For all his bombast, Trump is plummeting – financially, legally and politically
Donald Trump is doing his best Wizard of Oz imitation. These days, Trump is not looking like the “winner” he needs voters to believe him to be. Like the title character in L Frank Baum’s 1900 children’s fantasy and the 1939 movie, there is less there than meets the eye. The 45th president’s lead in the polls evaporates while his cash stash shrinks.
His upcoming felony fraud trial in Manhattan looms. For the record, he is zero for three in his bids to adjourn the trial, and lawyers are expensive.
At the same time, the stock price of Trump Media & Technology Group – his eponymous meme stock, DJT – has plummeted this week. “DJT stock is down again,” announced Barron’s on Thursday. “Trump’s stake in Truth Social parent has taken a hit.”
Elsewhere a headline blared: “Trump’s ‘DJT’ stock dives to lowest close since Ron DeSantis dropped out”. Reminder, Trump is a guy whose businesses are no stranger to bankruptcy or allegations of fraud. He leaves wreckage in his wake.
The spirit of Trump University remains alive. Like life in Oz, so much in Trump World is illusory.
Meanwhile, Trump’s attempts to bond New York state’s $454m judgment have run into a legal roadblock. The purported bond posted to avoid enforcement pending appeal may be legally insufficient. Letitia James, the state’s attorney general, demands clarification. Whether the paperwork will be sustained will be decided at a court hearing later this month.
If the court finds the bond to be insufficient or invalid, James may be able to immediately seek to collect what the state is owed. Financial humiliation set against the backdrop of the campaign is something that Trump can ill afford.
For the record, he has already posted a $91m bond to stave off enforcement in the second E Jean Carroll defamation case. His assets are getting tied up, his liquidity ebbs. To him, image is almost everything.
At the same time, abortion has reemerged as a campaign issue, to the horror of the presumptive Republican nominee and his minions. The death of Roe v Wade cost the Republican party its “red wave” in the 2022 midterms. This time, it may lead to another Trump loss and Hakeem Jeffries of Queens wielding the speaker’s gavel in the US House of Representatives.
Hell hath no fury like suburban moms and their daughters. The last thing they need is a thrice-married libertine seventysomething with a penchant for adult film stars and Playboy models telling them how to raise their kids or meddling in their personal lives.
When a guy who hawks Bibles for a side-hustle refuses to say whether any of his partners ever had an abortion, it’s time to roll your eyes and guard your wallet.
“Such an interesting question,” he replied to Maureen Dowd in 2016, when asked about his days as a swinging single. “So what’s your next question?”
For the moment anyway, the party faithful ignore Trump’s pleas to rectify the decision of Arizona’s highest court to allow the criminalization of all abortions except when the life of the mother is endangered. On Wednesday, the Republican-controlled Arizona legislature refused to revoke the 1864 law in the middle of this latest controversy.
In case anyone forgot, once upon a time Trump himself had called for the criminalization of abortion. There had to be “some form of punishment” for women who have abortions, Trump said at a 2016 town hall.
Likewise, Kari Lake – a Republican Senate candidate in Arizona, Trump acolyte and frequent guest at Mar-aLago – had demanded that her state enact an abortion regime that copied Texas’s draconian law.
Not any more. Live by Dobbs, die by Dobbs. Arizona is the new ground zero of this election. This is what states’ rights looks like.
Having feasted on Hunter Biden’s depredations, it is once again time for the Republican party to stare into the mirror and cringe. Trump is more Caligula and Commodus than Cyrus, the biblical paradigm of a virtuous heathen king.
For all of Joe Biden’s missteps and mistakes, his candidacy is demonstrating unexpected vitality. Then again, he is running against a defeated former president who lost the popular vote in 2016 to Hillary Clinton and again four years later.
Trump’s lead is now a matter of fractions. According to Real Clear Politics, he is now ahead by a microscopic two-10ths of 1%. Indeed, Reuters’s latest poll shows the 46th president with a four-point lead up from a single percentage point a month ago. Said differently, Trump’s campaign is in retrograde.
Joe Biden is in the hunt and Donald Trump is looking like the old man behind the curtain. Substitute Stormy Daniels for Dorothy and the only things missing from this tableau are Toto, the little dog, ruby slippers and Kansas.
Lloyd Green is an attorney in New York and served in the US Department of Justice from 1990 to 1992
two of the fund’s backers have withdrawn support.
Edward Blum, who is white and one of the founders of the AAER, was also instrumental in the initial supreme court decision to repeal affirmative action, as his group, Students for Fair Admissions, brought forward that suit.
Hello AliceLast August, Hello Alice, an online platform which offers grants to Black small-business owners, was sued by America First Legal (AFL), a farright non-profit formed by the former senior Trump White House adviser Stephen Miller. The lawsuit alleges that Hello Alice’s grant program is unconstitutional, and that it should be accessible to all business owners regardless of race.
Founded in 2022 by Elizabeth Gore and Carolyn Rodz, both of whom are white, Hello Alice’s grants help Black people across the country purchase commercial vehicles. Nathan Roberts, a white Ohio resident who owns Freedom Truck Dispatch, a trucking dispatch company, alleged that he experienced reverse discrimination because he was ineligible for the grants.
Roberts filed a lawsuit in August 2023 which argues that he is “suffering past and future injury in fact because he was barred from applying for this grant”.
“We think this case is meritless and sets the nation, and small businesses, back,” Hello Alice executives said in a joint statement. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) responded in February by filing an amicus brief with Hello Alice in order to give additional information relating to the case.
“Empowering employers to take voluntary measures to remedy past discrimination remains an important component of our nation’s progression toward equal employment opportunity,” the brief reads. “This court should take care not to hinder such efforts.”
NascarAFL also targeted Nascar for the organization’s “diversity driver development program”, “diversity pit crew development program”, and the “Nascar diversity internship program”, arguing that the programs violate the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the country’s benchmark civil rights legislation, which prohibits discrimination based on race and sex and outlawed segregation.
Nascar had predicted the potential for such a lawsuit and preemptively walked back its programs, widening it to applicants of “diverse backgrounds and experiences”, instead of specifically calling for “top minority and female” applicants as it had previously. The AFL’s letter to the EEOC alleged that the change still perpetuated discrimination.
“Nascar’s and Rev Racing’s commitment to race and sex-based hiring has not wavered – the website changes described above seem to have been designed only to conceal their ongoing, deliberate, and illegal discrimination against white, male Americans,” the complaint, which is currently pending, alleged.
Morrison FoersterMorrison Foerster, a California-based international law firm, changed the eligibility for the Keith Wetmore Fellowship for Excellence, Diversity, and Inclusion after AAER filed a lawsuit alleging in August of 2023 that the program was unlawfully discriminatory.
Initially, the program was only eligible for 1L students “who are members of historically underrepresented groups in the legal industry”. Now, the 12-year-old program seeks students “with a demonstrated commitment to diversity and inclusion in the legal profession”.
Wisconsin BarLate last year, a white member of the state bar of Wisconsin filed a complaint against the association alleging that its summer hiring program, the “diversity clerkship program”, was discriminatory. The program initially required that applicants be members of minority groups. However, following the supreme court’s affirmative action decision, before the complaint, the eligibility requirements were changed to include students with “backgrounds that have been historically excluded from the legal field”. Without defining which groups count as “historically excluded”, applicants could be from non-traditional backgrounds regardless of their race.
Despite the program’s race-neutral wording, the plaintiff still alleges that the bar’s program is unconstitutional in that it implicitly prioritizes minority groups. The complaint also alleges that the program constitutes compelled speech and compelled freedom of association, in violation of the first amendment, a common tactic by suits against DEI initiatives.
Last Friday, the Wisconsin Bar and the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty reached a partial settlement. Under the terms, beginning this September, the program will be open to all first-year law students attending either Marquette University Law School or the University of Wisconsin Law School who are in good standing. Specifically, the bar is prevented from stating, suggesting or insinuating “in its materials that only law students from diverse backgrounds, with backgrounds that have been historically excluded from the legal field, or who have been socially disadvantaged are eligible”.
The partial settlement also created a definition for the state bar to use for “diversity” as it applies to the program. Per the definition in the partial settlement, diversity “means including people with differing characteristics, beliefs, experiences, interests, and viewpoints”.
National Museum of the American
LatinoIn February, AAER filed a complaint and motion for a preliminary injunction against Jorge Zamanillo, the director of the National Museum of the American Latino. The complaint alleges that the museum’s internship program, which seeks to provide Latino undergraduates with non-curatorial art museum careers, is unconstitutional.
Following a settlement agreement in March, the program’s website now says that the internship “is equally open to students of all races and ethnicities, without preference or restriction based on race or ethnicity. The museum does not use racial or ethnic classifications or preferences in selecting awardees for the undergraduate internship”.
George Floyd Memorial scholarshipNorth Central University, in Minneapolis, is being accused of violating the Civil Rights Act in a federal complaint filed by Legal Insurrection Foundation, a far-right advocacy organization.
To be eligible for the scholarship, which is named after George Floyd, whose murder at the hands of police sparked international protests in 2020, applicants must “be a student who is Black or African American, that is, a person having origins in any of the black racial groups of Africa”.
According to the complaint, which is pending, the college’s George Floyd Memorial scholarship “engages in invidious discrimination on the basis of race, color and national origin”.