Trump’s Mob Boss Threat Against Nikki Haley Donors Blows Up in His Face

Donald Trump’s plan to threaten Nikki Haley’s financial backers immediately backfired on him on Wednesday, as several prominent people in the MAGA camp proceeded to donate to the GOP front-runner’s primary opponent, launching a spontaneous fundraising drive for the South Carolina governor.

“When I ran for office and won, I noticed that the losing candidate’s ‘donors’ would immediately come to me, and want to ‘help out.’ This is standard in politics, but no longer with me,” Trump posted during a late-night social media tantrum.

“Anybody that makes a ‘contribution’ to Birdbrain, from this moment forth, will be permanently barred from the MAGA camp,” he added, derogatorily referring to Haley, whom he put in his own presidential Cabinet as ambassador to the U.N.

But then several of Trump’s former staffers chimed in on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, apparently hard-withdrawing their MAGA cards in favor of sending some money to the ambassador.

“Done,” posted Trump’s former deputy press secretary, Sarah Matthews.

Haley caught on quickly, posting a link to her donation page.

That set the stage for other voters to gleefully join in the fundraising fray.

Others noted that the mob boss–style threat seemed particularly on edge for a candidate who just won the New Hampshire primary by double digits, and questioned the legitimacy of the financial threat from a man facing several pricy upcoming criminal trials and a potential $370 million fine for committing bank fraud to expand his real estate empire.

Despite the local drive’s overnight popularity, it will hardly replace some of Haley’s biggest backers—like venture capitalist Reid Hoffman—who began pausing donations to the campaign after Haley’s lackluster results on Tuesday.

Donald Trump posted at least 37 times about E. Jean Carroll, the night before her second defamation trial against him was set to resume. Trump will take the stand on Thursday to try to defend himself, and it clearly caused him to freak out.

Trump made the 37 posts between 9:22 p.m. and 11:43 p.m. Wednesday night. He mixed in some attacks on his Republican primary opponent, Nikki Haley, and some brags about his winning the New Hampshire primary. He also complained bitterly that he should have total immunity from legal proceedings and that unspecified lawsuits were just “election interference.”

The former president shared media interview clips and social media posts that appear to come from Carroll, all stripped of context so as to paint her as some sort of sexual deviant. He also falsely claimed that the co-founder of LinkedIn is paying Carroll’s legal fees.

Trump has made these exact claims about Carroll multiple times before. He has posted many of the same clips and claims during previous social media rants, and he often shares the same post more than once during his anti-Carroll posting sprees.

This is the fourth time during this trial that Trump has gone on such an unhinged social media rant. The first time was just before the trial began, and the second was—inexplicably—as he sat in the courtroom for the first day of the trial. Trump set a personal record during the third, after his trial was delayed earlier this week (per his own lawyer’s request). That last time, Trump made 42 posts about Carroll on Truth Social in the span of 13 minutes.

It’s possible that Trump is getting these complaints out of his system now because he won’t be allowed to bring them up when he actually takes the stand.

Presiding Judge Lewis Kaplan ruled two weeks ago that Trump and his lawyers cannot say certain things about Carroll during the trial—including many of the things Trump has been posting. The posts may still come back to haunt Trump, as Carroll’s lawyer has already said she’ll use his words as evidence against him.

Kaplan has a history of allowing no nonsense or rule-breaking in his courtroom, and he has made it abundantly clear that Trump is no exception. Kaplan and Trump’s lawyer Alina Habba have repeatedly butted heads throughout the trial, as Habba attempted to bend the rules and Kaplan repeatedly shut her down.

A top Republican official in Arizona threw in the towel on Wednesday, resigning from his position amid a public feud with Kari Lake, who he claims is “on a mission to destroy” him.

Jeff DeWit, chair of the state’s Republican Party, accused Lake of blackmailing him, after she released a recording of a private phone conversation between the two, in which he can be heard attempting to bribe the Senate candidate. Lake also allegedly threatened DeWit with a “more damaging” recording if he refused to step down.

“Since our conversation where I advised Lake to postpone her campaign and aim for the governor’s position in two years, she has been on a mission to destroy me,” DeWit said in a statement on Wednesday. “It was a suggestion made in good faith, believing it could benefit both her future prospects and the party’s overall strategy.”

“The release of our conversation by Lake confirms a disturbing tendency to exploit private interactions for personal gain and increases concerns about her habit of secretly recording personal and private conversations,” DeWit continued. “This is obviously a concern given how much interaction she has with high profile people including President Donald Trump.”

In the original, 10-minute audio clip published by The Daily Mail, DeWit—who served as chief operating officer on Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign—can be heard asking Lake to name her price to stay out of politics for the next two years, insisting that the GOP needed to make way for another candidate as Trump would not win the 2024 race and that there were “very powerful people who want to keep you out.”

“I said things I regret,” DeWit said, “but I realize when hearing Lake’s recording that I was set up. I believe she orchestrated this entire situation to have control over the state party, and it is obvious from the recording that she crafted her performance responses with the knowledge that she was recording it, intending to use this recording later to portray herself as a hero in her own story.”

Representative Dean Phillips thought he’d made a pretty good point Wednesday about the political division in the United States, but the internet was quick to show him just how badly he’d messed up.

Phillips is running a long-shot campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination against President Biden. If you’re wondering how that’s going for him, Phillips won just 19.6 percent of votes during New Hampshire’s unofficial Democratic primary on Tuesday. Biden won 55.8 percent—as a write-in candidate.

Following his New Hampshire loss, Phillips revealed Wednesday morning on Fox & Friends that he had attended one of Donald Trump’s rallies to try to connect with far-right voters. When his actions prompted backlash, Phillips spoke out against political divisions.

Phillips accompanied his tweet with what appeared to be an electoral map, which was indeed primarily red. But internet users were quick to point out that the map was massively misleading for two main reasons.

First, while the map makes it look like most people vote Republican, the areas that are blue actually have higher population numbers.

Second, the map isn’t even from the most recent election.

“There was probably a lane for someone to do reasonably well against Biden,” tweeted Osita Nwanevu, a columnist for The Guardian and contributing editor for The New Republic, “but being maximally annoying to every constituency in the Democratic Party at once wasn’t it, obviously.”

Ohio’s Republican-controlled General Assembly has voted to override Governor Mike DeWine’s veto of a bill that would ban gender-affirming care for minors. The measure will now become law, a further blow to LGBTQ Ohioans.

The state Senate voted 23–9 on Wednesday in favor of the override, primarily along party lines. The state House of Representatives passed the measure two weeks ago with a vote of 65–28.

Senate Minority Leader Nickie Antonio, a Democrat, urged her colleagues not to pass the bill. She pointed out that state residents had already rejected government intervention in health care when they voted in November to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution.

“The voters spoke when they voted in the last election that the government should not be in charge of their health care decisions,” Antonio said.

“If what we all agree on today is that this is a complicated issue that none of us have all the answers for, I don’t understand why we would just close the door,” she continued. “We don’t know what their lives are like, but the parents do. The families do.”

House Bill 68 bans gender-affirming care for transgender and nonbinary teenagers. The measure applies to treatments including puberty blockers, hormones, and medical procedures; it also prohibits trans high school and college students from participating on sports teams that match their gender identity.

DeWine shocked everyone when he vetoed the bill in late December, a rare bright spot in the current onslaught of measures restricting access to gender-affirming care. DeWine cited the medical community’s support for gender-affirming care as a factor in his decision, as well as conversations he had with trans teens and their parents.

“Parents have looked me in the eye and told me that but for this treatment, their child would be dead,” he said. “And youth who are transgender have told me they are thriving today because of their transition.”

But just a week later, DeWine undid everything when he signed an executive order banning gender-affirming surgeries for minors in Ohio and even restricting access to care for adults. Under the new rules, people of any age seeking gender-affirming care must get permission from multidisciplinary teams. Those teams could include an endocrinologist, a bioethicist, a psychiatrist, and more.

Ohio is now one of the few states to mandate these extra steps, which will add an undue burden for patients. The requirements will likely rack up significant medical expenses and dramatically extend how long people must wait to access what is widely viewed as lifesaving care.