DeSantis Lawyer Sounds Alarm About Administration’s Authoritarian Turn

Last week, a lawyer who worked for the Florida Department of Health resigned, and a letter obtained Thursday by the Miami Herald indicates that he didn’t like the state agency’s decision to prosecute television stations for airing political ads.

John Wilson, the head attorney for the department, wrote in the letter, “A man is nothing without his conscience.”

“It has become clear in recent days that I cannot join you on the road that lies before the agency,” Wilson wrote. Earlier this month, the department sent cease-and-desist letters to TV stations who aired political ads supporting Amendment 4, a ballot initiative that, if approved by Florida voters on Election Day, would increase access to abortion. The letters threatened to criminally prosecute the stations that didn’t take the ads down. Wilson, along with Florida’s Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, the head of the department, is facing a federal lawsuit over the letters. The plaintiff is the group behind Amendment 4, Floridians Protecting Freedom, which alleges that the threats violate the Constitution’s First Amendment rights to freedom of speech.

In his letter, Wilson stated that he had worked for the state for 14 years and as the department’s general counsel since 2022, and said that circumstances convinced him that he couldn’t work there anymore.

“I wish that were not the case, but I take great comfort in knowing that the lawyers I leave behind will rise to the occasion and provide you the zealous representation you deserve,” wrote Wilson. The letter didn’t go into more detail, according to the Herald.  

The ads feature a woman named Caroline who said that she received a terminal brain cancer diagnosis when she was two months pregnant and would have lost her baby, as well as her own life, if she didn’t receive an abortion.

“The doctors knew that if I did not end my pregnancy, I would lose my baby, I would lose my life, and my daughter would lose her mom,” Caroline said in the ad. “Florida has now banned abortion even in cases like mine. Amendment Four is gonna protect women like me.”

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has spared no effort to fight against the ballot initiative, even as his state was hit by Hurricanes Helene and Milton, spreading misinformation on his X account along with his legal threats. Last month, the state even sent police officers to the homes of people who signed a petition supporting the ballot initiative. At the time, DeSantis defended the zealous police action and even invoked the Republican bogeyman of voter fraud. It would appear that he’s very worried about the state’s abortion ban being negated at the ballot box.  

Last month, Donald Trump announced that he was selling limited-edition, gaudy watches ranging from $499 to the bargain price of $100,000, bragging about their Swiss-made precision.

But a CNN investigation traced the watches’ origin to a shopping center in remote Sheridan, Wyoming, where TheBestWatchesOnEarth LLC, the company behind the timepieces, is based. There’s no indication that a watch company is located at the building listed at the address, only a daycare. Its neighbors include an H&R Block, a Wendy’s, and a “vape and hemp smoke shop.”  

CNN couldn’t find the people behind the company either, because the business’s location allows it to legally hide those details from the public. The news network found that knocking on the door of the business’s supposed address didn’t answer those questions. Interestingly, the limited liability corporation behind Trump’s infamous gold sneakers is also based at the address, along with other random businesses. The watch company was registered on July 29, only two months before Trump announced the watch line.  

A lobbying firm that represents Montenegro’s government is also based at the Wyoming address, along with a company, Kingdom Honey LLC, that sells “male enhancement honey” products that the Food and Drug Administration has warned against consuming. Curiously, that honey venture also goes by TheBestHoneyOnEarth on its online retail store.

CNN could not find a direct connection between the honey venture and Trump, although it did reach a spokesperson for Kingdom Honey, who called it “a highly reputable company” but didn’t respond to a list of questions, none of which mentioned Trump. However, the spokesperson told CNN, “We’ve received direction from our leadership in the US not to engage with any news agencies (specifically CNN) until after November 5,” which happens to be Election Day.

When CNN followed up by asking if the company had connections to the former president, the response from the company was that it “cannot provide any information or details at this time.” There was one link among the myriad companies based at the address, an “organizer” named Andrew Pierce, who has an office in Sheridan. When CNN contacted it, they were told he spends most of his time at the company’s headquarters in Puerto Rico. 

Pierce’s business partner, his father, Mark Pierce, did respond to CNN, and told them he had no idea that two of their clients were connected to Trump. The older Pierce, an attorney, also criticized the former president’s track record, telling the network, “If Mr. Trump or anyone in his family were on the same side of the street I was on, I would cross the street.”

It’s telling that Trump would put his name on a product that has unclear origins, connected to a business that isn’t particularly transparent. After all, his presidential administration wasn’t particularly transparent, either, and his business activities led to a massive fraud judgment against him. Perhaps it just goes to show how desperate the former president is for cash.  

I don’t know about you, but I think Trump might get sued.

On Wednesday, Donald Trump’s team posted a cringeworthy video of women lip-syncing to a mash-up of Taylor Swift’s song “22” and the song “Trump Trump Bay” by rapper (and, more accurately, right-wing cable news mainstay) Forgiato Blow. Those women, wearing hot-pink Trump zip-ups, included Republican National Committee Co-Chair Lara Trump and former ESPN anchor turned pro-Trump podcaster Sage Steele.

The video appears to coincide with Trump’s desperate appeal to women voters following his sycophantic all-women town hall that aired on Wednesday. It also allowed MAGA to try to get in a jab at mega popstar Taylor Swift over her previous endorsement of Kamala Harris. Following Swift’s call to action for her followers to vote for Harris, Republicans, including Trump, lost their minds, with Trump posting in all-caps on Truth Social, “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!”

In posting the video, Trump’s team has no regard for the singer’s impressive legal squad who are known to use the come-down with serious force. Back in August, after Trump shared similarly strange AI-generated images of Swift endorsing him for president, he quickly backtracked, claiming he didn’t know “anything about them.”

But it’s not just Swift that Trump should worry about. MAGA superfan Forgiato Blow premiered the song featured in the video, which is a parody of “Ice Ice Baby,” at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee in July. The song was pulled from YouTube after a claim by Sony Music for copyright infringement (“Ice Ice Baby” features a sample of “Under Pressure,” to which Sony owns the rights). Blow had since tweaked the video to skirt the rules, but if team Trump used the wrong version on the audio, they may be on thin ice.

The former head of marketing for NBC is apologizing for “creating a monster” in Donald Trump through the production of his reality TV show The Apprentice.

John D. Miller wrote a column for U.S. News and World Report, published Wednesday, about how he helped to market Trump as “a super-successful businessman who lived like royalty,” creating “a false narrative by making him seem more successful than he was.”

For example, Miller wrote, the boardroom that viewers saw was a set, because Trump’s actual boardroom was deemed to be in poor shape and too old to show on TV. Miller also wrote that more successful CEOs were too busy. According to a New York Times article from September, Jack Welch, Warren Buffett, and Richard Branson were also contacted by producers but didn’t make the cut due to a lack of time or the “necessary charisma.”

Trump, unlike those other business leaders, “had plenty of time for filming, he loved the attention and it painted a positive picture of him that wasn’t true,” wrote Miller. Trump’s availability was due to the fact that, when the show first went to air in 2004, he wasn’t particularly busy: His business “empire” had been decimated by multiple bankruptcies, and he was no longer doing much at all. The show’s promotion would blanket NBC’s programming and create an exaggerated image of the real estate investor.

“The image of Trump that we promoted was highly exaggerated. In its own way, it was ‘fake news’ that we spread over America like a heavy snowstorm,” Miller wrote. “I never imagined that the picture we painted of Trump as a successful businessman would help catapult him to the White House.”

In his interactions with Trump, Miller found that he was both “manipulative, yet extraordinarily easy to manipulate,” foreshadowing his dealings with autocrats like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un. He also noticed that Trump was thin-skinned and quick to seek retribution.

Miller, who calls himself a “born-and-bred Republican,” closed his article by urging people to vote for Kamala Harris, saying that he and others “did irreparable harm by creating the false image of Trump as a successful leader. I deeply regret that. And I regret that it has taken me so long to go public.”

Miller joins many others who worked with Trump, either in his business or the White House, who now regret their efforts and are urging people to vote against him.

On a podcast released Thursday morning, Donald Trump said that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy “should never have let that war start,” referring to Russia’s offensive in Ukraine, which began when Russia invaded the country in February 2022. It was the latest of Trump’s many statements absolving Russia—and its murderous leader, Vladimir Putin—of blame for the invasion.  

Throughout the nearly 90-minute interview with Patrick Bet-David on the PBD Podcast, Trump continued to slam Zelenskiy, facetiously calling him “one of the greatest salesmen I’ve ever seen.” 

“Who else got that kind of money in history? There’s never been. And that doesn’t mean I don’t want to help him because I feel very badly for those people. But he should never have let that war start. That war is a loser,” said Trump. 

Trump also focused on the “beautiful golden domes”—referring to the numerous Orthodox churches, many hundreds of years old—destroyed by the Russian army, rather than the one million dead or injured in the conflict. (Trump loves a good dome.) And then, he attempted to paint President Joe Biden as the instigator of the war, rather than Putin. 

“Everyone will say, ‘Oh, this is terrible, he’s blaming Biden,’” said Trump, who then clarified that he is in fact blaming Biden, adding that “he instigated that war.” 

Trump has come under fire this month over rumors that he continued his relationship with Russian autocrat Putin after leaving the Oval Office. As president, Trump sent Putin Covid tests; out of office, the two have reportedly talked on the phone on numerous occasions, though both deny this (not always convincingly). On Tuesday, the former president did very little to deny those allegations, stating in an interview with Bloomberg that it would have been “a smart thing.”

JD Vance would not stop complaining Thursday about having been “censored,” when what he was actually describing was being corrected.

During a campaign stop in Pittsburgh—a publicized event with a large crowd, hardly censorship—Vance transformed a speech meant to be about economic issues into a diatribe about free speech. He repeatedly claimed that Kamala Harris wanted to censor Americans’ speech—without providing any actual instances where she had done so.

“We have leaders who would rather censor their fellow citizens than listen to them and persuade them,” Vance said.

He referred to his previous, and fully debunked, claims alleging that illegal immigrants had taken over the cities of Springfield, Ohio; Aurora, Colorado; and Charleroi, Pennsylvania.

“We are seeing all across this country that criminal gangs, sometimes, are moving into our communities and making it unsafe for American citizens,” Vance said. He immediately tried to walk back his gross generalization. “And even if it’s not criminal gangs, sometimes it’s people moving into our communities who have no legal right to be there.”

However, the groups that Vance has discussed, Haitian immigrants in Springfield and Charleroi, do have a legal right to be there. They are in the United States under temporary protected status, a legitimate legal status that Vance has conveniently decided he doesn’t believe in.

As for Aurora, Vance and Donald Trump have pushed claims that Venezuelan gangs have laid claim to apartment buildings in the area, an allegation that has been challenged by both residents and law enforcement.

Vance blamed the “thousands upon thousands of children” of undocumented immigrants for a decline in the quality of American education, and blamed immigrants for long wait times in emergency rooms.

At no point did he actually detail any supposed “censorship” of his words, but Vance’s statements about these immigrants have been subject to thorough fact-checks because they were all, in reality, untrue. Despite all the supposed government censorship, he did manage to get the words out without being arrested, which must have been a relief.

Later, Vance turned back to the subject, claiming that he and Trump would “always fight for your right to speak your mind.”

“The genius of the First Amendment is that when we debate our ideas, rather than censor one another, we can actually come to the table. We can disagree but still share a meal with one another afterwards,” he said.

“You do not bring our fellow citizens together by trying to silence them. You bring our fellow citizens together by talking to them. And inviting the conversation about how we’re going to make this country better, and fix our problems.”

Of course, when Vance or Trump are invited to the table, they lose their minds at the slightest bit of correction, not censorship. Vance himself flew off the handle after the smallest fact-check during the vice presidential debate.

“We may not always agree with each other, but we will fight for your right to speak your mind because this is America, and we get to say whatever the hell we want to,” Vance concluded his speech Thursday. He has repeatedly proved that painfully clear.

It’s worth noting that Vance and Trump haven’t limited their misinformation campaigns to immigration but have also spent the better part of the last two weeks spreading false claims about federal hurricane relief efforts, all while the work was actually undercut by MAGA lawmakers who opposed emergency funding until they wanted it.

In any case, it seems that Vance should be more worried about self-censorship, as his running mate has started pulling out of interview after interview.

Oklahomans are turning to the legal system to fight back against Superintendent Ryan Walters’s Bible education mandate for public schools.

Dozens of parents, teachers, and religious leaders in the Sooner State collectively filed suit Thursday against Walters and the state’s Department of Education, calling on the Oklahoma Supreme Court to intervene in the mandate’s implementation. Walters announced in September that he intended to spend as much as $3 million on the purchase and intracurricular use of Bibles in Oklahoma public schools.

The plaintiffs in Thursday’s suit included 14 public school parents, four public school teachers, and three faith leaders, all of whom torched the effort for seeking to spend millions in taxpayer dollars on what they described as an unethical, unconstitutional, and an illegal reallocation of resources. According to the suit, Walters’s plan would “unlawfully support an invalid rule” since “no statutory or other legislative authority exists” for him to spend state funds on specific curricular materials. Instead, the Department of Education is restricted to providing state funds to individual school districts, which are then mandated to “spend on texts of their own choice.”

“Respondents intend to spend on the Bibles funds that were designated for other purposes and have not been lawfully reallocated,” the plaintiffs wrote.

Curiously, once Oklahoma’s Department of Education opened bids to fill a 55,000 unit order of Bibles for classrooms across the state, Walters’s parameters for the eligible Bibles became eyebrow-raisingly specific.

Bid documents indicated that the Bible suddenly needed to meet strict expectations, including that the text itself be the King James version, that the copies include core, historical elements of the U.S. educational system, including the Pledge of Allegiance, the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, and that the text be bound in leather or a leather-like material. That narrowed the pool of applicants down to just one apparent choice: Donald Trump’s “God Bless the U.S.A.” Bible.

That detail didn’t pass muster with the suing Oklahomans, either, who wrote in their suit that it seemed “highly unlikely that anyone could fulfill the requirements” of the bid other than Trump’s version. Further still, the group criticized the state for proposing to spend as much as $54.55 a pop on the Trumpian Bibles—just a couple dollars cheaper than the text’s resale price—when other Bibles can be purchased for as little as $3 a piece.

“As parents, my husband and I have sole responsibility to decide how and when our children learn about the Bible and religious teachings,” Erika Wright, the founder and leader of the Oklahoma Rural Schools Coalition and one of the plaintiffs in the case, said in a statement. “We are devout Christians, but different Christian denominations have different theological beliefs and practices. It is not the role of any politician or public school official to intervene in these personal matters.

“Oklahoma’s education system is already struggling, ranking nearly last in national standings,” Wright continued. “Mandating a Bible curriculum will not address our educational shortcomings.”

JD Vance’s poll numbers are back to abysmally low levels, two weeks after they spiked following his debate against Tim Walz.

A new poll from The Economist and YouGov from October 12 to 15 shows that after an initial jump in support for Vance following the debate on October 1, his favorability numbers have dropped to where they were before the debate, a historic low for a vice presidential candidate.

According to the poll, 9 percent of Americans had an unfavorable opinion of Vance on September 28, and that number improved to 2 percent on October 5. But as of October 12, 10 percent of respondents had negative opinions of the Republican vice presidential candidate.

Donald Trump’s decision to choose Vance as his running mate does not seem to have given his campaign a boost. Trump’s choice was made before President Biden withdrew from the 2024 election and was meant to shore up support from the MAGA base instead of pulling in swing voters. When Kamala Harris succeeded Biden in July, Trump’s folly was quickly exposed, leading many Republicans to second-guess the decision.

Those Republicans had their fears validated in the following week, with sexist comments about “childless cat ladies” resurfacing from Vance’s past. The awkward Ohio senator did himself few favors while trying to ingratiate himself with the electorate, including making a bad joke about Diet Mountain Dew being considered “racist.”

Vance’s liabilities have subsequently piled up. He had previously suggested that Trump had committed serial sexual assault, was found to have promoted a right-wing conspiracy theorist’s book that called progressives “unhumans,” and The New Republic revealed that he wrote a favorable foreword for a book linked to Project 2025.

The debate gave Vance respite from the bad press, giving the public a brief impression that he was a normal person. But as the poll results show, that quickly faded, reminding the public all about his weird ideas. The fact that Vance spoke coherently and clearly in the debate and seemed relatively pleasant—as opposed to his normally awkward, off-putting demeanor—couldn’t make up for the fact that they share the same destructive ideas.

Perhaps nobody in Washington has flipped their opinion on January 6 quite like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Despite his public fawning, behind the scenes of the political theater, McConnell’s true feelings about Donald Trump were well known, according to The Price of Power, an upcoming book on the Republican senator by journalist Michael Tackett.

McConnell reportedly referred to Trump as “stupid,” “ill-tempered,” as well as a “despicable human being” weeks before Trump’s supporters ransacked the U.S. Capitol with intent to harm Vice President Mike Pence, then–House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi, and other key politicians.

Before the Georgia runoff election in November, McConnell reportedly described Trump as “stupid as well as being ill-tempered and can’t even figure out where his own best interests lie,” according to Tackett.

In the midst of the insurrection, as rioters banged on his barricaded office doors, McConnell addressed his staff in tears.

“You are my family, and I hate the fact that you had to go through this,” he told them.

In the immediate aftermath of the Capitol riot, McConnell laid the responsibility of the day’s events at Trump’s feet, proclaiming that there was “no question” the former president was “morally responsible” for the violent attack, and reprimanding Trump for his inaction while his supporters ransacked the legislature as a “disgraceful, disgraceful dereliction of duty.”

Still, when it came time for the Senate to vote on the House’s impeachment of the outgoing president for his involvement in the riot, McConnell chose to acquit. Then, after a year of relative silence on the issue, McConnell chose to wrist-slap the Republican National Convention for censuring House GOP lawmakers who investigated the events of the day.

“It was a violent insurrection for the purpose of trying to prevent the peaceful transfer of power after a legitimately certified election from one administration to the next,” McConnell said at the time.

Since then, McConnell has once again endorsed Trump for the Oval Office, rationalizing his support for the former president’s continued executive leadership on the basis that Trump had “earned” the nomination.

In a statement to the Associated Press on Thursday, McConnell insisted that he was now on the “same team” as the Republican presidential nominee.

“Whatever I may have said about President Trump pales in comparison to what JD Vance, Lindsey Graham, and others have said about him, but we are all on the same team now,” McConnell said.

Donald Trump has pulled out of two major interviews Thursday, after the Republican presidential nominee made several appearances this week that went disastrously awry.

Trump had been scheduled to do an interview with NBC News’s senior business correspondent Christine Romans that would air Monday, but the plans for a face-to-face were apparently shelved. CNN’s Brian Stelter reported Thursday that one source suggested the interview had only been “postponed.”

The former president also canceled his speech to an NRA convention on Tuesday in Savannah, Georgia. Convention organizers said Trump had a “scheduling conflict.”

These two changes come just days after Trump canceled plans to appear on CNBC’s Squawk Box, which the economic show’s co-anchor Joe Kernan reported Tuesday. While Trump’s campaign claimed he would be unable to attend the Friday interview due to scheduling conflicts that would bring him to Michigan, he is actually scheduled to appear live on Fox & Friends, which is only a few blocks away form the CNBC studio, according to The Daily Beast.

The cancellations come amid a rough week for Trump, who has visibly struggled during several events. The former president flailed while responding to tough questions at a Univision town hall Wednesday night, leaving attendees looking particularly unimpressed as he weirdly called the deadly January 6 riot a “day of love.”

He babbled incoherently during an interview at the Economic Club of Chicago Tuesday and threw a tantrum when fact-checked on his outlandish economic plans. On Sunday, he appeared to come untethered from reality as he stopped a town hall in its tracks so he could awkwardly stand onstage and listen to music for 40 minutes. And earlier this month, Trump broke nearly 60 years of tradition by backing out of an invitation for a sit-down interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes.

It seems that Trump is trying desperately to avoid a mainstream interview with journalists who aren’t in his pocket, opting instead for friendlier, Fox-ier faces.

Meanwhile, Vice President Kamala Harris doesn’t appear quite as apprehensive to speak with those who might not agree with her. Harris appeared in an interview with Fox News’s Bret Baier Wednesday, and seems to have gotten exactly what she wanted out of it.