Former President Donald Trump was accused in a lawsuit Wednesday of trying to “drastically dilute” the value of stock shares in his social media company held by the firm’s co-founders, potentially depriving themof hundreds of millions of dollars in profits.
The partnership, United Atlantic Ventures alleges that Trump Media & Technology Group engaged in “wrongful 11th hour … maneuvering” to dilute UAV″s minority stake in the media company, a court filing says.
The Delaware Chancery Court lawsuit comes in advance of the planned merger of TMTG with a shell company called Digital World Acquisition Corp., which would result in the shares of the combined entity being publicly traded.
If DWAC shareholder approve the merger next month, Trump’s 90% stake in TMTG could be valued at more than $3 billion, given DWAC’s current share price.
UAV is a partnership of Andy Litinsky and Wes Moss, who initially pitched Trump the idea of creating Trump Media in February 2021, after the former president was banned from Twitter and Facebook following the deadly Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
Both Litinsky and Moss were contestants on Trump’s television show, “The Apprentice.”
TMTG later built and launched Truth Social, the social media platform that Trump uses almost exclusively to communicate with the public.
The planned merger comes as Trump, who is the leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, has been ordered to pay more than $500 million in civil judgments in New York, related to trial verdicts for business fraud and defamation of the writer E. Jean Carroll.
“The attempt here is to deprive them of the deal,” said Christopher Clark, a lawyer for UAV.
“It’s not like they went out and bought a lottery ticket,” Clark said of the co-founders. “They actually went out and did the work, they created Truth Social, and now the beneficiary of that, Donald Trump, doesn’t want to pay.”
“Not a unique story, unfortunately,” Clark said, referring to Trump’s infamous practice of contesting bills from contractors and lawyers.
This is the same crime he’s been committing for decades and getting away with it, at least until the State of New York finally stepped up and did something about it. But he’s clearly still at it. If these guys manage to deprive him of his 3 billion dollar deal, that would be of great service to the world.
Quit the clickbait and get back to issues. @Sulliview calls out the “destructive obsession” with @JoeBiden’s age. “I wonder whether people are as aware of Trump's authoritarian plans as they are of Biden's age? And I think the answer to that is pretty clearly no," she argues. pic.twitter.com/8L9nnhSLdo
That applies to clickbait polls like today’s NYT poll that has everyone spinning out. No, women are not suddenly voting for Trump. And this too:
Have young voters truly move towards Biden since then, and have middle aged voters moved away? Who knows. But let's be careful about setting false narratives here, whether we're talking about age, race/ethnicity, or any other subgroup.
One more note on this poll – while people are talking about the shift from Biden +2 w/ likely voters in Dec to Trump +4 the biggest driver in that shift is the Dec poll sample had equal shares of Dems and GOPs while this poll is GOP +3. https://t.co/fySk2UJmmM
Punching back with style. Too bad it was behind closed doors.
A Tweet (suck it, Musk) regarding the closed-door House questioning of Hunter Biden caught my attention in a big way. Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) used his questioning time to punch back against the GOP’s phony Burisma inquiry.
If you have not read Eric Swalwell’s questions to Hunter Biden during his hearing, you have to.
SWALWELL: Any time your father was in government, prior to the Presidency or before, did he ever operate a hotel?
BIDEN: No, he has never operated a hotel.
SWALWELL: So he’s never operated a hotel where foreign nationals spent millions at that hotel while he was in office?
BIDEN: No, he has not.
SWALWELL: Did your father ever employ in the Oval Office any direct family member to also work in the Oval Office?
BIDEN: My father has never employed any direct family members, to my knowledge.
SWALWELL: While your father was President, did anyone in the family receive 41 trademarks from China?
BIDEN: No.
SWALWELL: As President and the leader of the party, has your father ever tried to install as the chairperson of the party a daughter-in-law or anyone else in the family? BIDEN: No. And I don’t think that anyone in my family would be crazy enough to want to be the chairperson of the DNC.
SWALWELL: Has your father ever in his time as an adult been fined $355 million by any State that he worked in?
BIDEN: No, he has not, thank God.
SWALWELL: Anyone in your family ever strike a multibillion dollar deal with the Saudi Government while your father was in office?
BIDEN: No.
SWALWELL: That’s all I’ve got.
Here’s how ABC News reported Hunter Biden’s “defiant” appearance and Swalwell’s snark:
Rep. Eric Swalwell, the Democrat from California, led one particularly pointed exchange intended to draw out the differences between President Biden and Trump, the Republican front-runner to challenge him for the White House.
“Did your father ever employ in the Oval Office any direct family member to also work in the Oval Office?” Swalwell asked.
“My father has never employed any direct family members, to my knowledge,” Hunter Biden testified.
Swalwell went on to ask questions referring to the Trump hotel in Washington, D.C., Trump’s legal case in New York City, his daughter-in-law’s recent bid to lead the Republican National Committee and his son-in-law Jared Kushner’s business dealings with Saudi Arabia.
“As President and the leader of the party, has your father ever tried to install as the chairperson of the party a daughter-in-law or anyone else in the family?” Swalwell probed.
“No. And I don’t think that anyone in my family would be crazy enough to want to be the chairperson of the DNC” — the Democratic National Committee.
Had his father ever been fined $355 million? “No, he has not, thank God,” Hunter Biden testified.
Lesson? Read the transcript. This pointed statement from Biden, for example:
So when you — when Jared Kushner flies over to Saudi Arabia, picks up $2 billion, comes back, and puts it in his pocket, okay, and he is running for President of the United States, you guys have any problem with that?
Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.) adds more and points out the “stark contrast” between Biden’s actions with a private enterprise and Jared Kushner’s deals with foreign governments.
Now, when do House Republicans charge Biden with lying under oath, not because he did but because it suits their narrative and helps Donald “91 Counts”?
An illustration of immigrants on the steerage deck of an ocean steamer passing the Statue of Liberty from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, July 2, 1887. National Park Service, Statue of Liberty NM
“Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic,” he warned, and warned again:
MAGA Republicans do not respect the Constitution. They do not believe in the rule of law. They do not recognize the will of the people.
They refuse to accept the results of a free election. And they’re working right now, as I speak, in state after state to give power to decide elections in America to partisans and cronies, empowering election deniers to undermine democracy itself.
MAGA forces are determined to take this country backwards — backwards to an America where there is no right to choose, no right to privacy, no right to contraception, no right to marry who you love.
They promote authoritarian leaders, and they fan the flames of political violence that are a threat to our personal rights, to the pursuit of justice, to the rule of law, to the very soul of this country.
And, oh, the pearl-clutching afterwards! Biden was being un-nice, mean, partisan. How dare he? The man-child leading MAGA called it “the most vicious, hateful, and divisive speech ever delivered by an American president.” (Takes one to know one, as any schoolyard bully knows.) “[J]ust eight weeks before midterm elections,” The Washington Post Editorial Board scolded, “Mr. Biden was wrong to conflate upholding the rule of law with his own partisan agenda.” Pundits questioned his political judgment to address the elephant in the room rather than campaign on bland-but-safe kitchen-table issues.
Two months later, the over-hyped, midterm “red wave” flattened to a ripple. Cause and effect? Maybe. Maybe not. But Biden’s “mistake” in campaigining on the soul of America may indeed have been an inflection point, “one of those moments that determine the shape of everything that’s to come after.”
But America’s short attention span means we are too easily distracted from America’s first principles, says Anand Giridharadas, by “Whac-A-Mole crises ginned up by fascists.” By which he means the hysteria over immigration. Sometimes it takes a son of immigrants to appreciate what makes this country worth fighting for (The Ink):
We shouldn’t be having a defensive conversation about immigration that starts with the story of border chaos.
We should have our own conversation from first principles: This is an extraordinary country. It’s extraordinary for many reasons. Among the reasons it is extraordinary: it is a country built of the world, from the world, from every part of the world.
I have had the fortune, as a journalist, as a foreign correspondent, to visit dozens of countries. And I’ve enjoyed all these countries I’ve been to, but I’ve actually never been to any other country that truly aspired to be a country made of the world.
When you’re in France — there are immigrants in France, but it is not like the United States. It is not a country made of the world. It is a country centered on Frenchness.
A lot of countries in the world — people may not know this — don’t even have birthright citizenship. If you live there, if you’re born there, even if your parents are from there, you still don’t necessarily become a citizen.
Eric Liu, a friend of mine, a Chinese-American, wrote in a memoir called A Chinaman’s Chance about how his family’s been in China thousands and thousands of years. His parents left, came to America. He said if he wanted to go back and become Chinese, he couldn’t. 5,000 years of loyal living in China, one or two generations in the United States.
Becoming Chinese is not a thing. Becoming Indian is not a thing. Becoming American is something that we do to a million people every year. We’ve done it under Republicans, under Democrats.
My family came here 47 years ago. I think we’ve had a pretty good run of contribution to this country — perhaps except my own.
So I think we need to not just react to Whac-A-Mole crises ginned up by fascists, but actually own this notion that our blood is better with the blood of many people in it. Our country is better when more people are here.
We have built everything we can because we have every kind of idea, every kind of contribution mixing together, and people who don’t have a heart, people who are miserly, or people who are cynically trying to raise money off of hatred don’t belong in the American story.
Conservatives by their nature resist change. But they are fine with it, grudgingly, if there is a buck to make from it. Their red line is cultural change that threatens a status quo that preserves white, male Christians atop the American social pyramid. For all our “created equal” chest-thumping, yes, we still have castes here, as Isabel Wilkerson argues. Some of us aspire for America to be better than that. Others are just fine with it, especially if there is a buck to make from it. Abolitionism was one of those inflection points where change happened against their resistance. We are at another of those points today.
Our blood is better with the blood of many in it. Our country is better when more people are here.
— The.Ink, from Anand Giridharadas (@AnandWrites) March 1, 2024
It is helpful to have Giridharadas around to remind us who we aspire to be. In the streaming age, his bandwidth is narrower than Neil Diamond‘s and Neil Sedaka’s back in the day, but his message is as strong.
Conservatives never back down; they double down. It’s a debating style the left has never embraced, but should. We hem and haw when challenged. We justify and present facts. I looks and feels weak to conservatives who value strength and strong conviction, like Giridharadas’. Punch back.
I’m reminded of a Roy Blount Jr. tale of reading in The New York Times that a southern folk remedy of eating kaolin clay (a main ingredient on Pepto) as a stomach ache remedy was on the wane. Naturally, some New York sophisticate asked if Blount ate dirt:
At that point there were two tacks I could take. I could say, “Well, I know there are some folks down south who like to chew on clay, but I never ate any myself and neither did any of my relatives or friends, and in point of fact I never even saw anybody eat dirt.”
The response to that tack would have been a knowing look. “Here is a man who comes from people who eat dirt and he thinks he is better than they are.” She would be thinking I couldn’t handle stigma. Or that I was inauthentic. Southern and inauthentic: the worst of both worlds.
So I took the second tack. “Hell, yes, we eat dirt,” I said. “And if you never ate any blackened red dirt, you don’t know what’s good. I understand you people up here eat raw fish.”
“And eat cold soup,” I once heard Blount add.
“Hell, yes, I support immigration” is not the answer Whac-A-Mole fascists expect. Try it out. See above for the punch combination that follows.
Pine martens, a species of mammal related to weasels and badgers, were once common throughout Britain. But sadly, due to habitat loss in recent centuries, their numbers were greatly reduced — bordering on the brink of extinction.
Thanks to conservation efforts, pine martens have begun to make a comeback, but sightings of these shy animals remain rare.
“Unfortunately, pine martens are notoriously difficult to spot,” Charlie Mellor of the Woodland Trust wrote. “They are so elusive that they are often studied via footprints, droppings and bits of lost fur rather than by direct sightings.”
February can be a tough time for wildlife as natural supplies of food can be severely depleted now. This pine marten visits nearly every night for a peanut treat and sometimes a raw egg. The Birdsy cam is great for recording their visits. Set-up: Hillockhead, Black Isle, Scotland pic.twitter.com/aJT1NYDn50
Recently, however, footage has emerged hinting at a lesser-discussed aspect of pine marten behavior — that they know how to have a good time.
Les Humphrey lives in Scotland, near the northern tip of Great Britain. There, he has a motion-sensing camera pointed out toward his garden to monitor for pine martens passing through.
The other day, Humphrey shared an amusing clip of one such visit with the group Mammal Society, capturing two pine martens having an absolute blast with child playthings in his yard — jumping and swinging like a pair of rambunctious kids.
“This has become a nightly ritual,” Humphrey wrote.
Pine martens caught on camera playing on children's swingset in Ardnamurchan, Scotland. The owner of the video, Les Humphreys, tells us this is a nightly occurence in his garden.
Demented Don waves at migrants attempting to cross the border, gives them a fist pump of solidarity and then says "They like Trump."pic.twitter.com/xTFo8VTnyr
I get why Biden keeps saying that he wants this “tough” border bill to pass but it’s a mixed bag for me. It’s an awful bill and I’m glad it didn’t for both policy and political reasons. (I don’t think Biden’s coalition would have been too thrilled once they saw the details.) But in any case , it didn’t and now we have the American people seeing that Trump is playing politics with his own issue and it’s a very bad look for him.
Here is a compilation of Republicans pointing out that the border is not solved because Donald Trump killed the border deal pic.twitter.com/pJFYowlVMc
Trump tells Americans to blame him for sabotaging a deal on the border so that he can campaign on the issue: Please blame me pic.twitter.com/1rR3E8w9UJ
His incoherence and lies aren’t exactly selling points either:
Trump, confused: We have people who don’t speak languages. We have nobody that even speaks those languages. Nobody speaks them pic.twitter.com/5OfQU9xIAb
“Conjured out of thin air.” CNN cuts out of Trump’s speech after he tells “several lies”. They have their fact-checker, Daniel Dale, standing by, who immediately goes to work. CNN has finally wised up. Every single network must do this when Trump is speaking. (Video: CNN) pic.twitter.com/9GAOnygmMe
Trump insists he’s not cognitively impaired because he took a “very tough” test that included pictures of a lion, a giraffe, a whale, and a shark and could identify which one was a lion pic.twitter.com/xvwHjWjAca
(1) This is not what “everybody on both sides” thinks
(2) It doesn’t just go back to the states; it also goes back to Congress which can overrule the states and impose nationwide abortion bans or rights https://t.co/FSPI5PjId5
Trump on Immunity: If you going to make a big decision as president and you're afraid that as soon as you get out will be indicted because you are trying to do something good for the country, even if it is severe, it might be a great thing for the country… pic.twitter.com/2TOA2vBvDo
According to a recent Pew poll, 57% of Americans said that a large number of migrants seeking to enter the country leads to more crime. Republicans (85%) overwhelmingly say the migrant surge leads to increased crime in the U.S. A far smaller share of Democrats (31%) say the same. The poll found that 63% of Democrats say it does not have much of an impact.
But despite the former president’s campaign rhetoric, expert analysis and available data from major-city police departments show that despite several horrifying high-profile incidents, there is no evidence of a migrant-driven crime wave in the United States.
That won’t change the way Trump talks about immigrants in his bid to return to the White House, as he argues that President Joe Biden’s immigration policies are making Americans less safe. Trump says voters should hold Biden personally responsible for every crime committed by an undocumented immigrant.
An NBC News review of available 2024 crime data from the cities targeted by Texas’ “Operation Lone Star,” which buses or flies migrants from the border to major cities in the interior — shows overall crime levels dropping in those cities that have received the most migrants.
“This is a public perception problem. It’s always based upon these kinds of flashpoint events where an immigrant commits a crime,” explains Graham Ousey, a professor at the College of William & Mary and the co-author of “Immigration and Crime: Taking Stock.” “There’s no evidence for there being any relationship between somebody’s immigrant status and their involvement in crime.”
Following up on the post below about Hispanic Christian Nationalists, here Philip Bump takes a deep dive into the PRRI poll on Christian Nationalism’s relationship to Trump.
Last year, PRRI asked a wide swath of Americans to evaluate several statements oriented around the idea of instituting Christian nationalism. Some were explicit: “The U.S. government should declare America a Christian nation,” for example. Others were more esoteric: “Being Christian is an important part of being truly American.”
From the responses, PRRI categorized respondents into one of four groups. Two were supportive of Christian nationalism, including the most supportive of the statements (adherents) and those who were generally supportive (sympathizers). The other two groups were hostile to the ideas, from those who mostly disagreed (skeptics) to those who rejected all the ideas (rejecters).
Using this scale, PRRI estimated the percentage of each state’s population that was supportive of Christian nationalism — that is, that were adherents or supporters. Nationally, about 3 in 10 Americans fell into this category, with 1 in 10 as “adherents.” But at the state level, support would at times near 50 percent. In Mississippi, half the population was estimated to be supportive of the precepts of Christian nationalism.
This can be compared to support for Trump in 2020. And when we do so, we see a clear correlation: a cloud of state labels moving up and to the right.
[…]
If we compare the 2020 results to just the percentage of Christian nationalism among the White population in each state, the correlation gets tighter.
This isn’t surprising, certainly. Support for Christian nationalism is higher among less-educated Americans, older Americans and White evangelical Christians, PRRI found. Those are all groups that are central to Trump’s base of support. This data also doesn’t tell us how causation might work: Are Christian nationalists drawn to Trump or are Trump supporters drawn to Christian nationalism?
Of course, Trump stokes the idea that he is a champion — the champion — of America’s Christian population. He makes explicit appeals to the role of Christianity that Christian nationalists support. His presumed goal is that support for Trumpism and Christian nationalism grow stronger together.
I guess I will never get over the fact that these people worship that lying, rapist, swindler but here we are.
Are there any Christian leaders out there who have the respect and authority to challenge this man’s hold on some of these people? No?
I’d imagine like most of you, I have been very puzzled by the number of Latino voters who are supporters of Donald Trump considering his obvious racist hostility toward them. He is actually proposing to round them up and deport them in massive numbers which would seem like it should be a deal breaker.
Hispanic Protestants are among the biggest supporters of Christian nationalism despite the belief system’s anti-immigrant and anti-diversity stances, according to a new survey.
Aroundtwo-thirds of Americans surveyed said they reject or are skeptical about Christian nationalism, but its prominence in the GOP is helping shape its educational, health care and immigration policies.
-About 66% of white evangelicals hold such views — the biggest share of any group surveyed.
-Among Latino Catholics, 72% said they rejected or were skeptical of Christian nationalism.
Republicans (55%) are more than twice as likely as independents (25%) and three times more likely than Democrats (16%) to say they hold Christian nationalist views, the survey found. Christian nationalists are among the strongest supporters of Donald Trump, various polls show.
Christian nationalism is a set of beliefs centered around white American Christianity’s dominance in most aspects of life in the United States…
“The idea that Christians should actually exercise dominion over all areas of American society has been quite popular among both white and Latino evangelicals,” Robert P. Jones, president and founder of PRRI, tells Axios. Jones said Latino evangelicals also are more likely to identify as racially white.
Many Latino evangelicals don’t know they’re being indoctrinated with Christian nationalism, Elizabeth Rios, founder of the South Florida Passion Center,a faith-basedjustice-oriented training center, tells Axios.
“I think this is happening because most of our Latinos have been discipled in these white megachurches where a lot of nationalism is taking place.”
Religious indoctrination is a powerful drug. And like most drugs, it can be toxic.
— The Intellectualist (@highbrow_nobrow) March 1, 2024
Alexei Navalny was buried to the soundtrack from his favorite movie, Terminator 2 – the scene where @Schwarzenegger sinks into the vat of molten metal and gives a thumbs up pic.twitter.com/XAk5TUwsXk
I don’t care a much about the notion of “American dominance” or “prestige” but I do care a lot about the prospect of the planet being blown up and destroying the institutions and alliances that make it possible to reverse catastrophic climate change. All of that is becoming closer to reality as Donald Trump continues to dictate American foreign policy from his gaudy social club in Palm Beach.
One of the best things about the Trump administration is how copiously it leaked to the press, so in real time and later through the many books and articles that were written about that tumultuous term, we have a very detailed understanding of the man’s worldview went he went in and what it is today. We know that even after four years in the most important job in the world, he didn’t learn a thing about world affairs.
According to “A Very Stable Genius” by Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker, by July of 2017 it had become clear to Trump’s national security and economic team that he desperately needed some tutoring in order to understand the importance of America’s key alliances. So they prepared a briefing with visual aids so that he didn’t get bored and assembled the top military brass as well as his relevant cabinet members to instruct him about US military and diplomatic alliances. He didn’t want to hear it, demanding to know why the US hadn’t won the war in Afghanistan, calling it a “loser war”, and kept interrupting the briefing to complain about the Iran nuclear deal and NATO. He yelled, “you’re all losers. You don’t know how to win anymore. I wouldn’t go to war with you people. You’re a bunch of dopes and babies.” After he stormed out of the meeting then Secretary of State Rex Tillerson famously turned to the room and declared. “he’s a f—ing moron.” Tillerson was not wrong.
This was the same meeting at which Trump asked why South Korea isn’t more appreciative of America’s military alliance and indicated that he wanted to restore the US nuclear arsenal to 1960s levels. (He later denied that he said that, only that he wanted to completely modernize it, a task that had already been started under the Obama administration.) Throughout his term, Trump never understood why the country that he led benefited from the alliances that America had made in the nuclear age, apparently failing to grasp that if you have the most nuclear bombs on the planet, you have a special responsibility to keep a lid on the possibility of WWIII.
Despite his insistence that he hated nuclear proliferation (because he knew all about it because his uncle was a nuclear scientist at MIT) Trump was fatalistic about the prospect telling CNN back in 2016 that he thought that Japan and South Korea might as well develop nuclear weapons for themselves:
It’s going to happen anyway. It’s going to happen anyway. It’s only a question of time. They’re going to start having them or we have to get rid of them entirely. But you have so many countries already, China, Pakistan, you have so many countries, Russia, you have so many countries right now that have them. Now, wouldn’t you rather in a certain sense have Japan have nuclear weapons when North Korea has nuclear weapons?
This fatalism stems from the ongoing, puerile obsession that America is being cheated and that the rest of the world should just fend for itself or pay big bucks to the US for protection. This is why he continues to threaten to withdraw from NATO and says that he’d encourage Russia to “do whatever the hell they want.” He clearly still fails to grasp the existential threat of nuclear proliferation and simply cannot understand that US security guarantees benefit America largely because they prevent the spread of nuclear weapons — and mitigate the risk of a planet destroying nuclear war. He just doesn’t get it, even now, after being president for four years.
It’s scaring the hell out of the world, especially our allies. In the Atlantic this week, Anne Applebaum offers the view from abroad and it’s sobering. America’s European allies are taking his threats very seriously, not because they are new but because they are seeing that he controls the Republican party even out of office and the Republican party has now adopted his worldview. The unwillingness to allow Ukraine military aid in this dire moment, tells them that America is no longer a reliable ally, even if the Democrats are in charge. She writes:
For outsiders, this reality is mind-boggling, difficult to comprehend and impossible to understand. In the week that the border compromise failed, I happened to meet a senior European Union official visiting Washington. He asked me if congressional Republicans realized that a Russian victory in Ukraine would discredit the United States, weaken American alliances in Europe and Asia, embolden China, encourage Iran, and increase the likelihood of invasions of South Korea or Taiwan. Don’t they realize? Yes, I told him, they realize….
Since then, I’ve had a version of that conversation with many other Europeans, in Munich and elsewhere, and indeed many Americans. Intellectually, they understand that the Republican minority is blocking this money on behalf of Trump. They watched first McCarthy, then Johnson, fly to Mar-a-Lago to take instructions. They know that Senator Lindsey Graham, a prominent figure at the Munich Security Conference for decades, backed out abruptly this year after talking with Trump. They see that Donald Trump Jr. routinely attacks legislators who vote for aid to Ukraine, suggesting that they be primaried. The ex-president’s son has also said the U.S. should “cut off the money” to Ukrainians, because “it’s the only way to get them to the table.” In other words, it’s the only way to make Ukraine lose.
The Europeans are taking all this very seriously and one has to assume that America’s allies elsewhere are as well. This may very well lead to full scale re-armament — and they are in active discussions to build their own nuclear arsenals. This is a catastrophic consequence of Donald Trump’s narcissism and ignorance.
What’s most profound about this is that it’s not the result of a serious shift in ideology by the Republican Party. The change from the days of Reagan and John McCain and even George W. Bush on foreign policy and national security has been abrupt and done without any thought or care at all for implications. It’s happened because the party has turned into a cult that worships one man and that man has such staggering character flaws and intellectual defects that it could take the whole world down the road to perdition.
