Category Archives: Donald Trump

TRENTON, N.J. (AP) New Jersey Republicans will decide whether they want an outspoken supporter of former President Donald Trump to be their standard bearer in the fall election for governor, while Democratic incumbent Gov. Phil Murphy is on an easy path toward capturing his partys nomination.

New Jerseys June 8 primary is just a month away, with some clear contours already emerging.

Murphy is aiming to become the first Democrat since 1977 to win reelection in a state where Democrats now outnumber Republicans by more than 1 million voters. On the GOP side, many in the party have lined up behind Jack Ciattarelli, a one-time Assembly member, accountant and small business owner. Ciattarelli is focusing his attacks on Murphy, but he faces competition from candidates embracing Trump.

A closer look at how the race is shaping up:

MURPHY CRUISING

Murphy wont have any challenger on the ballot for the Democratic primary. State officials ruled that two would-be challengers filed faulty petitions to get on the ballot last month.

That means Murphy, who is the head of the Democratic Party in the state, will secure the nomination.

It also means he wont have to burn cash to fend off attack and can instead focus on November.

A Monmouth University poll out Wednesday showed Murphy with a 57% approval rating, down from 71% at the height of the outbreak last year, but still in positive territory.

That poll surveyed 706 New Jersey adults and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.7 percentage points.

If he wins in November, hell be the first Democrat to win reelection in more than four decades.

As governor, he has a pulpit during his usually twice-weekly COVID-19 news conferences, which are streamed live on YouTube.

And despite some squabbles with fellow Democrats who control the Legislature, he has achieved a number of key campaign promises: phasing in a $15 minimum wage, enacting recreational marijuana legalization, raising taxes on millionaires, expanding gun control legislation and expanding paid family leave. A big unfished campaign promise is the establishment of a state bank.

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REPUBLICAN RIVALS

Ciattarelli is the only one of the four Republicans running for governor to qualify for public matching funds. He has also received support from county Republican parties up and down the state.

Ciattarelli ran four years ago for governor, but lost the nomination to then-Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno. He launched his campaign for governor almost as soon as Murphy took office in 2018.

Ciattarelli had been critical of former GOP Gov. Chris Christie and President Donald Trump. Still, in a GOP primary, hes highlighted the support he received from Republican Rep. Jeff Van Drew, a Trump favorite who left the Democratic Party and fully embraced the president over his opposition of the first impeachment.

Hes focused much of his campaign squarely on Murphy, calling for reopening from pandemic closures sooner and making the state more affordable.

Also seeking the nomination are Hudson County pastor Phil Rizzo, who recently posted a photo of himself alongside Trump at Mar-a-Lago, Hirsh Singh, a former unsuccessful gubernatorial candidate in 2017, and Brian Levine, an accountant and former county elected official. Singh has also been a vocal Trump supporter. Levine has called for the party to stop arguing over Trump and focused reining in tax rates.

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THE FUNDRAISING PICTURE

Based on the available public records, Murphy is leading the fundraising contest by a lot. Hes brought in $3.4 million, according to the Election Law Enforcement Commission, and gotten $4.1 million in public matching funds.

Ciattarelli has raised nearly $1 million and received $3.6 million in matching funds.

Data for the other GOP candidates, who havent qualified for public funds, will become available later this month.

The matching fund program goes back to 1974 and allows candidates to get $2 in public cash for every $1 raised. Candidates must raise $490,000 to qualify for the funds. Theres a cap of $4.6 million and spending for candidates getting public money is limited to $7.3 million in the primary.

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Murphy gliding in NJ's primary; GOP wrestling with Trump - Associated Press

As I write this article, Arizona Republicans are conducting a fake audit of the 2020 election in Maricopa County, the state's major population center. The purpose of that audit, as my colleague Amanda Marcotte accurately observes, is to satisfy Donald Trump and his supporters by doing two things. First, itapplies unproved conspiracy theories to the recount process in the hope of "proving" Trump actually won the state. More importantly, itdemonstrateshow easy it would be for Republicans to steal elections if Trump supporters and their ilk controlled the political process.

Since the most direct way for the Trump movement to gain power would be for Trump himself to be elected again in 2024, this article will look at a phenomenon that has recurred several times in American history: a defeated ex-president running again. (Only one actually won. We'll get to that.) Of course it's alsopossible that a future Trump-style movement could be led by a pseudo-Trumpsuck-up like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz or Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

The fundamental difference between Trump and other ex-presidents who have considered or attempted a political comeback is the question ofattitude. Prior to Trump, former presidents who tried to run again did so by appealing to democratic instincts. Sometimestheir party leaders believed they were the most electable alternative. Sometimes theyran asthird-party candidates to advance causes they believed were important.

Trump, by contrast, would run in 2024based on the assumption that power is his right, and something only he (or his sycophantic followers)are allowed to hold. Hehas conditioned his supporters since the 2016 election cycle to believe that the only possible outcomes whenhe's a candidate are thathe wins the election or the electionwas stolen. This disturbing personality trait, which hasbound many people to him through a process known asnarcissistic symbiosis,is why many people (including this author) believed that Trump would try to stagea coup if he lost the 2020 election. It didn't help that, as scientists have demonstrated,many Trump supporters are also motivated by their own insecure conception of masculinity.

Trump has already destroyed many of the precedents that would stop the rise of an authoritariandictator. He has used fascistic tactics to create a cult of personality that hisparty is expected to slavishly follow, has become the first incumbent president tolose an election and refuse to accept the result and has spread a Big Lie about his defeatso that his followers will believe he has a right to be returned to power. Most significantly, he actually egged on his supporters to storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 in a futile attempt to overturn the election results.

The good news is that the Trump movement represents a minority point of view. The bad news is, that may not matter. If Trump stages a successful comeback, it won't be viewed in normal political terms, as an ex-president losing one election and then being vindicated in another. It will be perceived as a validation of all of Trump's fascist, dishonest behavior and will provide him all the justification he needsto stay in power indefinitely.

Nothing like that was ever the case for any of the other ex-presidents who tried to return to power. Let me clarify that I'm including some borderline cases ofex-presidents who launchedhalf-hearted efforts to get back in the gamebut never waged full campaigns, as well as those who were encourage to run again by othersbut chose not to.

The first defeated ex-presidentto seriously consider another run was Martin Van Buren, who had been narrowly elected overWilliam HenryHarrison in 1836, and then lost to Harrison four years later. (Harrison went on to have the shortest tenure of any president, dying of a severe infection after 31 days in office.) Because of Van Buren'sclose ties to Democratic Party founder Andrew Jackson who had chosen him as his running mate for Jackson's second term Van Buren was originally viewed as a leading contenderfor the 1844 nomination, at leastuntil he came out against annexing Texas on the grounds that it could spark a war withMexico (as in fact it did). Democratic slaveholders wanted to annex Texas so they could expand slavery throughout the West, so Van Buren was suddenly no longer a viable candidate. Four years later, Van Buren was nominated as a third-party candidate by the Free Soil Party, which wanted to gradually abolish slaveryby prohibiting its expansion into the newly-acquired western territories.

The next ex-president to take a shot at the White House didn't do so for a noble cause. Millard Fillmorehad been elected vice president as Zachary Taylor's running mate in 1848, and served nearly three years as president after Taylor's death. The Whig Party didn't even nominate Fillmore to run for a full term in 1852, and he wound up running in 1856 as the candidate of the Know Nothing Party, which wasopposedto immigration and especially the large numbers ofIrish Catholics then arriving in the country.Fillmore did extremely well for a third-party candidate, winningmore than 21 percent of the popular vote and Maryland's electoral votes. Sincethe Whig Party had just collapsed, Fillmorehad a hypotheticalopportunity to turn the Know Nothings into America's second major party but did not even come close, with the newly-formed Republicans surging onto the scene. The Know Nothings dissolved a few years later, as did any chance of Fillmore becoming president again.

For more than 20 years after Fillmore, noex-president actively triedfor a restoration. Then, in the 1880 election, a powerful faction of Republicans wanted Ulysses S. Grant to be their nominee, even though the Civil War hero had already served two terms, leaving office in 1877. Rutherford B. Hayes, the president elected in the notorious compromise of 1876, was not running again, and Republicans needed a candidate. (The 22nd Amendment had not yet been passed, so there was no legal impediment to Grant running again.)Grant had been a great general but controversial president, due to a series of scandals that beset his administration, but was still a widely beloved figure.The Republican convention was sharply divided between Grant's supporters and his opponents.Although Grant had more delegates than any other candidate, he could not muster a majority, and delegates eventually united around a compromise candidate, James Garfield, who went on to win the election.

Twelve years later, in 1892, the above-referenced Grover Cleveland became the first and only ex-president to be electedto a second, non-consecutive term. There were a number of reasons why that worked: Democraticleaders trusted Cleveland's conservative economic philosophy and thought he was electable, which was reasonable enough, since Cleveland actually won the popular vote in 1888, despite losing the election toBenjamin Harrison (grandson of William Henry Harrison), who had become unpopular amid an economic downturn. There were no primary elections to select a party nominee, and Cleveland was well known and well liked by leading Democrats.

That brings us toTheodore Roosevelt, who had become president in 1901 after William McKinley's assassination and was then elected in his own right in 1904.After leaving office in 1909, replaced byhishandpicked successor, William Howard Taft, Roosevelt became dissatisfied with Taft's leadership and the Republican Party's direction. He first tried to wrest the Republicannomination away from Taftin 1912, and when that failed, wound up runningas the nomineeof the Progressive Party. Roosevelt didn't win the election but outperformed Taft in both popular and electoral votes his 27 percent share of the popular vote remains the largest proportion won byany third party candidate ever and for better or worse was instrumental in the election of Woodrow Wilson.

That was the last serious campaign mounted by a former president, nearly 110 years ago. The gradual emergence of the primary system probably has something to do with that, as doesthegrowing cynicism amongAmericans about politicians perceived as "losers." Otherformer presidents, including Herbert Hoover and Gerald Ford, have considered running again, but nonehas actually done so.

Until, perhaps DonaldTrump.

No previous ex-presidentwas anything likeTrump, as is blatantly obvious.Of course they were ambitious,but none of them tried to arguethat the presidency was his God-given right. None urged the kinds of party purges that Trump and his crew are leading against "disloyal" Republicans like Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney. None of them flat-out lied about the reason why they'd lost power or urged anti-democratic means in order to reclaim it.

Right now Republicans across the country are pouring millionsintovoting restrictions, clearly targeting Democratic voters, primarily people of color. They hope to win elections simply by preventing certain voters from exercising their constitutional rights. Even if this gambit fails in the near term, Republicans have laid the foundations for overturning unfavorable outcomes.They can simply appoint loyal Trumpers or GOP partisan to the right positions to ensure that they can win even if they lose, and then create another Big Lie to justify their behavior.

It is entirely conceivable that Trump could becomethe first ex-president since Cleveland to be elected to another term, given the potential effects of thesevoter suppression laws and the ardor of his supporters. Whether we will still have anything left that could be called a democracy, if that happens, is anyone's guess.

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Trump wouldn't be the first ex-president to run again but he might be the last - Salon

Caitlyn Jenner praised Donald Trump for "disrupting" American politics and said she aims to do the same if she is elected to office in her first major TV interview as a candidate for California governor.

The 71-year-old former Olympian and reality TV star, who came out publicly as a trans woman in 2015, spoke with Fox News' Sean Hannity from her private airplane hangar in Malibu, California.

Jenner has no previous political experience. But during the 2016 election, she publicly supported Donald Trump and now counts several former Trump aides including Brad Parscale, who headed Trump's 2020 presidential campaign, as her advisers.

"What I liked about Donald Trump is he was a disruptor, you know," she said. "He came in and shook the system up, OK. A lot of people didn't like that in Washington, D.C., but he came in and shook the system up. I think he did some things that I agree with, some things I didn't agree with on trans issues, LGBT issues. I was more hopeful at the beginning. And but there were some good things he did."

"On the other hand, Biden, I don't think I've agreed with anything," she continued. "I don't think since he's been in there, he has done anything for the American worker, maybe other ones ... It is a 180-degree turn in our country, going the other direction, and it scares me."

Earlier this week, Jenner released her first campaign video in which she describes herself as a "compassionate disruptor." And later during her interview with Hannity, Jenner categorized herself as "an outsider" and said she wants to surround herself "with some of the smartest people out there" to develop her political brief.

"I'm in a race for solutions. I need to find solutions to be able to turn this state around," she said. "I absolutely love this state. I'm a fighter. Always have been."

The pair also discussed immigration policy, and the former reality TV star said she is "all for the wall," referencing Donald Trump's defunct plan to build a wall on the southern border with Mexico.

"I would secure the wall. We can't have a state, we can't have a country without a secure wall," she said.

"You have two questions here, one is stopping people from coming in illegally into the state. And then the second question is, what do we do with the people that are here? We are a compassionate country, OK? We are a compassionate state. Some help, I mean, some people we're going to send back, OK? No question about that. But I have met some of the greatest immigrants into our country."

At one point during the interview, Jenner mistakenly said she was "pro-illegal immigration" before Hannity corrected her.

"You're pro legal immigration," he said.

"Legal immigration, yes," Jenner replied. "Thanks for catching me. You've got my back Sean, I appreciate that."

Jenner first announced her candidacy via a statement posted to Twitter late last month. If elected, she would be the first trans governor elected in the United States.

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Caitlyn Jenner praises Donald Trump and says she's in favor of building 'the wall' in Sean Hannity interview - Business Insider

When Donald Trumps ban from Facebook was upheld this week, the howls of bias could be heard from Republicans far and wide. Those shrieks, ironically, came mostly on social media.

Republicans have spent recent years criticizing Facebook and Twitter, demonizing them as biased against the right. But they, not Democrats, have been the most enthusiastic embracers of social media, and the most successful in harnessing its potential.

Between 1 January and 15 December last year, right-leaning Facebook pages accounted for 45% of all interactions on Facebook, according to a study by Media Matters for America, a progressive non-profit which monitors US media.

Rightwing pages earned nearly 9bn likes or comments, MMFA found, compared to 5bn interactions on left-leaning pages. Conservative pages account for six of the top 10 Facebook pages that post about US political news.

The years-long dominance on Facebook has translated to notable successes most memorably in 2016, when Donald Trumps win was propelled by his social media reach. Facebook and Twitter were the reason we won this thing, Brad Parscale, the digital director of the 2016 Trump campaign, said in the aftermath of the election.

Twitter for Mr Trump. And Facebook for fundraising.

Those successes appeared to have been forgotten in the last week, when prominent Republicans, including Texas senator Ted Cruz and House minority leader Kevin McCarthy, condemned Facebook in particular. The platform angered the right with its decision to uphold Trumps post-insurrection suspension, even though a long-term decision has been punted down the road.

If the big tech oligarchs can muzzle the former president, whats to stop them from silencing you? Cruz said.

If they can ban President Trump, all conservative voices could be next. A House Republican majority will rein in big tech power over our speech, was McCarthys take.

Cruz and other Republicans have been accusing Facebook of bias for years even as the platform was propelling Trump to victory, while being criticized on the left for being slow to remove rightwing lies or conspiracy theories.

Because Republicans have such a disproportionate amount of influence on these platforms and engagement, the real effect is that by constantly crying bias, it works the refs in such that they dont enforce the rules against them in a consistent way, Angelo Carusone, the president of MMFA, said.

Or theyre less likely to take action against cheaters and bad actors, because they dont want to deal with the blowback of what happens when I take off one of these accounts.

Carusone pointed to how Facebook dealt with groups promoting QAnon, a conspiracy movement that alleges a group of global elites are involved in paedophilia, human trafficking and the harvesting of a supposedly life-extending chemical from the blood of abused children. It took until October last year for the network to finally ban groups, pages or Instagram pages which represent QAnon, despite the theory having been promulgated for years.

Joe Romm, author of How To Go Viral and Reach Millions and editor-in-chief of Front Page Live, a news site dedicated to elevating fact-based stories said that for Republicans, claiming that they are oppressed by media is a consistent narrative.

Its part of the overall strategy of playing the victim, Romm said. Donald Trump showed that its part of the overall strategy of: accuse your opponents of doing what youre doing before they can accuse you.

And so it just makes it so much harder, because if you accuse them first, then when progressives then accurately say: Oh, were being disadvantaged on social media, no one is going to believe it, because they bought into this big lie that the conservatives are being punished on social media.

As Republicans have cried foul, several rightwing politicians have even written books about such perceived bias the most recent by Missouri senator Josh Hawley, a millionaire Yale law school graduate turned earthy, blue collar, man of the people.

Hawley wrote The Tyranny of Big Tech after claiming he had been censored and canceled by social media. The hypocrisy of the books claim that big tech is suppressing conservative thought was exposed by Hawley himself this week, however, when he used Twitter, one of the companies he rails against, to giddily proclaim that his book had been a bestseller all week on Amazon another company he opposes.

The claims of conservative bias are only like to continue as the 2022 midterms approach, but experts sayany bias is actually against the other side.

I would say that, in fact, big tech right now is biased against liberals the thumb is on the scale for those who put out the rightwing lies, Romm said.

The thing that the social media apps want to do is keep you on their site. Thats what they care about. They dont care about the truth, they care about keeping you on their site.

So the way things are set up, if you can stir up anger, and get people to comment, and engage and send out shares and say: This is outrageous, then youve got a big advantage in the algorithm. So what the social media sites have done is create a system that favors the most outrageous statements.

Ironically, some of those most outrageous statements are set to come against the leaders of the Republican party railing against the social media giants.

I think the right will leverage this moment to make big tech the new Hillary, Carusone said. And thats going to be a galvanizing force for them leading into 2022 and then again in 2024.

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Republicans cry big tech bias on the very platforms they have dominated - The Guardian

News media is failing usonmedical marijuana

It is extremely concerning to me that our local media is just blindly accepting the medical marijuana legislation instead of questioning very serious elements.

Why are we allowing the legislature to bypass the FDA for approving medication? All other medications have been required to go through the FDA approval processes

Why are we allowing the use of marijuana for illnesses or conditions that have zero or little research science behind them?

Why are we willing to accept an extremely high dose level of THC that has been clearly demonstrated to cause episodes of psychosis?

How are we going to deal with patients that want to smoke pot while they are hospitalized for other conditions. Will hospitals be required to carry marijuana?

Will malpractice lawsuits increase because of serious side effects from marijuana recommendations?

Why are we not hearing about all of the negative experiences from other states that have succumbed to medical marijuana. There is tremendous evidence that allowing medical marijuana was a mistake.

News media needs to be asking these questions and pushing back on a dangerous and potentially harmful legislative action.

Eric Voth, M.D., Topeka

A vote for a Republican now means a vote to nullify free speech, a vote to accept truth as that which Donald J. Trump says is truth. The Republican Party no longer allows dissent. If the Republican Party again becomes the majority party, the right to freedom of speech for all of Americas citizens could end.

The Republican Party has long been a home for those who are conservative in ideology. Today, it is a party that has no ideology. It had no platform. It is the party of whatever Trump wants it to be. If he proclaimed the sky to be orange with purple stripes, the Republican Party would oust those Republicans who would insist that the sky is blue & sometimes gray. An orange sky with purple stripes would be the new truth.

Those who claim a Trump win last November are either lying or delusional or, worst of all, standing silent to protect their own already tainted political futures. To minimize the Capital insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021, is to minimize or even deny our democratic roots.

Scary stuff.

Terry Larson, Topeka

Medicaid expansion is one of the most critical steps our lawmakers can take right now to help fight cancer.

More than 165,000 Kansans are in the Medicaid coverage gap they earn too much to qualify for the Medicaid program but not enough to receive subsidies for insurance on the federal marketplace. By increasing the income eligibility for Medicaid, these hard-working Kansans can finally gain access to affordable, comprehensive coverage.

Medicaid expansion has been proven to increase access to preventive health care like cancer screenings. That means cancer can be caught and treated earlier, leading to better outcomes for patients. In short, we can save lives with Medicaid expansion.

Kansans overwhelmingly support Medicaid expansion and all our neighboring states have chosen to expand their Medicaid programs. Now is the time for the Kansas Legislature to do the right thing and expand the Medicaid program so that more Kansans can lead healthier lives.

As the child of someone who lost their fight with cancer, I know that cancer doesnt wait. And I encourage our lawmakers to not wait either.

Alexandra Williamson (American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network volunteer),Topeka

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Letters to the editor: Doctor against medical marijuana; readers address Donald Trump's lie, Medicaid expansion - The Topeka Capital-Journal

Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump three of ex-President Donald Trumps adult children continue to stick taxpayers with the cost of their Secret Service protection.

They racked up more than $140,000 in charges in the first month following President Joe Bidens inauguration on Jan. 20, according to watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which analyzed Secret Service spending records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

Agents protecting Trumps progeny spent $52,296.75 on travel and $88,678.39 on hotel costs during the 30-day period, including on trips to Salt Lake City, Miami and New York, the group said Wednesday.

It works out to around $4,699 per day.

And the total costs to taxpayers could be even higher, because the Secret Service did not provide records of spending at Trump businesses, which is the most controversial aspect of the extended protection, CREW added.

That the Trump offspring can benefit from publicly funded security details at all is down to their fathers six-month extension of their protection following his departure from the White House.

Only the ex-president, former first lady Melania Trump and their son Barron, 15, are entitled to automatic protection.

Trump, however, extended the perk to his aforementioned kids (plus youngest daughter Tiffany Trump) and their partners in the final days of his administration.

While it may be tempting to put the story of the Trump familys profiteering in the past, we cannot until they have actually stopped directing taxpayer money into their own bank accounts, said the group, which has long exposed instances of taxpayer money being funneled to Trump properties. Thanks to Trumps unusual extension of their protection, theyve got a few more months to continue the grift.

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Donald Trump's Adult Children Are Still Costing Taxpayers Thousands Of Dollars A Day - HuffPost

Former President Donald Trump, who reportedly has $590 million in debts due over the next four years, is set to receive a $617 million cash payout as part of a bond deal made by Vornado Realty Trust, his longtime majority-stake partners.

Trump apparently scored the massive $600-million plus in cash after investors bought up $1.2 billion of bonds tied to the refinancing of a San Francisco office tower, 555 California. Trump has a 30 percent minority stake in the building, which makes up a massive portion, as much as $800 million, of his entire net worth. Because Vornado holds the majority stake, Trump doesn't have any control over the two properties he owns with them, the second being 1290 Avenue of the Americans in New York City. The windfall he "stumbled into" comes at a great time for Trump, analysts said, because numerous banks and businesses cut ties with him in the wake of the January 6 U.S. Capitol riot.

The $617 million cash infusion from the Vornado refinancing in San Francisco is likely to precede another large payout for Trump's 1290 Avenue of the Americans office tower. Steve Roth, Vornado's chief executive officer, told investors this past week, that building is "on deck" for refinancing, Bloomberg News reported.

Trump has a lengthy financial record which includes numerous corporate bankruptcies, suing lenders and provoking nearly every bank except for Deutsche to run the other way. But with $617 million of cash and another lucrative refinancing deal about to fall in his lap, analysts said he may have already dug his way out of more than a half-billion of debt his Trump Organization has sat on since entering the White House.

"What the tax records for Mr. Trump's businesses show, however, is that he has lost chunks of his fortune even before depreciation is figured in," according to The New York Times in an eye-opening September 2020 report on Trump's federal income tax payments.

"To see what a successful business looks like, depreciation or not, look no further than one in Mr. Trump's portfolio that he does not manage...he ended up with a 30 percent share of two valuable office buildings owned and operated by Vornado. That's a $176.5 million share of profits for which he has never had to invest more money in the partnership," the Times report said, highlighting Trump as an overall liability to Vornado.

According to financial disclosure forms that first came to light in 2019, Trump has reported holding 14 loans on 12 properties. Six of those loans, representing around $479 million in debt, are due over the next four yearsa debt that a cash-heavy Trump may now be able to pay.

"Trump has been an even less equal partner in the relationship than his 30 percent stake already implies. He more or less stumbled into the arrangement," Mother Jones' Russ Choma wrote Friday, noting that Trump's partnership role was greatly diminished after his "Trump City" project in the 1980s was a "huge flop."

Trump's tax returns, which The New York Times detailed last September, showed that Trump had $6.67 million in taxable interest$6 million of which came from his investment with Vornado.

Newsweek reached out to Vornado's corporate offices as well as those for the Trump Organization Saturday morning.

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Donald Trump, Facing $590 Million in Debt Payments, Gets ...

The Guardian

A social media campaign featuring a self-described cisgender millennial Latin intelligence officer drew ire from right and left The CIAs attempt to brush up its image for a new generation drew criticism from left and right but others were supportive. Diversity is an operational advantage, said one former officer. Photograph: Dennis Brack/EPA In its long and colourful history, US intelligence has come in for a lot of criticism, for engineering coups, drug trafficking and torture, but just over 100 days into the Biden administration it faces a new charge no one saw coming: is the CIA just too woke? A social media campaign, Humans of CIA, aimed at boosting diversity at the agency has united critics on the right and left in a moment of shared derision, albeit for different reasons. The focus of the uproar is a video about a Latina intelligence officer, who declares: I am a cisgender millennial, who has been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder. I am intersectional, but my existence is not a box-checking exercise, she says, in the voiceover to a film of her walking confidently through the CIAs Langley headquarters with a T-shirt emblazoned with a clenched fist motif. I used to struggle with impostor syndrome, but at 36 I refuse to internalize misguided patriarchal ideas of what a woman can or should be, she adds. The terminology of wokeness drew a volcanic response on Fox News. One guest, Bryan Dean Wright, a former CIA operations officer turned political strategist, called it propagandist garbage and the culmination of what he claimed was a liberal takeover. What happens when you hire a bunch of folks who are wokesters going out into the world that is not woke? he asked. Is an analyst who is a wokester are they going to bring nuance to their analysis? Of course not, Theyre activists now. The Republican senator Ted Cruz joined in, tweeting: If youre a Chinese communist, or an Iranian Mullah, or Kim Jong Un would this scare you? Weve come a long way from Jason Bourne, he added, before being swiftly reminded in Twitter replies that Bourne was an entirely fictional amnesiac carrying out rogue assassinations, and that Donald Trump, who Cruz had steadfastly supported, had openly declared his love for Kim Jong-un. On the left, the critics accused the agency of appropriating woke language to gloss over an unsavoury history. The job for the US & UK intelligence services, and, indeed, for other centers of establishment power, is to transform the Woke wolf into a domesticated Woke dog. Im betting they succeed, wrote the author and policy analyst David Rieff. A CIA spokesperson said the campaign has been going on for some time. In 2019 we started our ongoing social media series, Humans of CIA, for real officers to share their firsthand experiences, the spokesperson said. Some veteran spies came to the CIAs defence, lauding the agencys efforts at diversity (other videos were about a gay CIA librarian and a blind receptionist), and arguing it would make it more effective. Diversity is an operational advantage. Simple as that. I want case officers who look like the UN, Marc Polymeropoulos, a former senior officer, said on Twitter. [The] Agency needs to push Diversity efforts to win, not to be woke. I applaud their efforts, but also note they have a ways to go.

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Ted Cruz and Donald Trump Jr. mocked a new CIA recruitment ad in which a staffer identified as a millennial with anxiety - Yahoo News

The big three social media platforms have locked President Trump's accounts because his posts violated their policies during riots at the U.S. Capitol. USA TODAY

WASHINGTON As Facebook decides whether to lift its ban on Donald Trump, the former president unveiled a new website Tuesday designed to communicate to his followers without interacting with them.

"From the desk of Donald J. Trump" went operational more than fours months after Facebook, Twitter, and other social media companies banned him for lies about the general election that helped trigger the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

The website, which includes written statements the ex-president has issued since leaving office Jan. 20, includes a camera feature that Trump can use to make video statements.

More: Will Donald Trump's Facebook, Instagram bans stick? Facebook's Oversight Board to issue ruling Wednesday

"Straight from the desk of Donald J. Trump," said a 30-second video posted on the site that included references to his banning from social media.

Will former President Donald Trump remain banned from Facebook and Instagram? The decision from Facebook's Oversight Board comes Wednesday.(Photo: Gerald Herbert, AP)

The new Trump website, first reported by Fox News,surfaced a day before Facebook'sOversight Board is scheduled to announce a decision on whether to keep the ex-president off Facebook and Instagram.

More: President Trump blocked from posting to Facebook, Instagram 'indefinitely,' at least through end of term

More: President Trump permanently banned from Twitter over risk he could incite violence

This is not the social media platform that Trump has pledged to create; there is no way for viewers to interact or respond to the Trump messages that are posted on the new website.

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Trump spokesman Jason Millersaid on Twitter that the new website is "a great resource to find his latest statements and highlights from his first term in office," but added "this is not a new social media platform. Well have additional information coming on that front in the very near future."

Others offered a different description of the venture that allows Trump to post comments, images, and videos.

"Its basically a blog," tweeted pollster Frank Luntz.

Read or Share this story: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/05/04/from-desk-donald-j-trump-ex-president-creates-new-website/4945717001/

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Trump launches 'From the desk of Donald J. Trump' as potential Facebook ban looms - USA TODAY

The lead item in Politicos signature morning newsletter asked if a certain public figure was losing his mind. His rants made him seem ever more unhinged. Then again, they might be theatrical, a way to keep you guessing as to whether hes just putting you on.

Those words, or their rough equivalents, were used scores if not hundreds of times to describe Donald Trump.

But they were written last Tuesday about Tucker Carlson. And they settled the matter: Hes the new Trump. Not Ron DeSantis. Not Josh Hawley. Not Rick Scott. Certainly not Ted Cruz.

Those other men are vying merely for Trumps political mantle, with the occasional side trip to Cancn.

Carlson is seizing Trumps theatrical mantle as well.

Moving to fill the empty space created by Trumps ejection from the White House, his banishment from social media and his petulant quasi-hibernation, Carlson is triggering the libs like Trump triggered the libs. Hes animating the pundits like Trump animated the pundits.

Case in point: Carlsons endlessly denounced, exhaustively parsed jeremiad against masks on his Fox News show on Monday night.

Your response when you see children wearing masks as they play should be no different from your response to seeing someone beat a kid at Walmart, Carlson railed. Call the police immediately. Contact child protective services. Keep calling until someone arrives. What youre looking at is abuse. Its child abuse.

What lunatic hyperbole. What ludicrous histrionics. And what timing. Carlson shares Trumps knack for that for figuring out precisely when, for maximum effect, to pour salt into a civic wound.

His free-the-children bunk played on the weariness of more than a year of coronavirus vigilance. It came just as Americans were puzzling over the need for masks once theyre vaccinated or when theyre outdoors. It was juiced by arguments about what degree of caution remains necessary and whats just muscle memory or virtue signaling.

And it was helpfully succinct and tidily packaged so that other commentators could tee off on it. Carlson understands what Trump always has and what every practiced provocateur does: You dont just give your detractors agita. You give them material. That way, everything you say has a lengthy half-life and durable shelf life.

Several shows on MSNBC covered Carlsons rant. Several shows on CNN, too. The View waded in. So did Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel. When youre the subject of late-night comedians monologues, youve really made it.

Just two and a half weeks earlier, another of Carlsons soliloquies in which he peddled the far-right paranoia about a Democratic Party scheme to have dark-skinned invaders from developing countries supplant white Christian Americans became its own news story, making him more of an actor in our national drama than a chronicler of it.

It was hardly his first lament about immigration, and he had dabbled in the great replacement theory before. But this time around it was more helpfully succinct, more tidily packaged, more honed. Every time they import a new voter, I become disenfranchised as a current voter, he fumed. I have less political power because they are importing a brand-new electorate.

He made voters sound like Mazdas and America like a car lot.

Like Trump, he has decided that virality is its own reward. And hes being amply rewarded, as exemplified in this very column. Id prefer to ignore him, but I face the same irreconcilable considerations that all the others who arent ignoring him do.

To give him attention is to play into his hands, but to do the opposite is to play ostrich. In April, his 8 p.m. Eastern show drew an average nightly audience of about three million viewers. That made him the most-watched of any cable news host ahead of Sean Hannity, ahead of Rachel Maddow and it meant that he was both capturing and coloring how many Americans felt about current events. His outbursts, no matter how ugly, are relevant.

Remind you of anyone now clomping through the sand traps near Mar-a-Loco?

The amount of real estate that Carlson occupies in political newsletters that I subscribe to seems to have grown in proportion to the amount that Trump has lost. (Thats my own replacement theory.) And it proves that we need not just villains but also certain kinds of villains: ones whose unabashed smugness, unfettered cruelty and undisguised sense of superiority allow us to return fire unsparingly and work out our own rage. Carlson, again like Trump, is cathartic.

Trumps dominance was so profound from early 2016 through early 2021 that theres now something of an obsession with naming his successor, even though its not at all clear that hes willing to be succeeded. All the men I mentioned earlier covet that crown. But not all of them fully understand that Trumps mtier wasnt politics. It was performance.

Carlson gets that. If advancing arguments was his exclusive or primary goal, he wouldnt allow for so much confusion regarding the flavor of his invective. But debates about whether hes genuinely making points or disingenuously pressing buttons might well be a ratings boon. To keep people guessing is to keep people tuned in.

Im not saying that hes Trumps doppelgnger. Hes neither orange nor ostentatious enough. He can be as verbally dexterous as Trump is oratorically incontinent, as brimming with information as Trump is barren of it. Carlson reminds you of a prep school debate team captain all puffed up at his lectern. Trump reminds you of a puffy reality-show ham what he was before he rode that escalator downward, a harbinger of the countrys trajectory under him.

But both barge through the contradictions of being both populists and plutocrats. Both pretend to be bad boys while living like good old boys. Both market bullying as bravery.

Part of the appeal of Carlsons show is its tendency to generate knockouts rather than split decisions, Kelefa Sanneh wrote in an excellent profile of Carlson in The New Yorker in 2017. His unofficial Reddit page features pictures of guests judged to have performed especially poorly; over each face is written wasted.

That wasted reminds me of Trumps loser. Its the vocabulary of mockery, a sport in which Carlson is a champion. But its stranger when played by him than when played by Trump, who never pretended to be thoughtful. Carlson was thoughtful, back in the days when he was writing long articles for ambitious magazines.

Then came television and then high-decibel duels on television and then Trump, the shark to Carlsons pilot fish. Carlson, who flattered him, got the time slot on Fox News that had belonged to Megyn Kelly, who feuded with Trump.

And now? The pilot fish has grown his own mighty jaws, and the oceans only a little bit safer.

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Opinion | Tucker Carlson Is the New Donald Trump - The New York Times