A group of top Republicans on Capitol Hill have responded to the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump during a Saturday afternoon campaign rally in western Pennsylvania by calling for Secret Service Director Kim Cheatle to be replaced.
Continue reading “Top Hill Republicans Are Demanding Secret Service Director Resign After Trump Shooting”The RNC Is Suing Gretchen Whitmer To Make The Swing State’s Election System Seem Sketch
The Republican National Committee and Donald Trump’s campaign have filed a lawsuit in federal court against Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson over their efforts to make voter registration more accessible.
Continue reading “The RNC Is Suing Gretchen Whitmer To Make The Swing State’s Election System Seem Sketch”Joe Biden’s Grip On Re-Nomination Is At Its Most Tenuous Since The Debate Disaster
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
The Knives Are Out
The events of the past 24 hours have placed President Biden’s renomination in greater jeopardy than at any point since his June debate performance upended his campaign and the trajectory of the general election.
We now know that private entreaties from other leading Democrats for him to withdraw his re-election bid – which were suspected but not yet confirmed – were in fact made over the past week. The emissaries to the president included, separately, Sen. Charles Schumer (NY), the leading Democrat in the Senate, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (NY), the leading Democrat in the House, and Rep. Nancy Pelosi (CA), the former speaker of the House.
It is obvious by his words and deeds that Biden rebuffed those appeals.
What happened yesterday was the other shoe dropping: It appears through strategic leaks and off-the-record confirmation of those leaks that leading Democrats let it be known via the press that they had tried and failed to dislodge Biden. Making that information public was another step in the pressure campaign to get Biden out. Private appeals having failed, the pressure campaign from leading Democrats went public.
At the same time, the likely next senator from California, Rep. Adam Schiff (D), came out publicly against Biden remaining as the nominee. Schiff’s position as an active Senate candidate from the most populous state was another indication of the darkening political environment for Biden.
In a parallel move, the Democratic National Committee delayed from July until August a virtual roll call vote to make Biden the nominee. The move reportedly came at the urging of Schumer and Jeffries. The effect is to buy the anti-Biden movement more time to exert pressure on him to withdraw. Meanwhile, Democratic donors continue to make their displeasure with Biden known.
It’s fair to say that there is no real historical precedent for this situation, certainly not since the implementation of the current presidential primary system in the 1970s. It’s astonishing to consider the ousting of the sitting president as the party’s standard bearer at such a late date, but it is at least as difficult to envision how he survives this widespread intra-party revolt against his candidacy.
Biden Tests Positive For COVID
The president was on a campaign swing through Nevada when he tested positive for COVID. He will isolate at his Delaware home. His symptoms are described as mild.
Piecing Together The Trump Assassination Attempt
As preliminary after-action reports continue to trickle in, let me offer one caution on sourcing for the details of the security failure that led to Donald Trump narrowly escaping assassination.
There are four broad categories of sourcing:
- Official on-the-record accounts from law enforcement agencies;
- Independent reporting from journalists based on eyewitness accounts and visual and documentary evidence;
- Off-the-record accounts from government (leaks, basically);
- Second-hand accounts provided by members of Congress based on briefings from law enforcement agencies.
No single source is inherently more or less reliable, except No. 4 above, which is always fraught because it is second hand and because members of Congress filter the information, sometimes deliberately and other times unconsciously, through their own political prisms.
With that said, here are some of the key stories from the past 24 hours:
- The NYT has produced one of its high-quality audio-visual dissections of the assassination attempt drawing on contemporaneous video and photographic evidence of the rally site from multiple angles and viewpoints.
- NYT: A Blind Spot and a Lost Trail: How the Gunman Got So Close to Trump
- WSJ: Trump Gunman Identified as Suspicious Well Before Shooting
- WaPo: Secret Service was told police could not watch building used by Trump rally shooter
- NYT: Gunman’s Phone Had Details About Both Trump and Biden, F.B.I. Officials Say
Never Seen Anything Like This
Four GOP senators confronted Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle at the Republican National Convention over the assassination attempt on Donald Trump and continued to follow and berate her after she tried to end the exchange.
The senators were James Lankford (OK), Marsha Blackburn (TN), Kevin Cramer (ND), and John Barrasso (WY). Here’s video of the encounter posted by Blackburn:
Secret Service Defends Its Women Agents
The Secret Service felt compelled to a defend its female employee against right-wing attacks, providing a statement to NBC News that read in part: “It is an insult to the women of our agency to imply that they are unqualified based on gender. Such baseless assertions undermine the professionalism, dedication and expertise of our workforce.”
Still No Official Word On Trump’s Injuries
AP: “Four days after a gunman’s attempt to assassinate former President Donald Trump at a Pennsylvania rally, the public is still in the dark over the extent of his injuries, what treatment the Republican presidential nominee received in the hospital, and whether there may be any long-term effects on his health.”
Foreshadowing More Gun Violence
The 8th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled this week that Minnesota’s ban on 18- to 20-year-olds carrying handguns in public is an unconstitutional infringement of the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms. Relying on recent Supreme Court decisions, the appeals court said the Second Amendment applies to all adults.
JD Vance Accepts Veep Nomination
TPM’s Josh Kovensky offers four takeaways from JD Vance Night at the Republican National Connvetion.
The Lawlessness On Full Display
Trump White House official Peter Navarro was released from federal prison yesterday and made a beeline for Milwaukee, where he was reward with a speaking slot at the Republican National Convention. Navarro had served four months in prison for contempt of Congress after stymying the Jan. 6 committee’s investigation.
Menendez On Verge Of Resigning
Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ), now convicted on federal bribery charges, is considering resigning his seat under pressure from Senate Democrats, the NYT reported. NBC News took it a step farther, reporting that Menendez is telling allies he will resign.
Still Grinding My Teeth Over SCOTUS Immunity Ruling
Roger Parloff has yet more on the part of the ruling that is most flagrantly favorable to Trump’s particular situation and puts the New York hush-money conviction at risk.
Do you like Morning Memo? Let us know!
Pretty Passive
As you know, I’ve been pressing the simple point that we don’t have any information about the injury to the former president’s ear or what caused it other than a social media post from him on Truth Social a few hours after the Saturday afternoon shooting. That’s not just inadequate. It’s frankly bizarre. Someone did just flag to me that two days ago the Times made a very oblique reference to this in an article devoted to Congressman Ronny Jackson’s description of changing the gauze on Trump’s ear on his flight to Milwaukee (“Former White House Doctor Describes Tending To Trump’s Wounded Ear“). That article says in passing: “So far, only Mr. Trump has described his injuries; his team has not provided any formal medical briefing to the public since the shooting.” And that’s it.
Continue reading “Pretty Passive”4 Takeaways From The Night Of JD Vance’s Big Introduction At The GOP Convention
The third night of the Republican Convention in Milwaukee had two goals: introduce audiences to the MAGA 2.0 take on foreign policy, and to former President Trump’s newly selected vice presidential candidate, Sen. JD Vance (R-OH).
In both cases, what was included was as notable as what wasn’t.
Continue reading “4 Takeaways From The Night Of JD Vance’s Big Introduction At The GOP Convention”JD Vance To Elegize Own Dignity On Night Three of RNC
Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) will deliver the keynote speech at the RNC on Wednesday night, marking his first full-length public appearance after Donald Trump selected him as a vice presidential candidate.
Continue reading “JD Vance To Elegize Own Dignity On Night Three of RNC”Please Take a Moment to Read This Very Important Post
Thank you for taking the time to read this note.
Today we are kicking off our fifth annual TPM Journalism Fund drive.
We plan these drives months in advance. So let me start by saying we had no way of knowing that we’d be launching in the midst of what has been perhaps the most chaotic, bewildering, and often agonizing three-week stretch in our political life in recent memory. After we’d processed launching during the post-debate frenzy, then came last weekend’s Trump rally shooting. I say this simply to note that we’re fully cognizant of the fact that it may seem jarring to be holding a drive in this current news moment. But in an odd way, it all fits with our drive’s focus this year, which is on “preparing TPM for what’s next.”
The success of our drive last year made possible all sorts of big, exclusive stories — like our expose of SACR, the Trumpist secret society of white Christian men prepping for a “national divorce,” the Ken Chesebro document trove that shed new light on the fake electors scheme, our profile of a tough-talking sheriff taking on the neo-nazis who surged into central Florida, or our look, before anyone else was looking, at the surreal, extreme post-2020 world of the man who became the GOP nominee for governor of North Carolina. It’s also made possible what I believe has been unparalleled, deeply knowledgeable coverage of the Trump trials from Josh Kovensky and of the right-wing judiciary from Kate Riga.
I’m sure we’ll have more big exclusives like these over the next year. But when we say “preparing for what’s next,” we mean something slightly different, more expansive. At this moment, we very much don’t know what’s next. I don’t mean the lead-up to the November election. No one knows what the next three and a half months hold, but our team has been preparing for a campaign in which literally almost anything is possible for months. We’re ready for all of that. I’m talking about what comes after that, which is very much up in the air at this moment.
So what we mean is fortifying and strengthening TPM for the long haul, to be able to react, grapple with, make sense of any number of future possibilities. In the last three weeks, especially, I’ve had so many TPM readers reach out to me and say they’ve found the site as valuable and as necessary as it’s ever been precisely now — not just for our efforts to explain, as best as we’re able, the unprecedented, but to do so with a unique steadiness and transparency about our reasoning. While I’m admittedly biased, I believe TPM is a unique beacon in the journalistic firmament, an oasis for our community and a source of news and insights that spread far beyond our virtual pages. We want to make TPM strong enough — financially, editorially, legally — for whatever comes next.
That’s what this year’s drive is about. So I hope you will be able to contribute in whatever amount you feel able to. Let me add that in addition to keeping TPM robust and vital, the Journalism Fund is what provides the resources that allow us to provide free memberships to TPM Readers who cannot afford a subscription as well as to any registered student. Last week we held our first of what we hope will be many TPM community happy hours in New York and in other cities. And a reader came up to me and told me she had one of these free memberships and thanked me personally. I told her that was very nice of her to say but that it was our pleasure and, really, the thanks goes to our larger community, which makes them possible. But it was gratifying to hear because this part of our financial model is part of what makes me proud of what we do and of our community.
Publications around the country are shuttering, retrenching, laying off employees, getting sold to private equity funds. We’re not. This year, like last year, our goal is to raise $500,000 for the drive. Last year I made clear that it was critical that we reach that number. And we did. For reasons tied specifically to 2023, the wolf was truly at the door. And that is not the case this year. But let’s be honest: the wolf lives in a co-op down the street from TPM. He’s never far away. So this year’s drive remains very important. We aim to and believe we can strengthen the financial footing of the organization, get ready for what comes next and even modestly expand. And that’s the spirit in which we’re coming to you today
If you’re ready to join us in this year’s drive just click right here.
Thank you so much in advance.
Schiff Makes It Public
Over the weekend, shortly before a gunman fired on former President Trump, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) told a crowd gathered at a New York fundraiser that if President Biden remained at the top of Democrats’ 2024 ticket, the party would suffer significant losses down-ballot.
Continue reading “Schiff Makes It Public”Timing
I don’t know what will happen. But if party leaders are going to move to have Biden step aside, I think it’s going to happen right now. It is really the last time it can happen. And the key is that whatever happens has to happen and be done and then all Democrats get behind the candidate, whoever it is, and move forward.
My two cents is that it can only be Joe Biden or Kamala Harris.
Update: To clarify the meaning here, I don’t mean we’re going to see some announcement today. I’m not saying there’s going to be one ever. What I’m saying is that the optimal and really the last time to make a real attempt to persuade Joe Biden to leave in the race is in the days just after the RNC. And if that’s going to happen the key events leading to that have to happen now.
Trump Media Made a Deal That Could Secure a Major Financial Windfall for the GOP Candidate
This article first appeared at ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
After markets closed the day before the Fourth of July holiday, former President Donald Trump’s social media company made a disclosure that got little notice.
“The Company entered into the Standby Equity Purchase Agreement,” Trump Media & Technology Group, the company behind Trump’s Truth Social platform, said in a filing.
The jargon represented a major development that allows Trump Media to create and sell up to $2.5 billion worth of new shares. The plan, securities experts said, is a way for the company to convert its astronomical value on paper into actual cash. That could secure a windfall for Trump, who owns a majority of the company. Even if excitement for the stock deflates, his company might still retain billions in cash value.
Trump Media has seen its value on paper skyrocket into the billions despite losing money and having almost no revenue, thanks to enthusiasm from Trump supporters who are betting the former president will return to the White House.
Trump’s nearly 60% stake in the company represents the majority of his personal fortune, according to Forbes’ estimate.
Any sale of shares by the company could help the former president solve two problems that stand in the way of transforming what is now a $4 billion stake on paper in the company into something more tangible, experts said. A so-called “lockup” agreement prevents Trump from personally selling his shares in the company until late September. Even after that point, many observers believe a move by Trump to sell shares could be interpreted as a vote of no confidence in the company by its owner and namesake, spooking other investors and sparking a sell-off that would crash the company’s share price.
Trump Media declined to answer detailed questions from ProPublica, including whether the company intended to limit public attention by announcing the agreement after hours before the holiday.
“These outlandish and nonsensical conspiracy theories about TMTG’s routine, transparent business practices constitute legally actionable defamation, and we will take legal action in response,” a Trump Media spokesperson said in a statement.
The spokesperson did not immediately respond to a follow-up question about the statement.
Shares of a company are essentially slices of a pie. If a company wants to raise cash, it can re-slice the pie, creating more slices but making existing slices smaller. The percentage stake of the company represented by each share shrinks.
There are a number of ways a company can raise money by selling shares. A traditional version involves the company hiring an investment bank such as J.P. Morgan to play middleman. The bank finds big investors like pension funds to buy the new shares of the company.
Trump Media has chosen a different route, one more common with small, high-risk “penny stock” companies as well as “meme stock” companies, whose shares are the subject of Reddit-fueled hype and speculation by retail traders, experts said.
This alternative route is attractive to companies that might be seen as too risky by top investment banks or that believe that the demand for their stock will be driven by a fan base of retail traders.
Instead of hiring J.P. Morgan or another bank, Trump Media has entered into a deal to sell stock with a small New Jersey financial firm called Yorkville Advisors.
The firm has done similar deals with a number of small biotech companies, such as a firm trying to develop “cannabinoid pharmaceuticals” to treat autism and Alzheimer’s. In 2021 it inked a high-profile deal with a meme stock electric vehicle startup called Lordstown Motors, whose stock has crashed from a peak of more than $400 to under $2 today.
Companies like Yorkville that offer such deals are not typically intending to hold on to the stock, experts said. They are playing a version of the middleman role, allowing Trump Media to easily sell shares when it wants to. The basic arrangement works like this: Trump Media has the option to sell Yorkville shares of itself up to $2.5 billion, a significant chunk of its current market value. Yorkville was paid a fee up front, and if Trump Media decides to sell shares, Yorkville will also get a discount — 2.75% — off the market price. Yorkville typically would turn around and immediately sell those shares to other buyers, pocketing the difference.
In the July 3 press release announcing the deal, Trump Media CEO Devin Nunes, the Republican former congressman, suggested any share sale would be used to buy assets to build the company’s business. “We’ve secured a great deal to guarantee access to additional capital, if necessary, to pursue big strategic opportunities as we look to build out our portfolio by acquiring assets and technologies in the Patriot economy,” he said.
Xavier Kowalski, a securities lawyer who teaches at the University of Florida, said even if Trump Media didn’t spend the cash it raised building its social media business, “you could think of it as a diversification strategy: diversifying away from Truth Social and into just being a pot of cash.”
The company would have no obligation to spend the money purchasing an asset. It could distribute cash to shareholders — including Trump — in the form of a dividend, for example.
Kowalski and other experts said Trump Media would be following other meme stocks if it moves forward with a share sale. “Is this what I would expect for a company that is losing money and a stock that most people think is overvalued? Yes,” he said.
Yorkville did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The deal’s ultimate impact on existing shareholders is unclear. The creation of new shares means their shares represent a smaller percentage stake of the company. But if Trump Media uses the money to, for example, buy a company that brings in significant profits, that could create stability for the value of Trump Media long term.
Other meme stocks have taken similar approaches, with mixed results. The CEO of AMC, the theater chain whose shares soared during the pandemic because of a Reddit-fueled buying spree, defended issuing new shares: “Now, if you thought — well, dilution is bad. Then, you were wrong, because foolish dilution is bad. Smart dilution is smart. And our share price went up.”
But frequently deals that dilute shares hurt existing shareholders. In its filing announcing the deal, Trump Media acknowledged as much: “There are substantial risks to stockholders as a result of the sale and issuance of shares to Yorkville. … These risks include the potential for substantial dilution and significant declines in the share price of the Company’s securities.”
At least in the short term, the deal seems to have had that effect. The company made another filing about the deal Monday, and this one seems to have caught investors’ attention, with shares falling about 10% in after-hours trading immediately after Monday’s announcement.
Alex Mierjeski contributed research.
Do you have any information about Trump Media that we should know? Justin Elliott can be reached by email at justin@propublica.org or by Signal or WhatsApp at 774-826-6240. Robert Faturechi can be reached by email at robert.faturechi@propublica.org and by Signal or WhatsApp at 213-271-7217.