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Trump donor Eric Deters told Daily Beast podcast host Joanna Coles Wednesday night that he will be lining up the Trump family and associates for subpoenas and court depositions when he sues them for defamation in the coming months — and he expects all matter of gritty information to come to light.

Deters, a campaign donor to President Donald Trump, is the face behind leaked emails that brought down Trump Ambassador Kimberly Guilfoyle and enveloped the administration in scandal after texts suggested Guilfoyle begged Deters for money.

According to a Wall Street Journal report, Guilfoyle needed Deters, a former Kentucky congressional candidate, to secretly pay off her $100,000 American Express bill. Deters, meanwhile, said that he desperately needed someone in the Trump administration to help on some personal tax and legal issues and extradite a doctor he was trying to sue for unnecessary medical surgeries. Guilfoyle said she’d use her influence as Donald Trump Jr.'s ex to connect Deters with the new chief of the IRS and the Justice Department so he could lobby a case in exchange for the money.

But Deters told Coles he’d threatened to release the texts before blasting them to the press, to no avail.

“On Oct. 1^st, I sent an email to Susie Wiles, Kimberly Guilfoyle and Don Jr., and I tell them: ‘Last chance. You have to let me know you're going to set in motion Dr. [Abubakar Atiq] Durrani’s extradition. That there's going to be an investigation in the Ohio court system, there's going to be an investigation in medical protector's role. I said ‘you got to tell me it's going to happen, that it's set in motion’ or I'm going to release to the media what I've attached here. And what I'd attached was everything. I ended up attaching text messages, everything. I sent it to them on that Thursday. Five o’clock Monday rolls around and never heard from them. I said ‘okay,’ so I sent it out.”

“So, I gave these people a chance,” Deters complained.

But what’s already happened is just the beginning, added Deters.

“I emailed Susie Wiles — I left Kimberly off this email — and Don Jr., yesterday and I said point Blank, ‘you know I'm going to sue Kimberly Guilfoyle for defamation’ because they said the texts were fake. They told me they were false. They told me that I was a known blackmailer. … [T]hen they said I owed her money and … so they defamed the hell out of me and she breached my agreement with her because she didn't do anything. So, I told them, I said ‘if you don't help [with Durrani] I'm suing her for defamation.”

“I'm going to sue Kimberly, which means I get to subpoena Don, Jr! I get to subpoena documents. I get to take their deposition and I get to make this thing go non-stop all the way through,” he said, hopefully even upsetting the presidential ambitions of JD Vance.

Deters told Coles he’s “already talked to Democrats on two committees: the Foreign Relations Committee and the Oversight Committee,” and he plans “to testify before Congress.”

President Donald Trump has repeatedly referred to the American economy under his second term as a "golden age." A conservative editorial board disagrees strongly with that self-assessment.

"The Labor Department’s inflation report on Wednesday was disappointing, and it explains why voters remain unhappy about the economy," wrote The Wall Street Journal's editorial board on Wednesday. "Prices are rising faster than wages."

The newspaper continued, "The consumer-price index rose 0.6 percent in September and is up 3.7 percent over 12 months. Energy accounted for more than half of the increase as supply disruptions from the Iran war push up prices. Consumers will get some relief when oil and fuel supplies return to normal, but it could be awhile."

From there, the editorial board briefly surveyed the landscape in prices, explaining why energy, food and other prices are rising in a landscape of erratic tariffs and a prolonged war in the Middle East.

"The lesson for monetary policy is that the Federal Reserve under former Chairman Jerome Powell was premature in easing in late 2024 and last year. Inflation rebounded each time," the editorial board wrote. "Mr. Powell, who remains a Fed Governor, did no favors for successor Kevin Warsh."

Warsh's biggest obstacle at present, though, may be Trump himself.

"President Trump wants the Fed to cut rates as he always does, rain or shine, spring, summer, winter or fall," the editorial board concluded. "But the Fed clearly has more work to do against inflation. Mr. Trump ought to give Mr. Warsh the support to squash it. That is, unless the President wants inflation to remain a losing issue for Republicans in 2028 the way it looks like it will be for the party on Election Day this year."

Conservatives are not alone in urging Warsh to stand firm against Trump's pressure. Dr. Robert J. Shapiro, an economic who served as a top adviser for President Bill Clinton, told AlterNet in August that "Trump has been attacking the Fed for as long as he's been in office for not cutting interest rates. But you don't cut interest rates when inflation is rising, because cutting rates stimulates the economy — meaning you increase demand without increasing supply, so prices go up. Powell refused to cut rates because he said, in effect, 'We're in an inflationary period; once we contain inflation, we can cut rates.' Trump has made that much harder by increasing inflation through both the tariffs and the effects of the war on Iran."

He continued, "Even [Kevin] Warsh, Trump's handpicked successor to [Jerome] Powell, hasn't cut rates. But the market believes there's a significant possibility that he will, given the pressure Trump has been putting on him — and in anticipation of that, they've been driving long-term rates up. We'll see what Warsh does. My own guess is that he'll wait until right before or right after the election to raise rates, because he doesn't set policy alone — interest rate policy is made by a committee at the Federal Reserve comprising the seven members of the Board plus five of the regional bank presidents, and there's increasing pressure among them to raise rates."

Jonah Goldberg, the founder of conservative news site The Dispatch says the thing that drives many people nuts about the Trump administration — and the broader MAGA industrial complex — have to do with incompetence instead of villainy.

“What complicates that analysis is that the incompetence is very often the result of the villainy,” said Goldberg. “The key distinction between the two Trump terms is that in the second one, he has been determined to hire people for loyalty first and competence a distant second.

Trump’s premium on loyalty involves a willingness to lie about a stolen election and fawn “ridiculously” about Trump, and Goldberg said if anybody constrains their search criteria this way, the pool of qualified people “shrinks spectacularly” down to a wet patch imbeciles.

But, it’s worse than just that, said Goldberg. The party apparatchiks most rewarded in the Trump era come from the “slice of young people in the deepest, darkest corners” of an extremist filter bubble.

“Many of these people may be intelligent, but they have come of age in a remarkably stupid time, and being young they’ve never really known any other political reality. They think politics is about demonizing the opposition, owning the libs, posting killer memes, and turning out the part of the base that agrees with them,” Goldberg said. “Concepts like ‘governing’ or ‘state capacity’ are alien to many of them. The fact that, say, Benny Johnson is a person of considerable influence on the right is profound testimony to the fact that the new normal is incredibly dumb. And a lot of people have a normalcy bias for this idiocy.”

Take Trump’s floundering new press secretary Katie Zacharia, who Goldberg calls “the quintessential beneficiary of MAGA affirmative action.”

“A hot blonde who has trafficked in conspiracy theories and Trump worship, she got the job by curating her media hits to moments she believed Trump would be watching TV,” Goldberg said. “… She will undoubtedly get better at the job; it’s hard to see how she could get much worse. But you could make [GOP pundit] Scott Jennings do 20 shots of tequila or give him a minor lobotomy, and he’d be better out of the gate than Katie Zacharia was this week.”

The Dispatch founder warns there is “an entire MAGA industrial complex” that has risen up in the Trump era that thinks it has permanently won arguments, when it is merely following behind a trampling Trump and his Trumpism.

“They’ve pushed through open doors and doors knocked off their hinges by Trump, and think they’ve won an intellectual argument,” said Goldberg, but the months ahead are preparing to deal a massive blow to all that.

“[I]n part because their arguments for protectionism, industrial policy, and mass deportation have not yielded anything like the ‘golden age’ that was promised,” said Goldberg. “I find the idea that these guys — the self-styled intellectuals, the jabroni remora apparatchiks, and the get-rich-while-the-getting-is-good grifters, alike — will be well situated to win arguments on the right or anywhere else in the post-Trump era very implausible. Because the record of their tenure, in terms of policy and politics, won’t look like a golden age to anybody. Except maybe Benny Johnson.”

A judge appointed by President Donald Trump knocked a hole in the president’s argument to remove media that he does not like — but the judge’s decision itself paled in comparison to the contempt the Trump judge had for the administration’s bad preparation, according to AllRise reporter Adam Klasfel and attorney Glenn Kirschner.

U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly of Washington, D.C., issued an injunction preventing CNN, Politico and MS NOW from being booted from the White House complex until the case is decided. However, language in the Tuesday filing appears to suggest the judge was ready to wash away White House legal arguments with a garden hose, said Klasfeld.

The judge flushed White House arguments to ban certain media organizations because it amounted to “viewpoint discrimination.”

Kelly sided with the news outlets, and he dismantled Trump’s argument using national security as a reason for the ban — reasoning that the White House hacked together after it snatched press passes.

“There is practically nothing national security-related in the record connected to the President’s decision to revoke Plaintiffs’ hard passes to which the Court can defer,” Kelly wrote in his 26-page opinion. “Moreover, even accepting Defendants’ claims that these incidents damaged national security in some way — a proposition that, as discussed below, they have not really tried to support with evidence here — such reporting is commonplace, for better or worse,” the judge argued.

But Kelly then seized upon the slap-dash way the White House cobbled together its argument: “Finally, it seems likely that if President Trump or another official would have banned Plaintiffs from the White House … Defendants would not have had to scramble to make their case with unsigned letters and a declarant who does not even work there.”

Klasfeld said it was a startling act of clumsiness to approach someone like Kingsley Wilson to frame the White House’s argument.

“Kingsley Wilson, working as Pete Hegseth’s Department of Defense as the press secretary, does not work with the White House press pool,” said Klasfeld, “but they’re sending her to come up with the justification — after the ban — to pretend there’s a national security risk. … A lot of it hinged on this person.”

But what’s worse is Wilson’s background in MAGA bigoted corners. Klasfeld cited a Mother Jones story about Wilson’s xenophobic posts.

“She is now the Pentagon Press Secretary in the Trump administration, and she subscribes to the white supremacist idea that there is a plot to change the population of the United States to make it non-white,” said Klasfeld. “She is a supporter of the AFD, the German far-right party. And she is now the Pentagon press secretary and for some reason the Trump DOJ is going to her to file a court declaration to support the idea that certain press was a national security risk.”

President Donald Trump has been struggling with New York Republicans and former Republicans for a long time — and one of them, his ex-communications director Anthony Scaramucci, opened up on the president during an interview on Wednesday.

"Let me put it to you this way," Scaramucci told MS NOW anchor Katy Tur when discussing the widely-maligned performance of the new press secretary, Katie Zacharia. "If she was my family member, I would say take a powder on that job. It’s not the right job for you. And the universe is sending you a message. You know, the good news for me is that the universe expunged me from Trump world nine years ago."

He added, "And at the time it felt like a catastrophe, but the truth of the matter was, probably the best thing that ever happened to me. So if I was her life coach, which I’m not, she’d probably be upset with me for saying all this thing, you know, bail on that job. It’s not the right job for you. And by the way, she comes across as too nice of a person. You know, you gotta have mendacity in your spirit to work for Donald Trump in that position."

Scaramucci continued, "You gotta be willing to lie with great enthusiasm, you know? Sean Spicer was trying his hardest. You know, he was telling people that crowd sizes were bigger than they actually are and all that other stuff. He just wasn’t a good liar. He was like too Catholic, frankly, to be a good liar. And she doesn’t come across as a good liar to somebody like me. So I would tell her to take a powder on the job."

But he assured the Trump administration wasn't "gonna fire her," despite her podium nosedive: "There’s just so many different reasons why they won’t fire her. But the main one: she really hasn’t done anything wrong yet. She was essentially doing what the president had told her, to do."

This is not Scaramucci's only broadside about the Trump White House. Earlier in October, he slammed the White House for presiding over a $40 trillion budget deficit.

He added, "This isn’t apocalyptic. It’s just math. 10-year treasury at 6 percent. $40 trillion in debt. Do the math. That’s $2.4 trillion in annual interest payments. Larger than the entire Social Security disbursement. You cannot sustain that."

Speaking to AlterNet in September, Scaramucci reflected that he believed Trump began considering running for president in the 2016 cycle shortly after seeing 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney lose to former President Barack Obama.

"We came out of that campaign and the Republicans put together a white paper that said we were going to be more favorable towards immigrants," Scaramucci told AlterNet. "Trump took the party in a completely opposite direction of that. And here's something else, and I do reference it in the book: he helped Romney, and I didn't see it at the time, but reflecting back on it, 2012 was the early kernels of MAGA, the early kernels of right-leaning populism."

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The Washington Sun reports a small firm with big ties received a no-bid contract for nearly $50,000, with government officials citing “unusual and compelling urgency.”

That urgency: Great Gatsby-style light fixtures for President Donald Trump’s birthday — just four of them to be exact.

“In this particular case, the environment of the 250th anniversary, the birthday, and other events [redacted],” Reports the Sun, quoting a previously unreported contracting document dated June 5. “This must happen over the weekend as these must be in place before the June anniversary events.”

The Sun said Trump’s 80th birthday fell the following Sunday — June 14 — the same night as the UFC fight on the White House lawn. Trump spent the weekend of June 6-7 away from the White House, at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey.

The General Services Administration chose Agile1Tech, a Virginia-based government construction contractor, for the installation of the four light fixtures with princely prices. The company had “recently completed the contract which created the UFC viewing/gaming room,” the contracting document states.

Officials argue that “Agile1Tech is familiar with how to brace these chandeliers in a structure that may not support such weight,” according to the document. “Given the urgency and the unique structures in the ceilings of the White House, Agile1Tech is the contractor identified to meet this urgent need. … Based on the results of market research, the government determined that a limited number of vendors were available, but none possessed the capability to properly install a complex chandelier in a historic environment.”

Agile1Tech initially billed the government $22,000 for the chandelier installations, reports the Sun, but on Aug. 27, the contract more than doubled, adding $27,600 for an “additional 3 chandeliers.”

Trump is known for Great Gatsby-themed parties at Mar-a-Lago, complete with 1920s dresses, headbands, dancers and Prohibition-era nostalgia.

Despite his investment of US taxpayer money in the celebration, the president struggled to get decent turnout at his celebration of America’s 250th birthday, which focused on promoting Trump himself rather than American history.

Aside from having Americans finance one of the biggest birthday parties of the year, critics speculated that Trump might have used the semiquincentennial to “bolster his, and his party’s, fortunes for the fall.”

And while Trump seemingly pranced amid expensive lighting, he is also catching an unwelcome October surprise right to the face, contradicting his economic pitch to American voters on the campaign trail.

Within a week of the president declaring that “prices are coming down very fast,” inflation is climbing again, and the latest numbers from his government are much worse than economists projected. The Bureau of Labor Statistics revealed that the Consumer Price Index rose 3.7 percent year-on-year in September, up from 3.4 percent in August.

President Donald Trump, faced with accusations of bribery for accepting a 747 jet as a gift from the Qatari government, openly bragged at an Arizona rally that he took the airplane because "when you're given gifts, you take them!"

After quoting the legendary golfer Sam Snead to illustrate a point — specifically, Snead's quote "you know, when they give you a putt, you say just two words: ‘Thank you.’ You bend down, you pick it up, and you walk to the next hole.” — Trump compared accepting a substitute Air Force One from royalty to being generous to an opposing golfer during a game.

"It’s been years with ordered and waiting for the new ones," Trump said. "And I went to a very fine person, actually, Tamim, the Emir of Qatar. Extremely wealthy people, great people, actually. And I said, 'We would love to borrow your 747. The United States of America would love to borrow it, because our planes are 35 years old.'"

He added, "The old one, the baby blues. I think we like this coloring scheme better, right? Red, white, and blue. I added a little gold, if you don’t mind. A little touch."

Trump continued, "But I said, with love, I called Boeing. I said, 'Who’s got the greatest, the best of all the 747s that have been built?' And they said, 'Definitely the Qataris, Qatar.' So I called up the head of Qatar. Highly respected guy, great guy, young, handsome guy, actually. Great to be young, handsome, and have plenty of cash. And he had it, just like very few hours, very little used. And I said, 'Tamim, if it’s possible, on behalf of the United States of America, the Air Force, I’d love to be able to borrow or use your 747 as Air Force One for a little while while we wait for ours.'"

According to Trump, Tamim then said, “No, no, no. No, no, no. You’re my friend. I will not allow you to borrow it or use it. I will allow you to, on behalf of the United States, have it. You may have it.'"

This, Trump concluded, was why he accepted the jet; to "remember Sam Snead: when they give you the putt, you say, 'Thank you.' When they give you the airplane, you say, 'Thank you. We appreciate it.'"

Although Trump initially attempted to ameliorate criticisms of his accepting the jet by promising he would donate it to his presidential library after his administration ends, he has since walked back that promise.

"The plan seemed as clear-cut as it was unorthodox: After he leaves office, President Donald Trump said, the Qatari-gifted plane that he has used as Air Force One will be displayed at his new presidential library," NBC News reported in August. "But that idea appears to have been scrapped. The president’s son Eric Trump told NBC News in a text message Tuesday that the plane that Qatar donated to the Defense Department last year for presidential travel isn’t the one that will go to the library complex in Miami once Trump leaves office."

A far right Republican political operative, Rick Tyler, has bad news for Texas Republicans, and as a former adviser to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), Tyler knows a thing or two about Texas Republicans.

"Rick Tyler, once a chief spokesperson for Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-TX) 2016 presidential campaign, delivered a grim forecast for the party ahead of the November midterm elections, warning that the GOP is headed for a 'bad night!'" reported Mediaite's Kathryn Wilkens on Wednesday. "Tyler joined Wednesday’s edition of CNN News Central to discuss the competitive Texas Senate race between Republican Ken Paxton, the state’s attorney general, and Democratic state Rep. James Talarico."

Wilkens added, "While a recent Marist poll found no clear leader in the race, with Talarico edging out Paxton 47 percent to 45 percent, CNN’s Boris Sanchez pointed out that the same survey put the Republican’s unfavorability rating at 56 percent."

She concluded, "Paxton’s campaign has been plagued by a string of controversies, including a Monday Wall Street Journal report featuring video of him celebrating New Year’s Eve in Dubai with two men facing federal criminal charges, his wife’s divorce filing citing adultery, voter fraud allegations, his office’s plea deal with convicted child sex predator Adam Hoffman, and more."

As far back as last year, Tyler was issuing warnings for Republicans about the upcoming midterm elections. Talking with MS NOW's Symone Sanders about the president's tariffs, Tyler remarked that "tariffs have a negative effect on the economy — we don't have to wonder about it. It's like a wrecking ball at the apex aimed at the building when the wrecking ball starts to move. We know what's going to happen: It's going to hit the building. That's what's going to happen."

Tyler is not alone in ruminating that Paxton is in danger of losing to Talarico. In September, The Bulwark's pollster Sarah Longwell told MS NOW that "Donald Trump is now the albatross on a lot of these candidates necks. But to me, what is funny about the Paxton comments about Trump is that Paxton is already trying to lay the groundwork to blame Trump for him losing, right? They already are pointing fingers at each other, you know, to say, 'Oh, it's this person's fault if I lose.'"

Longwell continued, "Trump is saying that Paxton, you know, because Donald Trump held that convention, he spent much of it kind of making fun of Ken Paxton. You can tell even though he wanted to get rid of John Cornyn because John Cornyn wasn't sufficiently loyal, that Trump doesn't really like Ken Paxton. And now Ken Paxton, you know, is willing to say, 'Well, Trump is the one who's dragging us down.'"

The lone juror who refused to find Lindsay Clancy to not be criminally responsible for killing her children is explaining his controversial vote, one that has polarized America like few other mass murder cases.

Lindsay Clancy is an accused family killer who did not dispute accusations that she killed her three children (ages five years, three years and eight months) by strangling them with exercise bands. During her first trial, Clancy defended herself by arguing she suffered from postpartum psychosis and killed her children after being commanded to do so by a voice. Eleven of the 12 jurors believed her story and voted to find her not guilty by reason of insanity, yet a lone holdout insisted she knew what she was doing. That juror, Michael Desronvil, later had his identity leaked. After the mistrial, Clancy’s lawyer argued there wasn’t enough evidence that she killed the children, even though in the first trial the defense didn’t dispute it. A judge rejected that argument earlier this month.

On Wednesday Desronvil appeared on Fox News to explain to host Kayleigh McEnany why he refused to go along with the other jurors.

"'Did you have reasonable doubt?' McEnany asked," reported Mediaite's Sean James. "'No,' Desronvil answered. That contradicted claims made by several other jurors, including Roni Carlson, the jury foreperson who said Desronvil 'admitted he had reasonable doubt.'"

The jury foreperson told NBC 10 in Boston that she believed Desronvil admitted he had reasonable doubt but then reneged, while a separate juror complained that Desronvil "had the hardest time getting off the fact that Lindsay viciously killed her children.”

"Desronvil told McEnany there were a few 'tense' moments during the trial, especially during deliberation," James reported. "'I definitely had a lot of evidence to back up my claim, but because out of respect of the other jurors and the court system, I will put that to sleep for now,' he added."

The Clancy case has received widespread attention in part because many feminists empathize with Clancy's struggles with postpartum psychosis, which they say is under-treated in the United States.

"When Patrick Clancy returned to their home in Duxbury, Massachusetts, he found Lindsay on the lawn with major injuries, suffered in a jump from a second-story window," The Conversation reported in 2023. "Inside, his children – ages 5 years, 3 years and 8 months – were unconscious. The two oldest were pronounced dead at the scene, while the youngest survived for several days."

The Conversation added, "As more details of the case became known, a picture emerged of a doting mother and nurse midwife who often shared family photos and anecdotes on social media. After her youngest child’s birth, these posts included references to depression, anxiety and her ongoing attempts to find relief via therapy and medication."