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Meet the VIPs for Trump’s Big Speech Tonight

by PhilMcNish51795 Posted on July 22, 2016

Mother Jones

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In the leaked version of Donald Trump’s acceptance speech, he rails against special interests, big donors, and elite media figures as the puppet masters behind Hillary Clinton. But waiting backstage and seated in the luxury boxes at the Quicken Loans Arena as he delivers his big address will be the very type of people he denounces.

According to a copy of the speech obtained by the Washington Post, Trump will blame America’s problems on special interests, as he has done throughout the campaign:

…These interests have rigged our political and economic system for their exclusive benefit. Big business, elite media and major donors are lining up behind the campaign of my opponent because they know she will keep our rigged system in place.

They are throwing money at her because they have total control over everything she does.

She is their puppet, and they pull the strings. That is why Hillary Clinton’s message is that things will never change.

But an official guest list for the VIP boxes at the fourth and final night of the Republican National Convention, first published by Bloomberg on Thursday afternoon, includes billionaire mega-donors such as Las Vegas casino owner Sheldon Adelson, Wisconsin roofing supply mogul Diane Hendricks, and the Amway scions of the DeVos family. (If Trump’s puppet master line sounds familiar, it’s because he once mocked Marco Rubio as “a perfect little puppet” of Adelson, who was believed to prefer the Florida senator.)

Adelson, Hendricks, and the Devoses will be situated in Suite 125 at the Quicken Loans Arena, located directly behind the podium where Donald Trump will make his acceptance speech, where they will be joined by:

Joe Craft, the CEO of coal company Alliance Resources.
Wilbur Ross, a billionaire leveraged buyout king who owned the coal company involved in the Sago Mine disaster.
Woody Johnson, heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune and owner of the New York Jets who was the finance chairman of Jeb Bush’s presidential campaign.
Anthony Scaramucci, a New York hedge-funder who leads Trump’s outreach to Wall Street.
Steve Mnuchin, a banker and Trump’s campaign finance chairman.
Todd Ricketts, owner of the Chicago Cubs, who was a major bankroller of the #NeverTrump movement. (A source told Bloomberg that Ricketts was attending as a supporter of the party, not Trump.)

This luxury box will also include a handful of Trump’s closest political allies, such as governors Chris Christie and Rick Scott.

In another suite, hosted by Mnuchin, key Trump business and political allies will huddle. The list includes Phil Ruffin, Trump’s partner on his Las Vegas hotel; billionaire Andy Beal, a banker, mathematician, and poker player; Tom Barrack, the Los Angeles billionaire investor who is heading an effort to raise money for a pro-Trump super-PAC; Harold Hamm, a natural gas fracking mogul who Trump is said to be considering for Energy secretary in a potential Trump administration; and…Nacho Figueras, an Argentinean model and polo player.

In another suite, Rebekah Mercer, the daughter of hedge fund billionaire (and former Ted Cruz backer) Robert Mercer. The leaked documents show Mercer (and a bodyguard) will be joined by five guests, including Steve Bannon, the chairman of Breitbart News, Matt Boyle, the conservative website’s Washington editor, and other Breitbart staff.

If Trump starts to rail against NAFTA, another suite may fall a little silent—one invitee is Dennis Nixon, CEO of Laredo, Texas-based International Bank of Commerce, whose website hails him as “instrumental” in the passage of NAFTA. Nixon’s guests include IBC executive Eddie Aldrete, vice-chairman of the National Immigration Forum, an immigration reform group, as well as Noe Garcia, a Washington D.C.-based lobbyist who represents the Border Trade Alliance.

The final VIP suite includes Annie Dickerson, a key advisor to hedge funder Paul Singer, who has made his dislike of Trump very clear. Dickerson led the unsuccessful fight last week to include more pro-LGBT-friendly language in the RNC platform, a major issue for Singer, who strongly supports LGBT rights. Dickerson’s listed guest is former Bush adviser Dan Senor, who made news last week when he tweeted about recent conversations with Indiana governor Mike Pence where Pence complained about Trump. (Senor says he won’t be attending.)

The full guest list for the VIP suites is below.

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RNC2016-SuiteGuestList (PDF)

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Meet the VIPs for Trump’s Big Speech Tonight

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The Top 5 Moments From the Republican Debate

by Onopriyll7 Posted on February 14, 2016

Mother Jones

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A week before the crucial GOP primary in South Carolina, the Republican presidential candidates met for another debate Saturday night. Gone were Gov. Chris Christie and Carly Fiorina, who each dropped out following the New Hampshire contest. The debate, hosted by CBS, began with a moment of silence to mark the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. Then the candidates, in a series of fiery exchanges, returned to the familiar conflicts that have dominated their previous encounters.

Here are the highlights:

Ted Cruz gets his facts wrong…and the crowd boos the moderator for correcting him.

At the start of the debate, moderator John Dickerson, the Face the Nation host, asked each candidate if he thought President Barack Obama should name a replacement for Justice Scalia during his final year in office. Predictably, several of the candidates pushed the new conservative meme: the GOP-controlled Senate should block Obama from appointing a successor to Scalia. “We have 80 years of precedent of not confirming Supreme Court justices in an election year,” Ted Cruz claimed. Not so, said Dickerson, pointing to Justice Anthony Kennedy, who was confirmed in February 1988. Cruz tried to argue that Kennedy got his seat in 1987—which was when he was nominated. But when Dickerson tried to make sure viewers were aware of the facts, the South Carolina crowd booed.

Donald Trump invokes Iraq War and 9/11 to attack Jeb Bush.

In 2008, Donald Trump said that George W. Bush should have been impeached over the Iraq War. When Dickerson asked Trump if he still holds this view, an inflamed Trump called the Iraq War “a big fat mistake” that cost the US trillions of dollars and thousands of lives.

A heated exchange followed: Jeb Bush fired back at Trump, calling out the business mogul for his continued attacks on the Bush family. “While Donald Trump was building a reality TV show, my brother was building a security apparatus to keep us safe,” Bush said. The back-and-forth grew hotter when Trump interrupted Bush and declared that the Twin Towers came down when George Bush was president.

Rubio disagreed, asserting that September 11 was Bill Clinton’s fault because Clinton failed to kill Osama Bin Laden in the 1990s. Rubio added, “I thank God that it was Bush in the White House on 9/11 and not Al Gore.” In response, Trump again invoked the 9/11 attack: “I lost hundreds of friends, the World Trade Center came down during the reign of George Bush.” He was met by a roar of boos from the audience.

Ted Cruz gets booed over immigration.

It wouldn’t be a GOP debate without a fight between Cruz and Rubio over immigration. But this tussle came with the added twist of a debate crowd that turned on Cruz, booing him when he attacked Rubio’s support for immigration reform. And when Cruz accused Rubio of once supporting amnesty during an appearance on Univision, Rubio fired back: “I don’t know how he knows what I said on Univision, because he doesn’t speak Spanish.” Cruz immediately shot back at Rubio in rapid, but grammatically incorrect, Spanish.

Donald Trump calls Ted Cruz the biggest liar.

When Trump said he considers himself “a common-sense conservative,” Cruz protested. Cruz contended that the billionaire has been “very, very liberal” throughout his career, though also “an amazing entertainer.” Trump then accused Cruz of putting out robocalls criticizing Trump. He said that Cruz was a “nasty guy” who “will say anything.” Trump continued, “You are the single biggest liar.”

A few minutes later, while Cruz was trying to respond to another attack from Trump (regarding Cruz’s support for the confirmation of Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts), Trump began shouting over Cruz: “Why do you lie? Why do you lie?”

“Donald, adults learn not to interrupt each other,” Cruz responded. “Yeah, yeah, I know, you’re an adult,” Trump replied.

Trump says Planned Parenthood does “wonderful things” for women’s health, other than abortion.

Cruz accused Trump of supporting taxpayer funding for Planned Parenthood, hitting Trump for having said, “Planned Parenthood does wonderful things and we should not defund it.” Trump responded by saying that he does believe the organization does “wonderful things” having to do with women’s health “but not when it comes to abortion.” Cruz used Trump’s answer to again accuse the tycoon of being a liberal and claimed that Trump would appoint progressive judges to the Supreme Court.

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The Top 5 Moments From the Republican Debate

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This Was the Most Important Exchange of the Democratic Debate

by ImaCardoza Posted on November 15, 2015

Mother Jones

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Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders may have enjoyed a detente during the foreign policy portion of Saturday’s Democratic debate, but when the subject turned to Wall Street, the gloves came off.

It started when the CBS moderator, John Dickerson, asked Clinton how voters could trust her to rein in Wall Street given her close ties to the financial services industry. Clinton was ready for it. “Well I think it’s pretty clear that they know that I will,” she said. She described “two billionaire hedge fund managers who started a super-PAC and they’re advertising against me in Iowa.” Why? Because “they clearly think I’m going to do what I say I’m gonna do.” She then invoked her Senate career and pointed to legislation that she introduced to limit compensation and increase shareholder oversight and continued:

I’ve laid out a very aggressive plan to rein in Wall Street—not just the big banks, that’s a part of the problem, and I’m going after them, it’s a comprehensive plan. But I’m going further than that. We have to go after what’s call the shadow banking industry. Those hedge funds—look at what happened in ’08. AIG an insurance company. Lehmann Brothers, an investment bank, helped to bring our economy down. So I want to look at the whole problem, and that’s why my proposal is much more comprehensive than anything else that’s been put forth.

But when Dickerson asked Sanders for his response, the Vermont senator was unimpressed:

“Not good enough!”

“Here’s the story, I mean let’s not be naive about it,” he said. “Over her political career, why has Wall Street been a major, the major campaign contributor to Hillary Clinton? Now, maybe they’re dumb and they don’t know what they’re gonna get, but I don’t think so.”

Dickerson pressed Sanders on what specifically he believed Wall Street would get for the industry’s campaign contributions to his opponent. Sanders explained:

I have never heard a candidate—never—who’s received huge amounts of money from oil, from coal, from Wall Street from the military-industrial complex, not one candidate, who doesn’t say, ‘Oh, these contributions will not influence me, I’m going to be independent.’ But why do they make millions of dollars of campaign contributions? They expect to get something. Everybody knows that. Once again, I am running a campaign differently than any other candidate. We are relying on small campaign donors, 750,000 of them, thirty bucks apiece. That’s who am I indebted to.

Clinton was ready with a sharp response. “He has basically used his answer to impugn my integrity, let’s be frank here,” she began. “Not only do I have hundreds of thousands of donors—most of them small—and I’m proud that for the very first time, a majority of my donors are women—60 percent.” She said her support for Wall Street is because “I represented New York on 9/11 when we were attacked.”

Where were we attacked? We were attacked in downtown Manhattan where Wall Street is. I did spend a whole lot of time effort helping them rebuild. That was good for New York, it was good for the economy, and it was a way to rebuke the terrorists who had attacked our country. Now it’s fine for you to say what you’re gonna say but I looked very carefully at your proposal. Reinstating Glass–Steagall is a part of what very well could help. But it is nowhere near enough. My proposal is tougher, more effective, and more comprehensive because I go after all of Wall Street, not just the big banks.

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This Was the Most Important Exchange of the Democratic Debate

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