn’t end up making any payments to Guilfoyle and had “not received one favor.”

Guilfoyle’s attorneys deny that the messages between her and Deters are legitimate, and claim that if anything he owed her speaking fees from his defunct Freedom Fest. Deters denies that.

This is a massive ethics question that the administration will likely try its hardest to ignore, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio did before leaving for Greece.

“I’m not going to comment,” he told reporters.

President Trump’s meeting with convicted election denier Tina Peters on Monday concerned some disturbing plans for the upcoming midterm elections.

Peter Ticktin, Peters’s attorney, said that she proposed that Trump seize ballots from across the country and conduct a hand recount, reports Kyle Clark of Colorado’s 9 News.

“It’s a good plan, and I do think that something like that is probably going to happen,” Ticktin said to right-wing podcaster Joe Oltmann in Colorado. “In the event that we have this kind of disaster, and everything goes wrong, and the vote is crazy, and the senatorial races put it up there to remove the president and the vice president, in that nightmare, should it come true, Donald Trump is not going to relinquish control again.”

Oltmann has called for the state’s top Democrats to be executed in the past, and said on the podcast that violence is going to be necessary. Ticktin said on the podcast that Trump should be in control of America’s weapons if the country descends into civil war.

“So, he’s got nothing to lose, the nation has nothing to lose, it’s better if we’re going to have a civil war of any sort that it would be martial law with our side in control of the armaments,” Ticktin said.

Normally, this kind of speculation would be written off as a conspiracy theory from the fringe. But Peters was invited to the White House for a meeting, and had her prison sentence for election tampering commuted after Trump put pressure on Colorado’s Democratic Governor Jared Polis. Trump is desperate to avoid a Democratic takeover of Congress after the midterms, and seems willing to entertain all kinds of crazy ideas.

The Democratic National Committee sued the Trump administration Wednesday, alleging that recent TV advertisements espousing the president’s political agenda were funded by taxpayers and thus violated U.S. propaganda law.

The 31-page complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, accuses Donald Trump of personally directing the advertisements. The DNC has asked the court to intervene in the scheme to stop the ads and the flow of public funds that has buoyed their creation and proliferation.

More than $12 million in government funds have been spent on the pro-Trump ads since September, according to the ad-tracking service AdImpact. The Department of Homeland Security had previously set aside $20 million for the dubious expenditure, the Associated Press reported late last month.

The administration ultimately created four adverts to glorify Trump, framing the MAGA leader as a centerpiece of American resistance. One 30-second commercial, set to JMSN’s track “Love Me,” framed Trump as the bastion of American strength and resistance against foreign foes.

The refrain, “love me,” was played repeatedly while images of Trump flashed across the screen, and text appeared reiterating Trump’s claim that “America will never be a communist country.”

“He is the toughest, most resilient person that I’ve ever met and nothing is going to stop him from fighting so hard for the country that he’s lost,” UFC President Dana White can be heard saying towards the end of the clip.

All four ads were accompanied by an unusual disclaimer: “Paid for by the U.S. government.” One appeared to use footage from a 2024 spot for Trump’s presidential campaign.

Trump practically confessed to the arrangement on Monday, relenting to public backlash via a Truth Social post in which he said he would no longer use taxpayer money on the adverts.

“The Radical Left is upset with the fact that I am taking Ads, which I consider to be a positive promotion for our Great U.S.A., and paying for them with U.S.A. money,” Trump wrote. “This is a rather standard thing to do but, rather than doing that, although nothing will make them happy, I have decided to do the Patriotic Ads, among others, and pay for them myself, and with money I raised for MAGA, Inc.”

He did not, however, mention if he would use his coffers to reimburse the American people.

Speaking with reporters outside the White House on Tuesday, Trump insisted that “the ads were really good” and a “promotion for the country” rather than a promotion of himself.

Vice President JD Vance also defended the commercials, claiming on Monday that the messaging was “not partisan.”

“We’re trying to tell a story about how great the United States of America is,” Vance said.

The DNC, however, disagreed. In their complaint, the political committee argued that the “political propaganda ads” were an attempt to resuscitate Trump’s “historically low approval ratings and avoid widespread Republican defeats in the 2026 midterm election.”

The ads, according to the group, followed a broader pattern of behavior in which Trump has repeatedly attempted to center himself in the midterm cycle, effectively turning Election Day 2026 into another referendum on his popularity.

In recent months, Trump has attempted to bribe Americans with a $5,000 handout (if Republicans win), made himself the center of an unprecedented two-day Republican midterm convention, and repeatedly instructed voters to act as if he’s on the ballot.

Yet all of those things have only proved to hurt Republican odds, as resentment grows against Trump due to the dragging Iran war and the rising cost of living.

This story has been updated.