After winning New Hampshire's primary, former President Donald Trump took a bow for winning the Nevada primary (which hasn't happened yet) and then pointed to two people in the crowd in Nashua: casino mogul Steve Wynn and subprime mortgage billionaire John Paulson.
"I'm pleased to announce we just won Nevada," he said to cheers. Then he scoped the crowd trying to find the VIPs.
"We have a man from Nevada here... Steve Wynn wherever he may be," said Trump. "And John Paulson, the great John Paulson."
Mother Jones' David Corn was quick to point out that the honorable mentions for the two disgraced figures "offered a true snapshot of Trump’s perverted worldview."
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Wynn was essentially a casino legend, having developed gambling oases like the Bellagio in Las Vegas, but also in Macau and Atlantic City.
But Wynn was also shamed following a 2018 Wall Street Journal article citing dozens of people accusing Wynn of having “sexualized his workplace and pressured workers to perform sex acts.”
Wynn defended himself, saying, “The idea that I ever assaulted any woman is preposterous.”
And while Wynn and Trump legally were at loggerheads over their Atlantic City casinos in the 1990s — they've since settled and "ended up bosom buddies".
In 2020, Wynn hosted a $500,000-per-couple Hamptons fundraiser for Trump at his mansion.
Corn mentions how Wynn has bankrolled Republicans and backed Trump when he laughed his first presidential campaign. When Trump became the president, Wynn went on to become finance chairman of the Republican National Committee.
He resigned the post soon after the revelations went public.
“The unbelievable success we have achieved must continue. The work we are doing to make America a better place is too important to be impaired by this distraction," he said at the time.
And Trump's praise of John Paulson was even more robust.
"The great John Paulson," Trump said talking about how successful he's been in Nevada, even though he doesn't live there. "Makes money wherever he goes. A money machine— well —you know what, put him in in Treasury!"
As Corn summarizes, Paulson secured $4 billion back in 2007 "betting against subprime mortgages... by shorting a package of mortgage bonds assembled by Goldman Sachs."
Corn adds: "Guess who selected the bonds that went into this package? Paulson."
