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Donald Trump’s pick for the number two position in the Department of Defense,
#Steve #Feinberg, is a billionaire with business ties to the defense industry.

Feinberg is co-CEO of Cerberus Capital Management, which has invested in hypersonic missiles and once owned private military contractor DynCorp.

In Trump’s first term, Feinberg was the head of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board, which gives advice to the president on intelligence estimates and assessments,
as well as counterintelligence.

The deputy secretary of defense post comes with much more responsibility, with day-to-day management of the massive department’s 3 million civilian employees and service members among its duties.

Like Trump’s choice for secretary of defense Pete Hegseth, Feinberg does not have experience running a large organization or working in the Pentagon.

Plus, Feinberg’s investments and business activities would create multiple conflicts of interest if his appointment to the DoD survives the Senate.

Unlike Hegseth, Feinberg doesn’t have a long list of sexual misconduct, as well as scandals running veterans organizations (that we know of).

His appointment could convince senators that there’s someone competent actually running things as the deputy to a Christian nationalist who envisions the military taking sides in a civil war scenario.

Feinberg is not the only Trump appointee with conflicts of interest:
the president-elect’s pick to run Medicare and Medicaid,
#Mehmet #Oz, has multiple ties to the pharmaceutical industry.

But Feinberg’s defense industry ties could affect his view of the role of the U.S. military,
as the Trump administration is already stocked with pro-war and pro-intervention advisers.

A man who stands to profit when the U.S. military is deployed doesn’t bode well for peace.
newrepublic.com/post/188973/su

The New Republic · Surprise: Trump’s Latest Appointment Has Conflicts of InterestSteve Feinberg, tapped to be a key leader in the Pentagon, has extensive business ties to the defense industry.

“Elon and I disagree on some things, but Elon deserves his place at the table,” #Steve #Bannon recently told Puck.
“He stroked a $150 million check for the ground game, which is not sexy, at the exact moment we needed it. He came in with the money and the professionals.
To be brutally frank, it’s the reason we won.”

The tech billionaire’s support means more than just money though, according to Bannon.

“This is what I like about Elon Musk.
He and Vivek are talking about what we’ve been preaching on the War Room for years,”
Bannon added, referencing his radio show.

independent.co.uk/news/world/a

The Independent · Steve Bannon names the one thing that made a difference in the election: ‘It’s the reason we won’By Josh Marcus
Continued thread

Since Mitt Romney’s loss in the 2012 election,
the Mercers have drifted ever further out of the orbit of Planet Koch,
building up their own entities, including #Breitbart #News,
#Cambridge #Analytica (the data startup),
and the ironically named #Government #Accountability #Institute,
all of them featuring #Steve #Bannon, the self-described economic nationalist, in top slots
—until he joined the White House.
Cambridge Analytica, on whose board Bannon served, and Breitbart, where he was the chief executive, are private companies.
#GAI, which produced the campaign-season book
"Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich", by Peter Schweizer,
is a nonprofit organization.
Schweizer’s book, together with an accompanying movie executive-produced by #Rebekah Mercer, was designed to sully the reputation of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.
It was part of a Bannon-crafted strategy to steer the sort of smears that usually bubble up from the right-wing fever swamps directly into the mainstream media.
It worked; in 2015 the New York Times and the Washington Post both made exclusive agreements with the GAI to report on advance excerpts of Clinton Cash.

#Bannon was wealthy before he met up with the Mercers,
first through his work as a banker for Goldman Sachs back when it was a privately held company,
and then through his own privately held ventures in movie-making and consulting.
Though Bannon’s wealth, when compared to that of Betsy DeVos, makes him a pipsqueak in the Trump money universe
(assets worth between $12 million and $54 million, according to the New York Times),
it nonetheless derives primarily from privately held entities.

Continued thread

Attendees, with white-and-red gift bags and lanyards, knew to be closelipped when approached by hotel interlopers
or by the Times reporter, who was not invited to the closed-press festivities.

But a copy of the agenda listed remarks by several tech billionaires, including the Anduril co-founder #Palmer #Luckey and the venture capitalist #Marc #Andreessen, who spoke about his support for deregulating technology
and the mixed reaction in Silicon Valley to his endorsement of Mr. Trump, according to attendees.

There were tech up-and-comers, too:
Donald Trump #Jr. announced at the welcome dinner that he was entering venture capital.

And days before the president-elect chose Robert F. #Kennedy Jr. for health and human services secretary,
Mr. Kennedy spoke extensively about his public-health work to a standing ovation.

Ms. #Wiles also led a session on “2024 Election Analysis,” where she gave a preview of Mr. Trump’s first days as president.

“It’s the domestic ‘Davos in the desert,’” said the Rockbridge backer #Omeed #Malik, referring to the annual business conference in Riyadh, and Donald Trump Jr.’s new business partner.

➡️Rockbridge began with more humility.

Back in 2019, Mr. #Vance, then best known as the author of “Hilbilly Elegy,” and a conservative media figure named #Chris #Buskirk began informally hosting a series of small dinners
that would eventually become called Rockbridge.

The group drew early support from the venture capitalist #Peter #Thiel and eventually caught the attention of Donald J. Trump, who spoke at a few meetings.

Once in the fall and once in the spring, Rockbridge began to gather at places like the Four Seasons in Palm Beach, Fla.,
or the Ritz-Carlton in Dallas for three days of political panels and business networking.

Speakers included people like #Tucker #Carlson; the Thiel protégé #Blake #Masters; the casino mogul #Steve #Wynn; the investor #David #Sacks; and #Woody #Johnson, the billionaire owner of the New York Jets.

Not all attendees have politics at the top of their mind.

Some are primarily interested in business, seeing Rockbridge as a conservative-tinged version of the elite Sun Valley conference.

Continued thread

After the Bitcoin event in Nashville,
Trump brought Lutnick on board his plane, Trump Force One,
to a campaign stop in Minnesota, where Lutnick introduced Vance.

Lutnick later told an interviewer that travelling to a rally with the former President was
like “going to a rock concert with Mick Jagger.”

During the trip, Lutnick said, Trump offered him a formal role as co-chair of his Presidential transition team.

The decision was announced a few weeks later,
after the fund-raiser at Lutnick’s Bridgehampton home.

Another co-chair is #Linda #McMahon,
the former head of the Small Business Administration in the Trump Administration.

She, too, is a wealthy donor who, according to federal records, has given more than $10 million to support Trump in 2024.

That same month, Trump announced that he and his sons
Don, Jr., and Eric
were getting into the crypto business themselves.

#Steve #Witkoff, a New York real-estate mogul and a major Trump donor,
who testified on Trump’s behalf during his civil fraud trial this year,
helped set up the venture,
called "World Liberty Financial".

One of the entrepreneurs brought in as a partner,
#Chase #Herro, was later revealed to have referred to himself as
“the dirtbag of the Internet.”

Trump, during a rambling two-hour live-stream rollout on X,
struggled to describe how exactly the new business would work,
or even when it would launch.

“Crypto is one of those things we have to do,” he said.

“Whether we like it or not.”

By then, Lutnick’s sphere of influence had moved well beyond bitcoin.

In October, he told the Financial Times that appointees in a second Trump Administration would be subject to a strict
❌“loyalty” test
to avoid the kinds of senior aides who sought to constrain Trump during his first term.

“Those people were not pure to his vision,” Lutnick said.

“We’re going to give people the role based on their capacity
—and their fidelity and loyalty to the policy, as well as to the man.”

Continued thread

Trump has long made a practice of telling potential supporters what they want to hear.

This year, he has also changed previous policy positions in ways that would benefit some of his party’s largest donors.

In March, for example, he publicly reversed course on forcing the sale of the Chinese-owned social-media app TikTok,
despite having signed an executive order,
in August, 2020,
stating his intention to ban the app if it was not sold to a U.S.-based buyer within forty-five days.

Back then, Trump warned that a Chinese company owning so much of Americans’ personal data was a national-security threat.

But this winter, when the Biden Administration endorsed a bipartisan bill to force TikTok’s sale,
Trump came out against the measure.

On Truth Social, he wrote,
“If you get rid of TikTok, Facebook and Zuckerschmuck”
—his derogatory name for Facebook’s C.E.O., Mark Zuckerberg
—“will double their business.”

#Steve #Bannon, Trump’s former adviser, posted another explanation for the about-face:
“Simple: Yass Coin.”

Days earlier, at an event in Florida for the conservative group Club for Growth,
Trump had met with #Jeff #Yass, a major investor in TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance.

Yass, a libertarian-leaning Wall Street billionaire who started out as a professional poker player,
has not officially endorsed Trump or donated directly to him.

Instead, he has given more than $25 million to the "Club for Growth" pac, which is supporting the ex-President’s reëlection.

(According to OpenSecrets, Yass and his wife have contributed more than $70 million to conservative candidates and causes this election cycle.)

Yass also appears to have had a hand in Trump’s personal enrichment.

This spring, the company behind Truth Social merged with Digital World Acquisition Corp.,
a company in which Yass’s trading firm, Susquehanna,
was the single largest institutional investor.

Truth Social went public in March, and Trump’s majority stake in the company is now worth an estimated $3 billion.

Perhaps the most striking example of the former President’s donor-friendly flexibility in 2024 has been his shift on the #cryptocurrency industry.

In recent years, he was unambiguously critical of bitcoin,
the most widely traded digital currency,
saying it
“seems like a scam” and “potentially a disaster waiting to happen.”

But, in 2024, he became an unapologetic promoter of it, attracting contributions from major players in the field,
such as the twin brothers #Cameron and #Tyler #Winklevoss,
each of whom donated $1 million in bitcoin to help Trump.

The former rowing stars who famously sued Zuckerberg, their classmate at Harvard, for allegedly stealing the idea for Facebook,
went on to found the cryptocurrency exchange Gemini.

(In a speech this summer, Trump called them “male models with a big, beautiful brain.”)

This year’s Republican Party platform offers few details on many policy issues affecting Americans,
but it is unusually specific on crypto,
promising to
“defend the right to mine Bitcoin”
and opposing the creation of a
“Central Bank digital currency,”
which could threaten the crypto industry’s biggest investors.

In July, Trump flew to Nashville for the Bitcoin 2024 conference,
where he spoke shortly after one of his top fund-raisers,
#Howard #Lutnick.

Lutnick, the C.E.O. of the Wall Street firm Cantor Fitzgerald, has become a leading public proponent of the crypto industry;

at the conference, he announced a plan to lend $2 billion to crypto investors,

allowing them to use bitcoin as collateral.

Onstage, Trump said that his Administration would permit the creation of so-called #stablecoins,
which, he promised, would
“extend the dominance of the U.S. dollar to new frontiers around the world.”

Trump also promised to fire 🔸Gary Gensler, Biden’s chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission,
whose pro-regulatory positions on crypto have outraged bitcoiners.

The United States, Trump vowed, “will be the crypto capital of the planet.”

Lutnick, who has known Trump for thirty years and who once made a guest appearance on “The Celebrity Apprentice,”
supported Trump’s previous campaigns.

But he has significantly increased his giving in 2024.

According to Bloomberg, Lutnick and his wife donated $30,200 to Republicans in 2016
(though he also gave $1 million to Trump’s 2017 Inauguration committee),
$1.3 million in 2020,
and $12.1 million so far this year.

In May, during the former President’s trial in Manhattan, Lutnick hosted a fund-raiser for him at Lutnick’s apartment in the Pierre hotel.

In early August, he held another event at his forty-acre estate in Bridgehampton, which brought in $15 million; seats for a roundtable with Trump in Lutnick’s dining room went for $250,000.

The following Monday, maga Inc., a pro-Trump super pac, recorded a $5-million donation from Lutnick,
the largest individual political gift he’d ever made.

Continued thread

During this year's Republican primaries, Nelson Peltz gave $100,000 to a super pac supporting Tim Scott,
the South Carolina senator,
but Scott dropped out before a single G.O.P. vote was cast.

By the time of Peltz’s dinner, it was clear that Trump would secure the Republican nomination for an unprecedented third consecutive election.

Peltz, who was no longer on speaking terms with the ex-President, opened the discussion with a blunt assessment of the race.

🔥“I don’t like Donald Trump,” an attendee recalled Peltz saying.

“He’s a terrible human being, but our country’s in a bad place, and we can’t afford Joe Biden.”

So, Peltz concluded, however much they might dislike it, ❌“we’ve all got to throw our support behind him.”

Some of Peltz’s guests remained skeptical,
holding to the view, as the attendee put it, that
“Trump’s a terrible person
—I’m going to focus on the Senate.”

Most of the donors, however, adopted a more pragmatic approach to the ex-President.

Many of them had been granted significant access to the White House during his four years in office.

Some were expected to be considered for senior roles in a second term:

Trump has personally floated the name of the hedge-fund tycoon #John #Paulson, for instance, as a potential Secretary of the Treasury, touting him as
💥“a money machine.”

“They know how transactional he is,” the attendee told me.

“They’re hoping to have some influence over the course of appointments and therefore the direction of his Administration.”

A few of Peltz’s guests were all in.
#Steve #Wynn, the Las Vegas gambling titan, has known Trump for decades;

his wife, #Andrea #Hissom, is close to the former First Lady, Melania, and the two couples have spent time together in Palm Beach.

And then there was #Elon #Musk, the world’s richest man, who had reportedly got to know Peltz through Peltz’s son #Diesel, a tech entrepreneur.

At the time, Musk had said that he would NOT back a candidate in the Presidential race.

♦️By the fall, he would enthusiastically endorse Trump, spending $75 million to support him through a new super pac,
-- and spreading pro-Trump lies and conspiracy theories on his social-media platform, X.

Trump, the richest man ever to serve in the White House, is himself a billionaire,
though the extent of his wealth has long been in question.

(As of mid-October, with stock in Trump’s social-media venture, Truth Social, experiencing a pre-election bounce, Forbes estimated his net worth at about $5.5 billion.)

In 2016, Trump hardly bothered to court big donors.

He was shunned by much of the G.O.P. élite and largely self-funded his Republican primary campaign.

He lambasted Jeb Bush, the brother and son of Presidents, as a tool of the moneyed class.

👉“Super pacs are a disaster,” Trump said in a 2016 debate.
“They’re a scam. They cause dishonesty.
And you’d better get rid of them, because they are causing a lot of bad decisions to be made by some very good people.”

⚠️But in 2020, as an incumbent President, Trump embraced super pacs and their funders.

The two main super pacs supporting his campaign raised
💥$255 million on his behalf that year;

his total fund-raising came to more than
💥 $1 billion.

However, Biden, like Hillary Clinton four years earlier, raised even more than Trump,
bringing over-all spending in the 2020 Presidential race to a record🔥 $5.7 billion.

Continued thread

Cleta Mitchell, who leads Election Integrity Network, served on Trump’s legal team during his attempts to overturn the 2020 election result.

Since 2022, EIN has promoted becoming a poll worker,
directing people to “become part of the election apparatus” in their communities.

EIN affiliates in Georgia, North Carolina and Wisconsin have made efforts to recruit and train poll workers in 2024.

Mitchell and another EIN leader did not respond to calls and emails seeking comment.

During a June livestream on the video-sharing platform Rumble,
former Trump Homeland Security official #Ken #Cuccinelli directed an audience of about 10,000 to EIN’s website to sign up as poll workers.

What “can make the most difference without changing the laws,” Cuccinelli said,
“is getting more of our folks inside the polling places,
not as poll watchers,
but as election officials,
the ones who actually sign people in in the poll books,
the ones who actually count the ballots.”

Reached by phone, Cuccinelli said he takes every opportunity to encourage people to become poll workers and often refers them to EIN for training.

His remarks came during regular “election security” livestreams hosted on Rumble by Florida businessman and local Republican Party leader #Steve #Stern.
Stern declined an interview.

In April, #Christina #Norton, director of election integrity for the Republican National Committee, told the livestream audience that
its poll watchers and workers were the “heart of this mission.”

When they encounter problems on Election Day, Norton said,
they should “immediately report that issue back to the Republican headquarters,
back to our war rooms,
and then we are able to answer, mitigate or escalate these problems
to resolve them in real time.”

An RNC spokesperson said Norton meant that only observers should contact the war room
but did not respond to requests for clarification and whether the request asked workers to break the law.

When I saw the news that Trump is planninga rally at #Madison #Square #Garden
— as the Nazis did in 1939
— I checked the date to see whether that was before or after #Steve #Bannon gets out of prison.
Bannon is due to get out on October 29; the rally is two days earlier, on October 27.

On the current schedule, Bannon will be released nine days before the election, but not soon enough to attend what will undoubtedly be a larger version of the #Nazi #rant that Trump put on in Aurora the other day.
Unless something disrupts it, Bannon will start trial for defrauding Trump supporters on December 9, days before the states certify the electoral vote.
This is the kind of timing I can’t get out of my head.
According to FiveThirtyEight, Kamala Harris currently has a 53% chance of winningthe electoral college -- That’s bleak enough.
But based on everything I know about January 6, I’d say that if Trump loses, there’s at least a 10% chance Trump’s fuckery in response will have a major impact on the transfer of power.
Experts on right wing extremism are suggesting the same thing.
-- @emptywheel

The two Stephens
#Bannon, whose War Room podcast would serve to show that Trump intended to loose all Hell on January 6,
— and #Miller, who added the finishing touches to Trump’s speech making Mike Pence a target for that violence
— appear to have a plan to deliberately stoke violence, working in concert with Elon #Musk.

THE TWO STEPHENS SAY TRUMP MUST BE ABLE TO STOKE VIOLENCE WITH FALSE CLAIMS AS PART OF HIS CAMPAIGN
emptywheel.net/2024/10/13/mach

emptywheel · Machine for Fascism: The Two Stephens - emptywheelBack in June, Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon argued that Trump had to be permitted to make false claims that stoke political violence as part of his campaign. That strategy has become painfully clear in recent days.

Florida university to host extremist after DeSantis-led lurch to right

New College of Florida (NCF) will ⚠️host the extremist writer #Steve #Sailer,
who has been described as a
💥“white supremacist” and a
💥“proponent of scientific racism”,
at a college-branded public eventnext month.

New College has made headlines since January 2023, when the rightwing governor,
❌Ron DeSantis, vowed to transform it from a university known for liberal values into a conservative institution,
and installed a new board of trustees including the rightwing culture warrior #Christopher #Rufo.

That board in turn appointed DeSantis’s “close ally” #Richard #Corcoran as the new college president, in which role he makes a $699,000 salary.

DeSantis’s lieutenants’ actions at New College
– like ♦️abolishing disciplines,
♦️removing bathroom signage
and ♦️denying professors tenure
– have seen ➡️ the departure of more than a third of the faculty,
and given rise to myriad legal actions.

But the moves have been lauded by the so-called “new right”,
many of whom see US higher education as a bastion of liberalism that needs to be subject to a rightwing “#reconquista”.

JD #Vance, for his part, has pledged to. 🆘#aggressively #attack the universities in this country”.

Even so, Sailer’s invitation to speak is likely to stir controversy for his extremist views, especially on race.

In Sailer’s newly published anthology, Noticing, one essay claims that
an “African population explosion” is related to
a “primal African cult of fertility”.

Another associates “young woman-of-color journalists”
with “Haitian #voodoo and Southern #hoodoo magic”.

🔥Many offer variations on the claim that “Blacks have higher average levels of violent crime and lower average levels of intelligence”.

theguardian.com/us-news/2024/s

The Guardian · Florida university to host extremist after DeSantis-led lurch to rightBy Jason Wilson

Mort de Steve à Nantes: le commissaire jugé pour homicide involontaire relaxé

Le commissaire Grégoire Chassaing, chargé des opérations de police lorsque #Steve Maia Caniço est mort dans la Loire le 21 juin 2019 à #Nantes, a été relaxé vendredi par le tribunal judiciaire de Rennes. Une décision qui va à l’encontre des réquisitions du parquet.

mediapart.fr/journal/france/20

Microsoft billionaire fights US election disinformation

“Hi, I’m #Steve #Ballmer. I spent 34 years growing Microsoft, 10 years owning the LA Clippers basketball team. I love computers, data and facts.

That’s why I started ⭐️USAFacts,” Ballmer says at the top of the program.

Leading up to election day in November, #USAFacts is rolling out a series of fact-filled educational videoscentered on the US.
The videos are available on YouTube and will be shown as late-night commercials on select TV channels.

Depending on what program you’re tuning into, you’ll come across stats and information about the federal #budget, #immigration, the #environment or #healthcare.

And while Ballmer is leading the program, he says he is not out to change people’s minds.
“We’re trying to arm the American public with the information to do their jobs as citizens,” Ballmer said. “We don’t pick sides.”

The idea behind USAFacts came when Ballmer started helping his wife with his family’s philanthropic efforts and found himself facing the 💥scale and complexity of government data.

The organization’s first project, published in 2017, was what Ballmer considers a version of the 👉10-K financial reports companies are required to compile that illustrates the financial conditions of the company.

The report, now published annually, is called the "Government 10-K"
– named after the yearly financial report that public companies in the United States must file with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

Every year, the organization goes to Washington DC to host a session for lawmakers on its annual report and gives recommendations to lawmakers on collecting data.
“It’s just, here’s how we look at our company. Here’s our numbers about how we’re doing. It has to be presented with context,” Ballmer said.

Ballmer said USAFacts was non-partisan and only used information published by local, state and federal governments as a way to gain people’s trust in its data.
Information from other sources, like university research or thinktanks, is not included.

theguardian.com/us-news/2024/s

The Guardian · ‘Arm the public with facts’: Microsoft billionaire fights US election disinformationBy Lauren Aratani

Samuel Alito accepted concert tickets from conservative German aristocrat

#Samuel #Alito, the US supreme court justice, accepted $900 concert tickets from a Catholic German aristocrat known for her unabashed conservative views and ties to rightwing activists, his latest financial disclosure form reveals.

#Princess #Gloria #von #Thurn #und #Taxis reportedly gifted the tickets to Alito and his wife to allow them to attend the Regensburg castle festival,
an annual summer music extravaganza hosted at her 500-room castle in Bavaria.

The princess, a descendant of princes of the Holy Roman empire, is noted for ties with #Steve #Bannon, a key supporter and former aide of #Donald #Trump, and connections to figures in the Catholic hierarchy opposed to Pope Francis.

Her donation to Alito is set out in the justice’s annual financial disclosure report, which he filed late after requesting an extension.

The declaration follows a series of controversies over the ethics of supreme court justices amid revelations that some, including Alito himself and Justice #Clarence #Thomas, have accepted gifts from wealthy benefactors without disclosing on mandatory forms.

Alito has been at the centre of reports that he accepted a private jet free travel gift for a luxury salmon fishing trip from a conservative billionaire who had cases pending before the supreme court.

He previously met von Thurn und Taxis along with fellow justice #Brett #Kavanaugh when she visited the supreme court in 2019 along with #Cardinal #Gerhard #Ludwig #Müller, who was dismissed from his position as head of the Catholic’s church’s doctrinal body by Pope Francis, and #Brian #Brown, a leading anti-LGBTQ+ activist.

Von Thurn und Taxis’s palatial castle in Regensburg – the venue for the concert attended by Alito and his wife – has been mooted by Bannon as a potential venue for a 🔸European network of finishing schools for rightwing conservatives.
After her reinvention as a conservative Catholic activist, she drew criticism in 2001 after saying on a television talkshow that the high rate of Aids in Africa was due, not to a lack of safe sex, but because
“the Blacks like to copulate a lot”.
She later tried to amend her remarks, saying Africans had a lot of sex due to the continent’s hot climate.

theguardian.com/us-news/articl

The Guardian · Samuel Alito accepted concert tickets from conservative German aristocratBy Robert Tait