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.”