This MAGA Conspiracy Theorist Might Be the Next George Santos

Move over, George Santos—there’s another Republican politician with a taste for the finer things in life.

Royce White, the leading Republican candidate for the Senate in Minnesota, reportedly spent campaign funds from a previous failed political campaign on strip clubs, posh hotel stays, limousine services, and many other items that could only be described as personal expenses, reports The Daily Beast.

White, a retired NBA player, racked up the aforementioned ritzy expenditures, including more than $1,200 to a Miami strip club called “Gold Rush Cabaret,” during a failed run for Congress in 2022 while also taking part in Ice Cube’s “Big3” three-on-three professional basketball league at the same time. He might have gotten away with his two-year-old spending spree if he hadn’t decided to run for the Senate, as his violations of campaign finance law—which seem to rival Santos’s—went unnoticed in 2022.

“In nearly a decade of reviewing FEC disclosures, I’ve never seen a mess quite like White’s disbursements,” Jordan Libowitz, vice president for communications at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said to The Daily Beast.

White is a notorious conspiracy theorist, who’s gone from being a Black Lives Matter protester to an acolyte of Steve Bannon. He has also been accused of publicly opposing abortion while pressuring a woman to have one. Thanks to Bannon’s endorsement, White earned the endorsement of the Minnesota Republican Party in a landslide victory last weekend, garnering more than two-thirds of the vote.

With Minnesota’s Republican Senate primary set for August, Royce is not guaranteed to end up as the Republican nominee who will face incumbent Senator Amy Klobuchar in November. But the fact that he has made it so far to get a state party’s endorsement is telling. It’s anyone’s guess whether he makes it to November without criminal charges.

Trump is plotting ways to make it illegal to prosecute him for all the crimes he loves to commit if he retakes the White House—and he’s tapping GOP leaders to carry out the plan, according to sources who spoke with Rolling Stone.

“Even after a second term, he doesn’t think any of this is going to end,” one source told Rolling Stone. “He doesn’t think Democrats are going to quit coming after him.”

Trump has held meetings with “several” Republican lawmakers and attorneys about passing legislation to indemnify former presidents from nonfederal prosecutions, according to Rolling Stone—an idea he probably wishes he thought of during his first term and before getting hit with a dazzling array of criminal and civil charges over and over and over and over and over again.

Sitting presidents are granted presidential immunity for actions they take in their official capacity, but that doesn’t extend beyond the presidency or apply to activities unrelated to the presidency.

Trump has previously argued—including in a case now before the Supreme Court—that he has absolute immunity on the basis that everything he did as president qualifies as an official act. This, however, doesn’t absolve him from crimes he committed prior to and after his time in office, nor does it extend to nonfederal crimes.

Trump hinted at his new scheme during a break from his hush-money trial, telling cameras Congress needs to “pass lots of laws” to prevent “things like this” (Trump being charged for crimes). Whether the ploy will work is a matter of elections: Trump would need to win in November, and Republicans would need to control the House and Senate.

Despite that, efforts have been underway to shield Trump from prosecution, including the introduction of the “No More Political Prosecutions Act” introduced to the House in 2023 by Republican Representative Russell Fry, which seeks to move state and civil cases against current and former presidents and vice presidents up to federal courts, effectively freezing those cases. Simultaneously, Trump’s team has been working to revive and expand a Nixon-era Department of Justice memo prohibiting the prosecution of sitting presidents—and former presidents.

Team Trump is up to its old tricks again and falsely claiming a lackluster rally in the Bronx on Thursday drew a crowd of 25,000 supporters. This estimate comically contradicts on-the-ground reports, the NYPD, aerial views, and the laws of physics.

But reality is no match for the notoriously anti-factual Trump and his supporters, who have been obsessed with lying about his crowd size since the 2017 inauguration—and have become the living embodiment of the Nazi-era propaganda tactic of “Repeat a lie often enough, and it becomes the truth.”

In reality, Trump requested an event permit for 3,500 people, according to The New York Times. On Thursday, 3,400 tickets had been issued for the rally, according to NYPD statements made to Raw Story. How many ticket holders showed up is unclear, but according to live aerial shots from ABC, Trump’s rally was confined to just one area of the palatial park: the amphitheater.

Conservatives’ claims of 25,000 showing out in the Bronx is roughly 30 times what reality depicts of around 800 people in Crotona Park’s amphitheater, with a few hundred hanging around past the gates. For comparison, Waldo Stadium in Kalamazoo fits 30,000 people—as noted by a crowd-size visualizer blog this reporter has often referred to when people violently inflate their numbers.

Were 25,000 people to have shown up in the Bronx, tightly packed, they would have occupied 13.8 baseball diamonds. With room to move around, a crowd that big would have occupied 30.8 baseball diamonds. But aerial visuals indicate Trump supporters on Thursday left the baseball field–size amphitheater less than a quarter full, roughly the size of one baseball diamond—or around 800 people.

An amateur sting operation in a bitter feud between Republicans in a small town in central New Jersey has now resulted in the arrest of a local councilman.

The hustle, reports the New Jersey Globe, was organized and planned by a growing cohort of MAGA Republicans in Readington Township. Frustrated by the increasingly routine disappearances of their political placards, they decided to plant six repurposed boards from the district’s 2022 House race as bait, pinning them with Apple AirTags before planting them next to a group of signs supporting a pair of moderate conservatives running for Readington mayor.

The signs were then stolen, and the AirTags led the Donald Trump–aligned cohort to an unexpected location: the home of committeeman John Albanese.

Albanese, a member of the town’s Republican old guard and a former Readington mayor himself, was arrested May 17 and charged with “unlawfully taking or exercising control over certain moveable property,” according to a summons issued by Patrolman Brandon Griffiths.

Incumbent Mayor Adam Mueller and Committee Member Juergen Huelsebusch, both aligned with the town’s new conservative wing, issued a joint statement denouncing Alabanese’s alleged behavior. “The arrest of Committeeman Albanese, an elected official and former Mayor, is deeply troubling and indefensible,” the pair told the Globe. “Given the considerable damage and embarrassment this has caused to Readington Township and the Republican Party, we call for his immediate resignation from all elected offices. This is a necessary step to begin restoring trust and integrity within our community.”

Still, the election boards weren’t exactly the MAGA cohort’s property to be stolen. Originally, the House district signs belonged to the campaign for Representative Thomas Kean Jr., though the backs of the signs had since been marked as “Property of Readington GOP,” according to the Globe.

A spokesman for the Kean campaign declined to comment to the local paper, though the freshman lawmaker is backing Huelsebusch and Mueller.

The latest addition to Donald Trump’s horror show of vice presidential candidates is Senator Tom Cotton, The New York Times reports.

Trump reportedly thinks the Arkansas senator is a reliable communicator, and likes the fact that Cotton is a military veteran with undergraduate and law degrees from Harvard.

Cotton told Fox News on Monday that Trump has not discussed the vice presidency with him, and the two only discussed what the former president needs to do to be elected a second time.

“When we do talk, we talk about what it’s going to take to win this election in November—to elect President Trump to another term in the White House and elect a Republican Congress, so we can begin to repair the damage that Joe Biden’s presidency has inflicted on this country,” Cotton said.

Cotton may be on Trump’s shortlist for a different reason: his foreign policy hawkishness and itchy trigger finger.

Even before his political career began, he called for American journalists to be jailed for reporting on classified information. After becoming senator, he made a name for himself by constantly calling on the United States to attack Iran. But he’s also called for a brutal use of force domestically as well. In 2020, the Arkansas senator infamously called for invoking the Insurrection Act and sending in federal troops to quell Black Lives Matter demonstrations. Most recently, he again called for troops to be deployed against protesters, this time against demonstrators who oppose Israel’s brutal massacre in Gaza, which he continues to cheer on.

This year, he’s also made headlines for badgering TikTok’s CEO Shou Zi Chew in a racist onslaught of questions about Chew’s background, repeatedly asking if the social media executive was a member of the Chinese Communist Party and ignoring Chew’s assertion that he was Singaporean.

To many Republicans in today’s Trump-led GOP, these disturbing stances are welcomed, not rejected. The question is whether the Republican presidential nominee thinks Cotton and his record would help him return to the White House.