The Trump campaign raised over $45.5 million in the third quarter of 2023, with over $37.5 million cash on hand and close to $36 million of the total cash on hand designated for the primary.
Ron DeSantis’s campaign raised just $15m in the same period, with just $5m for the primary, meaning their quarterly burn rate is likely higher than how much they raised.
Trump raised $35m to DeSantis’s $25m in Q2.
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Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s fundraising woes continued last quarter with his campaign committee only raising $5 million for the Republican presidential primary contest. An additional $10 million the campaign committee says it raised can only be used for the 2024 general election according to U.S. campaign finance laws. DeSantis’s third quarter fundraising fell well below his second quarter haul of $20 million.
The cash-strapped campaign committee told staff at it’s Tallahassee, Florida headquarters on Wednesday roughly a third of them would be relocated to Iowa. Just over three months away, the Iowa caucuses are a make-or-break primary contest for DeSantis who currently has just $13.5 million cash-on-hand. The campaign believes either winning the Hawkeye state – or finishing with a strong second – will spark the momentum and donors they’ll need to defeat former President Donald Trump, the GOP front-runner.
In Iowa, pro-DeSantis SuperPAC Never Back Down has taken on many of the traditional roles associated with a presidential campaign committee. Campaign functions like bus tours, candidate events, and the entire political ad operation have for the most part been run through the SuperPAC. In addition, the Never Back Down has invested $25 million in a mass text messaging campaign powered by artificial intelligence as a cheaper, but unproven, alternative to television and radio ads. The DeSantis presidential campaign committee, on-the-other-hand, has yet to air even a single television ad.
A poll conducted by the DeSantis campaign’s pollster, Public Opinion Strategies, at the end of September showed Donald Trump leading Iowa with 50 percent – a 31 point advantage over DeSantis who was in a distant second at 19 percent.
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Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani has announced that he is suing President Joe Biden for referring to him as a “Russian Pawn” during one of the 2020 Presidential debates with Donald Trump.
Giuliani, who announced the lawsuit during a press conference in New Hampshire on Wednesday afternoon, argued that the remarks have cost him “millions and millions of dollars” in lost clients and consulting business.
“He called me a Russian operative… That is a lie, that is false,” Giuliani stated, “Joe Biden has spent his life telling lies” and referred to the President as a “pathological liar.”
Giuliani’s lawyer, William O’Brien, explained they are filing the suit in New Hampshire as the state “allows the recovery of damages … wherever and in whatever jurisdiction the statements were distributed or published.”
The former New York Mayor is currently facing a lawsuit from Joe Biden’s son Hunter, who alleges in proceedings initiated last month that Giuliani totally annihilated his digital privacy after he published information from Hunter’s laptop.
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Donald Trump does not believe he will be running against Joe Biden in 2024, with the incumbent’s incompetence and frequent verbal stumbles becoming ever more frequent and ever more likely to force him from the presidential contest as time wears on.
“I don’t imagine he gets to the starting gate,” Trump said of 80-year-old Biden in an exclusive interview with The National Pulse, noting the Democrat “can’t put two sentences together” and has managed to rehabilitate Jimmy Carter by surpassing him as “worst President in history.”
Trump further predicted there “will be a fight” for the Democratic nomination, with Vice President Kamala Harris denied a seamless coronation.
“A lot of people are so afraid to go against her [but] I don’t think it gets handed [to her],” he said. “I think all of a sudden everybody would start jumping in. She’d have to earn it, [and] it would be very hard [for her] to earn.”
The former president said he did not see Michelle Obama stepping in, naming Gavin Newsom, the California Governor, as a probable contender.
“Look, the man’s obviously incompetent. He can’t even speak,” he said of Biden. “The man is grossly incompetent.”
The full interview can be seen, here.
WATCH:
Click here if the embed does not appear.
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A French-Swiss writer has been sentenced to 60 days imprisonment in Switzerland after he referred to a left-wing writer and commentator as a “fat lesbian,” “queer activist,” and “unhinged.”
Alain Bonnet, who writes under the nom de plume “Alain Soral,” was convicted by a court in the city of Lausanne of incitement to hatred, discrimination, and defamation on Monday afternoon. He was also ordered to pay legal costs as well as a hefty fine.
Bonnet, 65, was initially fined by a lower court for defamation, but the Vaud Public Prosecution’s Office believed that should to face prosecution for an alleged “incitement to hatred” and appealed the first-instance decision. As of 2020, Swiss law considers any discrimination based on sexual orientation to be a punishable offense.
Soral’s lawyers, Pascal Junod, argued after the verdict that the writer had been convicted of a “crime of opinion” and “sinned against the dogmas of single thought.” Junod added that Soral will file an appeal to the Swiss federal court and, if necessary, the European Court of Human Rights.
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U.S. private sector payroll increased by just 89,000 jobs in September, well below the 150,000 expected according to the ADP National Employment Report. The lackluster report signals the weakest U.S. labor market since January of 2021. Additionally, wage growth slowed to 5.9 percent – the 12th consecutive month of decline.
The lower-than-expected job numbers come as bad news for President Joe Biden as he ramps up his 2024 re-election campaign. With weakening in the labor market likely to continue as a result of the Federal Reserve’s interest rate hikes, the Biden campaign’s decision to lean into ‘Bidenomics‘ may backfire. Employment sectors that make up core parts of the Democrat Party’s base – including trade, transportation, utilities, and manufacturing – all saw significant losses according to the report. Growth in service sector made up a bulk of the job gains.
ADP’s employment report has a mixed history of successfully forecasting job gains as reported by the U.S. government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The BLS will release their official non-farm payroll numbers for September this Friday. Economists expect the government agency to report 170,000 were added last month, down from 187,000 in August.
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Democrat officials are increasingly concerned the party is unable to meet its own stringent diversity standards and targets, supposedly running the risk of next summer’s convention delegates being “too white” when the party nominee for the 2024 presidential election is chosen.
The Democrat National Committee (DNC) sets its diversity targets by accounting for eligible voters from almost all identities other than white people. Their targets include black Americans, Latinos, Asians, Pacific Islanders, Native Americans, LGBT people, young voters, and those with disabilities. The committee then calculates what the right amount should be from each group, with the figure varying from state to state.
The party often sets targets at far higher rates than what is proportionate to the population, such as in California, where the diversity target for black voters is 12 percent despite black Americans comprising just six and a half percent of the Golden State’s inhabitants.
“I keep looking at these diversity goals in big states like New York, like California. And, for some reason, whether it’s the African American community, Black community, the LGBTQ+ community, or Hispanic community, [the] numbers continue to decrease,” stated Democrat strategist Donna Brazile at a recent committee meeting in Washington D.C.
Former Hillary Clinton campaign staffer Maria Cardona expressed similar concern, explaining, “this number seems to be going in the wrong direction here.”
Officials fear that the lack of diversity reflects the collapse in support among minority groups for Joe Biden, with many getting behind former President Donald Trump.
Indeed, President Biden has witnessed a near 20-point drop in support from the black community and Latinos, whereas Trump has seen his support among black voters jump from eight to 20 percent since 2020.
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The number of foreign-born workers in the United States is now just under 32 million, representing an all-time high and rising nearly 10 million in the past three years alone under the Biden government, according to statistics from the U.S. Department of Labour.
The percentage of foreign-born workers is also at a record 18.5 percent as of August this year, breaking the previous record of 18 percent set in 2022, with records dating back to 1996. The total number of foreign nationals arriving in the country to work each month is 65,000 higher this year than compared to 2022.
The rise comes following the Biden government issuing a staggering one million work visas last year – a 25-year high – with around 500,000 green cards granted, in addition to the skyrocketing levels of illegal migration marching across the Southern Border.
Yet, despite the increase, the Biden government announced it would nearly half a million – 470,000 – Venezuelans work permits as a means of “easing the financial strain on major migrant destinations.”
The vast majority of foreign workers seldom find employment in higher-paying industries due to language or vocational restrictions. Worse still, “foreign-born workers often don’t have the time or the wealth to enter a costly training process” for a higher-paying job, explains Ryan Nunn, a researcher at the Minneapolis Federal Reserve.
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Local police stations as well as Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport have been turned into makeshift migrant accommodation in the windy city’. Some of the police stations have been closed down due to recent outbreaks of scabies, with concerns that the iconic airport is next to shutter.
O’Hare is hosting hundreds of migrants, who are using airport restrooms as communal bathrooms as well as sleeping on cardboard bedding on terminal floors and staying for weeks at a time. The airport has seen black cloth walls erected in public areas, meant to hide the migrants from view.
Scabies is not the only disease being carried across the southern border by the migrant wave, however, with sheriffs reporting “all types of diseases like tuberculosis, scabies, COVID, hepatitis A and B, gonorrhea, syphilis, mumps, chicken pox, [and] dengue fever” among the illegal arrivals.
Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker vowed to “stand up for sanctuary cities and make Illinois a welcoming place” in 2018, and shared remarks by Hillary Clinton about “tearing down barriers” instead of “building walls” in 2016. Chicago Mayor Johnson, similarly, insisted “Chicago must lead with and live by the promise to be a sanctuary city” as recently as March.
Both Democrats are now complaining they are at “breaking point”, however, as conservative border states that never supported their open borders platform are taking them at their word and sending them a small portion of the migrants crossing over from Mexico daily.
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Texas Congressman and Ron DeSantis surrogate Chip Roy had a full-blown meltdown at the “MAGA camp” after Kevin McCarthy’s ouster as Speaker of the House of Representatives by Matt Gaetz, comparing himself to a soldier on D-Day and urging the Florida Governor to “restore order”.
“Some of our brothers and sisters, particularly in the, uh, you know, MAGA camp, I think, particularly enjoy the circular firing squad,” he said of McCarthy’s removal for failing to honor his commitments to America First conservatives on spending, border security, the Ukraine war, and impeaching Joe Biden.
“You want to come at me and call me a RINO? You can kiss my ass,” he seethed to Steve Deace, a fellow DeSantis booster, who recently said America’s Founding Fathers are “in Hell for all of eternity” because they did not “repent of owning slaves”.
“I have laid it all on the line, I’ve not seen my family for two days in the last 30 days. You go around talking your big game and thumping your chests on Twitter? Yeah, come to my office and come have a debate, mother!”
“I’m not gonna give up, I’m not gonna go to a nunnery, because God damn it there are people who are buried over in Normandy who deserve us to stand up for what they fought for,” Roy railed, adding that “all of you fuckers out there who are out there saying what you’re saying out on social media, you stick it! I’m going to go down to the floor and do my job, and I’m going to stand up for the people who fought for this country.”
“What happened to a country where we can’t even have order? You want to know what Ron DeSantis should be talking about, is being the Governor who can restore order as President of the United States,” he added.
Deace, in the clip below, also admits to being “paid to care,” about politics.
WATCH:
show lessChip Roy's MAGA meltdown is a thing of beauty. But not for the reason he or his rhinophyma-having buddy think. pic.twitter.com/gGhWmQzEMW
— Raheem. (@RaheemKassam) October 4, 2023
Behind-the-scenes political intrigue exclusively for Pulse+ subscribers.
