M.L. Nestel joined Raw Story in 2023. An award-winning writer and editor, his work has been published in New York Magazine, Los Angeles Magazine and The Guardian, among other titles. He also produces and writes for true-crime genre TV shows. Prior to that, he served on the Newsweek masthead as a senior writer, wrote as a correspondent at ABC News and held the titles of West Coast bureau chief and senior writer at The Daily Beast. Priors also include working as senior national correspondent at The Daily Mail and investigative reporter at all three NYC tabloids: The New York Post,The New York Daily News and Newsday. He traveled around the country as a national correspondent at The Daily. M.L. published hundreds of stories about underground music and cinema — most notably as a critic for Box Office Magazine and the New York editor at Soma Magazine. He also headed development at Fountainhead Films. M.L. splits his time between Los Angeles and New York.
Trump is reportedly terrified of becoming an inmate.
Former Trump staffer Alyssa Farah Griffin appeared on CNN to explain why she believes the 45th president is "worried that he will end up in jail."
Griffin was asked to try and make sense of Trump's Christmas outburst where he spitefully took aim at a variety of people, chief among them special counsel Jack Smith.
"Just a merry spirit, a joyful spirit," Griffin quipped. "It is vintage Donald Trump, and he's known for the unhinged holiday rants and then he follows up with a clip of him in "Home Alone II"...it shows that Jack Smith lives in his head in a big way, and he is concerned about the DOJ investigation into the events around Jan. 6th."
What's fueling Trump's run for a second term? For Griffin it's retribution as well as doing everything he can to stay a free man.
"This is the driving force behind the political campaign," she explained. "As much as his campaign advisers would want it to be the economy, jobs, foreign policy — he keeps going back to the fact that he is honestly worried that he is going to end up in jail, and he needs to be elected president to pardon himself."
"So his true colors are showing. He rants at special counsel Jack Smith and then puts a Merry Christmas bow on it with the 'Rot in hell.'"
Griffin fears if Trump keeps coasting to the GOP presidential nomination, he would lose with his unsparing agenda.
"...we are very much careening into running somebody who will likely lose head-to-head to Joe Biden only because he cannot get out of his own way, and the messaging and the rhetoric and the extremist policies, and we are not litigating a lot of what he has laid out for the second term agenda, but he is literally talking about internment camps, mass deportation and punishing former staffers and that is un-American, and not going to be appealing to a second term."
