New Trump Deposition Video Could Screw Him Over in E. Jean Carroll Trial

Donald Trump’s classless pastime of bragging about his money may get him into even deeper legal trouble.

In a video deposition made public Friday by the New York Attorney General’s Office, the 2024 presidential candidate claimed that he only became president the first time because of the “brand,” and that, according to him, he should have tacked even more onto his bank statements—statements that New York courts have already deemed overinflated and fraudulent.

“If I wanted to show you a good statement, I would have added maybe $10 billion or something for the brand,” Trump said. “I mean I became president because of the brand, OK. I became president. I think it’s the hottest brand in the world.”

Legal experts predict this could affect how much Trump will be expected to fork over to columnist E. Jean Carroll, whom a jury has already decided Trump is liable for sexually assaulting and defaming. Carroll is requesting damages of at least $10 million.

“This jury is allowed to consider how much Donald Trump is worth,” explained legal analyst Lisa Rubin on MSNBC. “Because if you’re trying to punish someone if they only have $10 in their pocket, that’s very different than punishing someone who has hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars in their pocket.”

“So, if I’m Robby Kaplan and her team representing E. Jean Carroll right now, I’m poring over this video and thinking about how to use it if Donald Trump, indeed, takes the stand on Monday,” she added.

Trump is on the line in four criminal trials and two civil trials. The videotaped deposition, which includes a 479-page written transcript, stems from his $370 million bank fraud trial in New York in which Trump and his sons stand accused of deceiving banks and insurers by massively overvaluing the elder Trump’s net worth.

But that wasn’t the only outsized claim the GOP front-runner made in his testimony. Elsewhere in the deposition, Trump patted himself on the back for allegedly standing in the way of nuclear holocaust.

“I think you would have nuclear holocaust if I didn’t deal with North Korea,” Trump argued. “I think you would have a nuclear war if I weren’t elected. And I think you might have a nuclear war now, if you want to know the truth,” Trump said during the April 13, 2023, deposition after he was asked if he was too busy to run his company while he was in the White House.

Representative Paul Gosar is livid that fewer white people are joining the military, a shift he blames on “‘woke’ ideologies.”

The far-right Arizona congressman sent out a fundraising email Thursday night with the subject line “dismantling woke marxist ideologies.”

“The number of white recruits has plummeted,” Gosar wrote in the email, first reported on by Vice News. “[It’s] a casualty of this cultural skirmish that has left our Army beleaguered and besieged by ‘woke’ ideologies.”

“This is not merely a crisis of numbers,” he said. “It is a crisis of spirit.”

Gosar was reacting to a study released last week by Military.com that found the number of white recruits in the U.S. army has dropped significantly in the past five years. In 2018, white people made up 56.4 percent of new recruits. But they made up just 44 percent in 2023.

The number of Black and Hispanic recruits has stayed about the same, but they make up a larger percentage of the recruiting pool because the lower number of white recruits has decreased the overall recruiting total.

Military.com was unable to pinpoint a single reason for the drop in white recruits but said factors could include increased scrutiny of military service, an underfunded public education system, and issues in public health. Others have suggested that another reason could be the fact that young white Americans make up about three-quarters of the tens of thousands of annual fatal opioid overdoses.

The military has also upped efforts to increase diversity, particularly LGBTQ people, as well as to root out extremism from its ranks. But Gosar and other right-wingers complaining about the drop in white recruits in the army shouldn’t worry too much: The vast majority of the military is still white.

Nonetheless, Gosar claimed the lower white recruitment numbers are more proof that conservatives are fighting a “pivotal battle for the soul of our nation”—a phrase that stings of white nationalism (to which Gosar has ties) and echoes Donald Trump’s recent claim that immigrants are “destroying the blood of our country.” Gosar is a staunch Trump supporter.

Many Republicans have increasingly accused the military of going “woke” and have tried to pass legislation limiting expressions of pride in diversity. In November, Senator Tommy Tuberville said the military was the “weakest” it’s ever been because of “wokeness.”

Ironically, at the time, Tuberville was carrying out a one-man blockade on military promotions to protest the Department of Defense’s policy of reimbursing costs for service members who had to travel for an abortion. Despite repeated warnings from military leadership that he was hurting military readiness, Tuberville persisted with his stunt for a total of nine months.

Representative Andy Kim slammed his own party on Friday, roundly criticizing local leaders of the Democratic Party attempting to pressure a cohort of Gen Z voters against endorsing him in the race to oust incumbent Senator Robert Menendez.

“This is why people lose faith in democracy and our system,” Kim posted in a thread on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

“The Dem party will lose credibility in criticizing Trump and others about efforts to subvert democracy if some leaders in our own party seek to put their thumb on the scale of our elections in NJ,” Kim continued. “We seek fairness in our democracy and must not deviate when it advantages us.”

The online blowup followed an explosive report by The New York Times outlining how Keely Magee, a youth coordinator for the Democratic State Committee in touch with one of Kim’s rivals, first lady of New Jersey Tammy Murphy, actively pressured members of the College Democrats of America and its local New Jersey chapter in a futile strategy to sway its endorsement—an effort that members of the group said left them feeling threatened and fearful.

In a series of calls over several hours, Magee reportedly warned against the endorsement, suggesting that it could threaten funding and future job prospects for leaders of the College Democrats, reported the Times.

A spokesperson for Murphy’s campaign told the outlet that the comments and calls were made by a “young person with no connection to our campaign, one who seemed eager to help, albeit in a misguided manner.” Magee, for her part, said she was in regular communication with Murphy’s campaign consultant Dave Parano.

Murphy has not just the support of her husband, Governor Philip Murphy, in the hotly contested race but also the endorsement of some of the state’s most prominent Democrats. She has also raised a record number of funds—more than $3.2 million, according to Insider NJ—in just the first six weeks of her campaign. And yet, Kim has so far pulled off an extreme advantage in the polls, tentatively pulling nearly half of the vote and a 23-point lead over Murphy, according to a December survey by Kim’s campaign.

Both are attempting to unseat Menendez, who has been indicted on multiple corruption charges related to the foreign governments of Qatar and Egypt. Menendez allegedly tried to help New Jersey real estate tycoon Fred Daibes secure a multimillion-dollar investment from an investment company tied to the Qatari government, and pressured officials within the Department of Agriculture to help Egypt maintain a business monopoly. In the process, Menendez collected incredible gifts, including lavish watches, $480,000 in cash, numerous gold bars, and “luxury vehicles” from Egyptian officials.

“If they’re threatening us, who else?” Nate Howard, vice president of the College Democrats of New Jersey, told The Daily Princetonian. “If they’re threatening college students who are by no means power brokers, what are they doing to people who actually have power?”

This article has been updated to clarify Magee’s role.

An Oklahoma Republican lawmaker has introduced a bill that would label many people of color as “terrorists.”

State Representative J.J. Humphrey introduced House Bill 3133 on Tuesday. The remarkably short measure (the body of the bill is just 20 lines long) would create a new category of people considered terrorists within the Sooner State.

The first criterion to belong to this new category: Be a person “of Hispanic descent living within the state of Oklahoma.”

If the person is also a “member of a criminal street gang” and has been “convicted of a gang-related offense,” they would be considered a terrorist. The punishment for terrorism would be forfeiting all assets, including all property, vehicles, and money.

The bill is clearly intended to target a wide range of people of Hispanic or Latino descent, including Afrolatino people. Police and prosecutors are far more likely to deem Black and Latino people gang members than white people, meaning that people of color are more likely to have been accused or convicted of something considered terrorism.

If the concern was simply punishing acts of terrorism, there would be no reason to explicitly call out Hispanic people in the text.

Humphrey gave a weak apology after widespread backlash from Oklahoma Democratic lawmakers and social media users, but he refused to back down.

“I apologize for using the word Hispanic, but I was not wrong. Again, these are Hispanic,” he said. “Reality is they are Hispanic. There’s nothing to be ashamed with.”

Humphrey said he would change the bill so that it says “undocumented here illegally, or something like that” instead of Hispanic, which is not any better.

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, the policy director of the American Immigration Council, slammed Humphrey’s proposed change.

“There are many people who claim that all they care about is violation of immigration law but when you dig deeper it’s just garden-variety bigotry,” Reichlin-Melnick wrote on social media.

After a week plagued by hand sores, deteriorating speech, and legal predicaments that included three key attorneys leaving his side and droves of courtroom faux pas in the E. Jean Carroll case, Donald Trump offered a pretty extreme idea for New Hampshire voters.

“What is your closing message to the people of New Hampshire?” asked Fox News’s Sean Hannity in a one-on-one interview with the GOP front-runner on Thursday night.

“The president of the United States, and I’m not talking about myself, I’m talking about any president, has to have immunity. Because if you take immunity away from the president—so important—you will have a president that’s not going to be able to do anything. Because when he leaves office, the opposing party, president, if it’s the opposing party, will indict the president for doing something that should have been good,” Trump said, after a brief rant about Colorado’s and Maine’s decisions to keep him off their primary ballots.

No other president in the history of the country has faced criminal charges. Trump, however, is staring down the barrel at 91 charges across four separate criminal cases, for his behavior related to the January 6 insurrection, his attempt to undermine the election results in Georgia, his alleged theft of thousands of classified documents, and the Stormy Daniels hush-money case, in the last of which Trump is accused of using his former fixer Michael Cohen to sweep an affair with the porn actress under the rug ahead of the 2016 presidential election.

Trump’s messaging on Thursday is an interesting indication of not just where his mind is at—but where he would prefer voters’ minds to be, as well, as he enters a period of extreme legal uncertainty in tandem with his race to reclaim the White House.