MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell's company has refused to repay a loan that reportedly includes 360% interest fees.
According to The Minnesota Star Tribune, Lindell's company took out the $600,000 loan during a cashflow panic last month. MyPillow agreed to pay $16,000 a day in interest as a part of the contract.
A lawsuit filed last week claimed that the loan was "usurious, unconscionable and thus unenforceable," and said it should be thrown out by Carver County District Court.
Although usury laws typically cap interest rates for loans, the agreement with Lifetime Funding and CapSpot Financial was structured as a purchase of unpaid MyPillow invoices to get around the restriction.
The lawsuit described MyPillow as "a cash-strapped business that needed funds quickly."
MyPillow's lawsuit also complained that the practice was "essentially loan sharking" and lashed out at lenders that use "improper tactics and devices to ensure that they will be repaid at grossly inflated rates by hook or by crook."
The co-hosts of "The View" were excited to see the footage from the Washington, D.C., rally on Tuesday night at the White House Elipse.
Former Donald Trump aide Alyssa Farah Griffin said that she was grateful to see Vice President Kamala Harris reclaim the space that was used on Jan. 6, 2021, before the crowd marched to the Capitol for the violent attack.
"These remarks hit me last night, I got to say. I found myself getting emotional," Griffin confessed. "The last time we saw a major national figure speak from the Ellipse, it was Donald Trump on Jan. 6th."
She recalled being in Florida after she'd already resigned while watching the day unfold.
"I had already resigned when he asked if Mike Pence had the courage to do this, and I had this pit in my stomach thinking you just put him in so much danger," recalled Griffin. "There is a mob of people who are ready to march up because you told them to. So, this imagery of standing and reclaiming that space ... was incredibly powerful."
She also noted that a woman standing with the White House behind her was a powerful image.
But Sunny Hostin looked at the crowd at the Harris rally and said that she saw America.
"We saw someone that was presidential, most importantly," said Hostin. "We saw someone that was ready and competent, who outlined her to-do list and what she would do for the country."
She continued, celebrating the diversity of the audience.
"One of my major takeaways is to look at the audience; 75,000 people were, you know, supporting her," she said. "And it looked like the United States of America that I know. Black, White, Latino, LGBTQ, old, young, everyone was there. And it looked like the country I know. It did not look like a white nationalist rally."
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson say they have big plans to implement "massive" changes to the entire U.S. food, drug, and health care system — from killing ObamaCare and all its protections, to handing over control of all health, food, and drug policies and agencies to conspiracy theorist and anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—and they're openly bragging about it just days before Election Day.
Republicans conspired to block every one of Barack Obama's initiatives even before the 44th President was sworn in to office in January, 2009. They have spent years promising to "repeal and replace" ObamaCare, or just end the Affordable Care Act entirely. Donald Trump for over a decade has repeatedly vowed to kill ObamaCare, and repeatedly said he would end it and unveil his new health care plan soon, before admitting during the presidential debate all he had were mere "concepts of a plan."
In September, The Washington Post reported Donald Trump "has spent 13 years promising a health-care plan" (video below).
“Health care reform’s going to be a big part of the agenda. When I say we’re going to have a very aggressive first 100 days agenda, we got a lot of things still on the table,” Speaker Johnson told an attendee at a GOP candidate's meeting, NBC News reported.
“No Obamacare?” an attendee asked.
“No Obamacare,” Johnson responded, before explaining how Donald Trump wants to "go big" in removing regulations.
“We want to take a blowtorch to the regulatory state," Johnson said, per NBC. "These agencies have been weaponized against the people, it’s crushing the free market; it’s like a boot on the neck of job creators and entrepreneurs and risk takers. And so health care is one of the sectors and we need this across the board.”
“And Trump’s going to go big. I mean, he’s only going to have one more term. Can’t run for re-election. And so he’s going to be thinking about legacy and we’re going to fix these things.”
Sunday night at Donald Trump's Madison Square Garden rally, the ex-president promised to let RFK Jr. "go wild."
"I'm gonna let him go wild on health. I'm gonna let him go wild on the food. I'm gonna let him go wild on the medicines."
On Tuesday, RFK Jr. announced Donald Trump had "promised" to put him in charge of the entire federal public health system.
“The key that President Trump has promised me is control of the public health agencies, which are HHS and its sub-agencies, CDC, FDA, NIH, and a few others, and then also the USDA.”
House Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries on Wednesday remarked, "House Republicans plan to kill the Affordable Care Act, impose a nationwide abortion ban and implement Trump’s Project 2025. These extremists cannot be trusted with the health, safety and economic well-being of the American people."
Last year, Forbes published what it described as "all the conspiracies" RFK Jr. promotes. Among them (quotes are Forbes's, not RFK Jr.'s):
"Covid-19 targets certain races and gives others immunity," "Mass shootings are linked to prescription drugs," "The 2004 presidential election was stolen," "The pharmaceutical industry is throwing money at Democrats," "The Covid-19 virus was genetically engineered," "Vaccines can cause autism," and, "Former White House medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci and Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates sought to exaggerate the pandemic, in part, to promote vaccines."
New York magazine's "Intelligencer" columnist Ed Kilgore reports that Speaker Johnson "plans to make repealing Obamacare an immediate priority if Trump wins and Republicans control Congress, which likely means it would be rolled into a gigantic budget-reconciliation bill and steamrolled through to passage if possible."
Kilgore adds, Johnson's "party’s designs on health-care policy are radical, meant to replace the regulations central to Obamacare’s coverage guarantees with 'free market' provisions almost certain to return the health-care system to the days when insurers aggressively discriminated against anyone old, sick, or poor. Johnson’s rhetoric will also give Democrats an opportunity to remind voters that the last 'repeal Obamacare' package aimed to decimate Medicaid, the federal-state health-care program for poor people and a key part of the country’s social safety net. Beyond that, Johnson seemed to to be telling Pennsylvanians a reelected Trump wouldn’t care if his health-care plans made Americans unhappy."
Republicans seem to lack a plan in their ground game in the key battleground state of Michigan, where their get-out-the-vote operation has been turned over to Elon Musk’s America PAC.
Democrats, on the other hand, have been pouring resources into the state that could help decide the presidential election, and Donald Trump's allies are grumbling about the resources operation, reported Wired.
“I think it’s what happens when you let a bunch of grifters take over,” said one Trumpworld source. “Sh*t is always gonna produce sh*t.”
The Trump campaign is leaning on bug-plagued apps and niche podcasts to identify and target low-propensity voters, and Musk has been offering voters a chance to win $1 million by signing petitions and paying door-knockers $30 an hour with performance bonuses, but some Republicans have questions about the effort.
“What happens is, you skim a bunch of money off the top, and then you hire the dumbest people and pay them a little bit of money,” the Trumpworld strategist said. “There’s no way of tracking whether it’s effective or not. It’s hard to track the output, and thus the effectiveness of the output.”
Trump's communications director in the state, Victoria LaCivita, who's the daughter of his co-campaign manager Chris LaCivita, insists the ground operations as “the most sophisticated and modern campaign, ever," but Detroit-area state Sen. Mallory McMorrow hasn't seen much evidence of their work.
“It’s been fascinating," said McMorrow, a surrogate for Kamala Harris. "It’s been weird? It’s been weird."
The Democratic legislator has been knocking on doors in Michigan to drum up support for the vice president, and while she's seen literature for Trump and GOP Senate candidate Mike Rogers, she's only encountered one person canvassing for Republicans, and that individual was working for Musk's operation.
“This guy told one of the people on our team that he's a Democrat,” McMorrow said, “but he's taking the money and doing it anyway.”
Former Republican lawyer George Conway urged a supporter of Donald Trump to "look in the mirror" over complaints that the former president had been called a fascist.
During a Wednesday appearance on C-SPAN's Washington Journal, Conway was confronted by a Republican caller who objected to being called a fascist.
"To call Trump a fascist, calling his supporters fascists, I'm not a fascist," the Republican named Mark said. "I'm a freedom-loving Republican. And for you to say that Trump supporters are fascists, it's just wrong."
"I didn't say Trump supporters are fascists. I think they may be supporting a fascist," Conway said, noting that he had previously been a Republican for nearly 40 years.
"I don't want to see a Republican Party led by a fascist," he continued. "But he is a fascist. He cannot help but be a fascist. His personality disorders make him a fascist. He does not care about anyone else."
Conway also pointed to Trump's felony convictions and other legal problems.
"He is, by any colloquial standard, a rapist, OK?" he said. "He is a bad man."
"And why all of you out there seem to want to excuse him and pretend that reality is something other than what it is and what you want it to be is the problem," Conway added. "I think you need to look in the mirror someday and start thinking about, is this man the man you want your children or your grandchildren to emulate?"
The Supreme Court made what may seem like a minor decision about a small group of Virginia voters, but legal experts are sounding the alarm.
After the court gave Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin the green light to pursue his purge of the voter rolls, these experts warned that this ruling ends a long-standing precedent not to have changes within 90 days of the election.
Concern among voting rights advocates is that the purge was already found to be inaccurate. The GOP lawmakers who support it have claimed that it was using recent data from the Department of Motor Vehicles to purge non-citizens accurately. Actual citizens who can prove their citizenship have been caught up in the purge, leaving them with last-minute hoops to jump through to cast a ballot.
"This only affects a small number of people but is a wrongheaded decision in light of clear federal law," said election law expert Marc Elias.
"The truth is, existing methods for ensuring only citizens register to vote are adequate. Voters have to certify they are citizens when they register. States check before they are added to the rolls," wrote former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance.
"Law Dork" Chris Geidner noted that all of the lower courts agreed that the purge was likely illegal under federal law.
Technically, he explained, the High Court is "staying the injunction pending Virginia’s appeal of the case." He remarks that the ruling "contains no explanation of why the justices took this action."
"This is a disturbing shadow docket decision, up there with the 2021 shadow docket decision allowing Texas’s S.B. 8 vigilante abortion law to go into effect despite Roe," he also said.
"This order is bad not only because of what it will do to voters in Virginia but also because of the mischief that it will invite against voters nationwide," lamented civil rights lawyer Matthew Segal on X.
Harvard Law School Professor Nicholas Stephanopoulos agreed in an X post, "Assuming the Court's decision was driven by Purcell, this situation shows why Purcell shouldn't always be dispositive. Federal law says that voter purges shouldn't happen close to an election. If a state violates that law, Purcell shouldn't immunize the state's illegal action."
One of the most closely watched swing states on Election Night 2024 will be Pennsylvania, where Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump have been campaigning aggressively in the hope of winning the state's 19 electoral votes.
Pennsylvania has gone Democrat in most of the United States' post-1980s presidential elections. But Trump carried Pennsylvania in 2016 before losing it to now-President Joe Biden four years later in 2020.
Trump posted on his Truth Social platform Wednesday: "Pennsylvania is cheating, and getting caught, at large scales rarely seen before. REPORT CHEATING TO AUTHORITIES. Law Enforcement must act, NOW!"
In response to Trump's post, Haake tweeted, "Trump appears to be laying the groundwork to contest Pennsylvania election results, claiming without evidence this morning that the whole commonwealth somehow is cheering at 'large scale levels.'"
Polls, in late October, are showing a very close race in the Keystone State.
An InsiderAdvantage poll released on October 28 showed Trump with a 1 percent lead over Harris in Pennsylvania. But a CBS News poll that came out the following day found Harris and Trump tied.
Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) advised Vice President Kamala Harris to label Donald Trump a "Nazi" after President Joe Biden seemed to suggest that the former president's supporters were "garbage."
During a Wednesday interview with Real America's Voice, Huckabee addressed Biden's reaction to a comedian at a recent Trump rally who suggested Puerto Rico residents were "garbage." A transcript that was later corrected by the White House seemed to say that Trump supporters were also garbage.
The former Arkansas governor and Republican presidential candidate offered some advice to Harris.
"When something like that happens, the smart play is to disavow yourself and say, look, I think Donald Trump is a Nazi, which she's been saying, which is ridiculous in itself, because then that means all of us who support him, we must be following a Nazi," he said. "So the fact that she has kept silent on this is an agreement with Joe that all the people who support Donald Trump are garbage."
Huckabee also said Biden was treating Trump supporters like Jews killed in the Holocaust.
"So if you've decided that some human beings really are garbage, rubbish, and trash, and need to be exterminated because they just aren't that important, it's not hard to get there," Huckabee opined. "One of the reasons that the Nazis were able to murder 6 million Jews and 11 million people total is because they spent decades telling people that some people just weren't taking care of, the infirm, the elderly."
"Excited to talk about the Senate GOP Leader race soon with [Loomer]!" wrote Scott. "We need Republicans in Washington to act like Republicans again. Looking forward to the conversation!"
Replied independent journalist Aaron Rupar, "Did Alex Jones turn you down or what?"
When Trump last month summoned Loomer onto his personal plane and brought her to a Sept. 11 anniversary ceremony in New York City, and at the time it sparked outrage onthe right.
And when Scott promoted his appearance on her podcast Tuesday night, he faced similar condemnation from policy experts, political commentators and even a former Trump aide.
"So Rick Scott condemned the anti-Puerto Rican bigotry at the MSG rally, but is going to appear with Laura Loomer, a self avowed white nationalist and Islamophobe on her podcast," wrote Tim Wise, a senior fellow at the African American Policy Forum.
"Lets you know Scott's concerns: it's not that he minds racism. He just needs Puerto Rican votes."
Mark Jacob, a former Chicago Tribune editor, urged Florida voters not to validate Scott's campaign tactics with their votes on Nov. 5 — and threw support behind his Democratic challenger instead.
"Here’s Republican Sen. Rick Scott legitimizing conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer, who said 9/11 was 'an inside job' and suggested the Parkland school shooting was a hoax," he wrote. "Please, Florida. Vote Scott out. Vote Debbie Mucarsel-Powell in."
Christopher Mathias, senior reporter for the Huffington Post, noted Scott's promotion came within days of condemning Hinchcliffe.
"Less than 48 hrs after distancing self from the racist Puerto Rico remark at MSG, Scott promotes Loomer," wrote Matthias, "who calls herself 'proud Islamophobe' & 'pro-white nationalism' who 'really does believe in IQ science' & called Ilhan Omar 'black dog' & said Somalis are 'inbred' & 'low IQ.'"
Mathias' HuffPo colleague Igor Bobic also highlighted a racist joke Loomer herself made last month that drew criticism from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) as well as Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Thom Tillis (R-NC).
"Loomer said if Harris wins the election 'the White House will smell like curry,' drawing condemnations from Graham, Tillis, & even MTG," Bobic wrote. "Graham called her “toxic” and urged Trump to keep his distance."
Trump's former deputy press secretary Sarah Matthews posited Scott's decision to appear on the show reflected his desperation to hold onto his Senate seat.
"Imagine wanting power so badly that you’re willing to debase yourself like this," Matthews wrote. "Feeling the need to kowtow to Laura Loomer is disqualifying for someone seeking to lead the Senate GOP."
United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain late Tuesday called for working class unity against Republican nominee Donald Trump in the final stretch of the 2024 race, warning that the former president would serve the interests of his own class and embolden the nation's executives to intensify their decades-long war on the labor movement.
Responding to members who question why the UAW is involved in the political process at all, Fain said during a videolivestream that "we are up against a billionaire class that will not stop their attack on us at the bargaining table."
"They will not stop at the workplace, they will not stop at the border—they will take every inch we give them," said the president of the UAW, which has endorsed Democratic nominee Kamala Harris. "We don't engage in political activity because we like a candidate. We don't do it for ourselves, as your union leadership. We don't do it for the Democratic or Republican parties. We engage in politics as a union because it is core to our fight for economic and social justice."
Fain said that the United States is currently trapped in a "vicious cycle" in which the "ruling class has waged a one-sided class war on the working class, and they've been winning."
"We're in a vicious cycle where the billionaire and corporate class take more and more for themselves and rewrite the rules of the game to keep it that way," said Fain. "They use their insane wealth to buy off politicians and elections. The lap dogs of the billionaires then pass more laws that restrict unions and keep working-class people down. They consolidate the fruits of our labor into the hands of Wall Street and corporate America, and that cycle goes on and on."
"It is an embarrassment to our democracy when billionaires can openly buy elections. But it's also a devastating situation for the working class."
Fain acknowledged that "it's a bipartisan issue" and that billionaires have "done everything they can to buy off both parties," characterizing the GOP as the outspoken party of big business and condemning "corporate Democrats" who "have also cozied up to the rich."
"It is an embarrassment to our democracy when billionaires can openly buy elections," said Fain. "But it's also a devastating situation for the working class."
But in the 2024 election, Fain argued, the choice is stark.
"The Democratic Party is interested in working-class people and what they have to say, and they want us to be in their coalition," said Fain. "On the other side, we have the Republicans, who—on a national level in particular—have embraced the billionaire class. They embraced their billionaire candidate, and they embrace his billionaire buddies, and they explicitly push policies that help billionaires and hurt anyone who might challenge that system."
"We can't sit this one out," the union president said. "Every organizing campaign, every contract, every grievance settlement will be impacted by this election. If the billionaires take back our presidency through their lap dog, that lap dog Donald Trump, you can be damn sure that every single CEO in this country will smell blood in the water."
Watch Fain's full remarks, which he urged union members to share with their co-workers, friends, and families:
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Fain has used the waning days of the 2024 presidential race to highlight the slew of anti-worker policies Trump pursued and implemented during his first term in the White House, including the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA)—a trade deal that the UAW president has called "Trump's NAFTA."
"The proof of Trump is already in the body of work," Fain said in a recent interview with The Nation. "Trump was president for four years. Auto plants were closing. He didn't do a damn thing to stop any of it, to save any of it. He didn't even make an effort to curtail any of that. He continues to tell this lie that he's fixing this and he fixed that and he's saving auto jobs and he's saving working-class jobs. But his body of work when he was president shows different. He didn't [fix things]. We lost jobs under Trump, and nothing improved with trade."
The UAW's messaging and organizing against Trump appear to have had an impact on the union's members: According to survey data released last week, Harris is leading Trump by 22 percentage points among UAW members in the key battleground states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada.
The poll found that "among those who say they have been contacted by the union," Harris' lead over Trump was 29 percentage points.
"What we do in this election matters," Fain said Tuesday, pointing to the survey results. "What we do as a union matters. When we talk to our co-workers about this election, it has an impact. When we talk to our families about this election, it has an impact. What you do in the next week matters—it matters for the next four years, it matters for your next contract negotiation, and it matters for your next organizing drive."
"For us in the UAW, it ain't about a campaign, it ain't about one day—it's about power," Fain continued. "No matter what happens in this election, we're all UAW, and we either rise together or we fall together. You can disagree with me, and you can vote however you're going to vote, but you cannot ignore our duty as a union to fight like hell for social and economic justice for every single member of this union, and every single member of the working class."
A Republican strategist highlighted a "big mistake" that Donald Trump is making with women and moderate Republicans in the closing stretch of the campaign.
“This is not a time to have anyone criticize Puerto Rico or Latinos,” Haley told Fox News anchor Bret Baier. “This is not a time for them to get overly masculine with this bromance thing that they have.”
The Republican nominee's campaign is focused on turning out low-propensity voters, especially younger men, but GOP strategist Doug Heye told CNN's Kate Bolduan he was potentially leaving votes on the table by shunning Haley, who had been his last remaining primary challenger.
"She's been a regular presence on the airwaves, but not on the campaign trail," Heye said. "I think it's a big mistake for the Trump campaign, and I say that because I was at Nikki Haley's third-to-last rally when she was running. It was in Raleigh, North Carolina. They moved the venue to a larger venues twice because that's how many people were interested in her campaign."
Bolduan agreed, saying both candidates were fighting for Haley's moderate Republican supporters, but Heye said the former president couldn't overlook her challenge to his nomination.
"I think with Donald Trump personal grudges always lean in heavy with what he wants to do and how he operates," Heye said. "Clearly, that's a part of this now, but it does not make good political sense."
With just a week until the election, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed Wednesday that Virginia could continue to purge its voter rolls of suspected non-citizens.
Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) had been pushing to clear illegal voters that he claimed were on the state's rolls, but was halted by a lower court order.
The Supreme Court allowed the purge to continue in its ruling Wednesday. The liberal justices dissented.
A Washington Post review of records and interviews with election officials regarding Youngkin's claims about purging more than 6,000 "non-citizens" from the voter rolls found that most of the purges stemmed from paperwork errors rather than actual cases of non-citizens voting.
"The Supreme Court's decision is extremely worrisome because the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 explicitly forbids systematic purges of voter rolls shortly before an election. It now looks like the conservative supermajority will let states ignore that prohibition," Stern also warned.
The Purcell principle says that no court can make changes too close to an election. This ruling overrode that long-standing precedent, said former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance.
During a discussion on why Donald Trump is taking his show on the road into states he has no chance of winning in less than seven days, one MSNBC analyst suggested the former president and his campaign is being dogged by low turnout in MAGA territory which has become an embarrassment.
The morning after Vice President Kamala Harris packed the ellipse in Washington, D.C., the "Morning Joe " panel noted that the Trump and his aides are trying to project an aura of invincibility despite polling that shows a close race.
According to MSNBC host Jonathan Lemire, the show of bravado is likely tied to the fact that no one who is close to Trump wants to tell him he's losing.
'There are two things in play," he told the co-hosts of "Morning Joe."
"First the Trump team is going to boast and focus on the good news because the boss, ie. trump, doesn't want to hear the bad. There's not someone walking in saying, 'Sir we're losing,' that's not how that campaign works."
"So even if there is data that shows a tight race or even trailing, they're not going to share it widely because Trump won't stand for it," he added. "But the second piece of it is what you and I were talking about and have talked about before: this idea that they're projecting the victory to lay the ground work for a possible appeal. That they want to get their supporters so conditioned to expect a win, there will be therefore so much anger if they lose and they can try to stoke that anger in their attempts to contest the election."
"And Mika, we're also seeing a projection of what appears to be confidence from the Trump campaign scheduling events in blue states," he elaborated. "He's got a rally coming up in Virginia and another rally in New Mexico. The Trump team says, well, we see numbers there we thought we could be in play, maybe help some congressional candidates. Democrats suggests the opposite. Trump, this is his third presidential cycle. He's been in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan so many times people have seen him so many times he's having trouble drawing the rally crowds he wants. If he goes somewhere new, he's more of a novelty factor, people will show up."
