Conservative radio host Wade Stotts launched a series of insults aimed at former DNC fundraising committee member Lindy Li on Fox News Friday afternoon.
Li
and Stotts joined The Will Cain Show to discuss topics that included tariffs and the cognitive health of former President Joe Biden.
During the seven-minute segment, Stotts challenged Li’s past as a fundraiser for the Democratic Party and questioned her authenticity.
Li, a former longtime Democrat, left her party earlier this year and registered as a Republican. She found a home on Fox News criticizing Democrats in the wake of the 2024 election.
As she criticized her former party during a discussion with host Will Cain and Stotts, the latter went after her.
Cain pointed out that Democratic and Republican rhetoric on trade had shifted in recent years. He admitted he previously opposed the kinds of tariffs President Donald Trump announced this week and said Democrats previously might have supported them.
After Li called her former party “hypocritical,” Stotts directed an insult at her:
Yeah, I’m not surprised at this behavior. These are people with no core beliefs. They just say whatever’s most advantageous to them personally at that moment. You know, it’s almost as bad as a person who raised tens of millions for Kamala trying to pass herself off as a right-wing influencer… the second her team loses. So I don’t know what Lindy thinks about that, but just my opinion.
Li replied, “I’ve been on Fox News for years saying that I’m a conservative Democrat. This is not a sudden switch at all. It’s been a years-long evolution, and I’ve been warring against the leftist faction of the Democratic Party for years.
Stotts fired back:
It’s hilarious to hear Lindy Lee slamming Democrats for being duplicitous. She was a Democrat until five minutes ago. The only belief she’s kept from six months ago is that she should be in charge of moving large sums of money. And that’s it. If you think you’re going to be able to avoid conversations about your loyalty, you’re delusional.
The radio host paraphrased comments Li had made in the past and asked, “Which version of you is the real version and you know why should we listen to you now?”
Li defended herself and Cain eventually intervened to steer the conversation in another direction.
Minutes later, Stotts took another swipe at Li. Cain asked Stotts why he thought previously anti-tariff conservatives supported Trump’s trade policies. Stotts replied:
Well, because Trump is the leader of the movement, and whatever you say about the pushback from the right, none of these people who are on the right tried to raise tens of millions of dollars for the people who tried to put Trump in jail.
Li responded, “You’re just trying to ambush me this entire time. I’m not going to sink to your level. You can do whatever you want, but I’m not as malicious as you are.”
The bloodbath in the markets in the wake of President Donald Trump’s new tariffs
hit Elon Musk’s Tesla especially hard Friday, knocking the price down over 10% and evaporating with it a chunk of the world’s richest man’s wealth.
The markets were rattled
after Trump’s plans were confirmed, with U.S. stock futures plummeting in after-hours trading, and continuing to have historically bad days
on Thursday and Friday. Even a number of Republicans
have spoken out
to criticize
the tariffs as causing unnecessary economicharm
.
Shares of Tesla, Inc.
were down 10.42% Friday. The company had already been reeling from crashing sales worldwide
amid backlash to Musk’s increased political involvement in far-right causes, protests at Tesla showrooms, and yet another embarrassing recall
last month.
Screenshot via Google Finance.
Other tech stocks had a bad day Friday but not quite as rough as Tesla. Apple was down 7.29%, NVIDIA Corp. down 7.36%, Amazon down 4.15%, Alphabet Inc. (Google’s parent company) down 3.20%, and Meta Platforms Inc. (Facebook and Instagram’s parent company) down 5.06%.
Overall
, the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 5.50% Friday, the S&P 500 was down 5.97%, and the NASDAQ composite was down 5.82%.
According to multiple reports, Musk owns about 411 million shares of Tesla stock, which is 12.8% of all shares. A large portion of those shares was pledged as part of the collateral for his purchase of Twitter, which he rebranded as X, and while the exact number of collateralized shares, the loan-to-value ratio in his agreements with lenders, and the exact stock price that could trigger a margin call are not publicly known, it is potentially a significant problem for him.
Using the round number of exactly 411 million shares for simplicity’s sake, that meant that Musk’s Tesla stock was worth almost $109,852,080,000, or nearly $110 billion, when the market closed yesterday. Today’s closing price of $239.43 means that Musk’s shares were worth $98,405,730,000, or about $98 billion — a loss of about $12 billion in one day.
Since the markets closed, Tesla has dropped another 0.49% in after-hours trading, as of the time of publication, losing Musk another half of a billion dollars.
Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy revealed Thursday that he lost millions as a result of the stock market nosedive
resulting from President Donald Trump’s tariffs.
The president on Wednesday announced the implementation of sweeping tariffs on dozens of American trade partners. Trump’s announcement — in the White House Rose Garden — was held after the stock market closed, but the market responded by immediately plummeting at opening the next day. Moments after opening at 9:30 a.m. in New York, the Dow was down nearly 3% and the S&P saw a dip well over 3%.
Hours later, Portnoy talked about the brutal day on his Twitter/X live stream called “Davey Day Trader Global.” During that stream, he detailed just how significant his losses were.
“And it’s tariff city,” Portnoy said around the three-minute mark of the stream. “Trump has put his tariffs all over the place. I’ve been trying to understand them. I don’t. Like it’s more a trade deficit tariff to me. Like, ‘Hey, we get this much shit from you and you get this much from us. Let’s even that up. Let’s get some wacky formula and do tariffs.’ And everything’s in the shitter because of it.
“So I said, ‘Dave, pick yourself up. It’s OK that you don’t feel good. You gotta get to the people. The people need you. Get on DDG presented by Kraken, where I do all my crypto — or what I got left of it. I almost tweeted out, ‘Dave, how much are you down right now today?’ Seven million. I’m down seven million bucks in stocks and crypto.”
White House adviser Stephen Miller told a whopper about the economy on Fox News, and it went completely unchallenged.
Miller joined Friday’s America Reports as stocks cratered for the second day in a row after President Donald Trump imposed sweeping tariffs on virtually all imports. At a Rose Garden event on Wednesday, Trump cited bogus data
to falsely allege that other countries were slapping massive tariffs on U.S. exports. As Miller spoke, a graphic on the screen indicated the Dow Jones Industrial Average had dropped more than 2,100 points on the day. The index closed down 2,231, or 5.5%
.
“I’ve only got a few seconds left. People are throwing around the R-word,” host Sandra Smith told Miller. “And they see the Dow down 2,100 points, and people are worried about a recession, worried that we can’t do this without sending this economy into such a deep dive that we can’t come back from it. And I know you guys are all about growth, I know you’re about lowering taxes, rolling back regulations, and seeing that growth. Are you concerned that this is going to put us into a recession?”
Miller responded by saying, on the contrary, things are going great. He even falsely claimed the administration inherited a “depression”:
The exact opposite. We inherited from Joe Biden an economy in total free fall. There has been zero jobs growth for American workers in four years. All the jobs growth had gone to foreign workers. That is a depression, not a recession, that is a depression for the American worker. We had debt and deficits that were rising unsustainably that would lead us into a certain debt and deficit crisis. We had inflation that was in high double digits crushing the American family, making it possible to afford the essentials of life.
We had an economy that was in a state of calamity and catastrophe. President Trump’s policy of re-shoring our supply chains, pushing for total expensing of capital gains, eliminating regulation, eliminating intrusive green news scam environmental rules, pushing for the biggest, broadest tax cut in American history, and reducing taxes on American workers, including ending taxes on tips, ending taxes on overtime, ending taxes on Social Security. This economic program is the single most important program for American wealth, prosperity, and rejuvenation that we’ve ever seen in this country.
Smith responded, “Alright, [I’d] love to continue the conversation. Hope to have you back on, Stephen. Thank you so much.”
President Donald Trump is opting to attend a golf event
at his Doral Golf Course instead of attending a dignified transfer of slain soldiers at Dover AFB.
Mediaite spoke to several military veterans and spouses, each of whom expressed outrage that the commander in chief appears to have prioritized the promotion of a professional golf event by Saudi-backed LIV Golf over honoring four soldiers killed in service in Lithuania.
Trump has decided to send Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to Dover Air Force Base for the dignified transfer of four American soldiers killed in a training exercise in Lithuania,
per reporting by Fox News Pentagon reporter Jennifer Griffin.
Lithuania paid homage to the fallen soldiers with a moving memorial on April 3rd. Images of the memorial service were shared in a social media post by the US Embassy in Lithuania, which Griffin shared while reporting that Trump would be skipping the service.
Mediaite spoke to Joe Stutler, a US Army veteran who joined the military in 1982, served two tours in Desert Storm, and left in 1992, followed by an eight-year stint in the National Guard.
“This stuff matters to me,” he told me. “I can’t begin to express my disgust with what this admin is doing to the troops and the veterans. Cut sto the VA have once again this is the guy who calls us losers and suckers. Coming home from dying in service and ‘I’m going to hang out with the Saudis because of golf?’ I’m disgusted at a minimum.”
“You don’t have to have worn the boots to be the commander in chief,” he continued. “It’s not mandatory nor should it be, and that’s how it should be — the defense department needs civilian leadership. But virtually every other President we’ve had has had the honor and integrity to recognize those who have paid the ultimate price, who have made the ultimate sacrifice, which they made for their fellow human being. And they did it for people they never met. And we owe these people a huge amount gratitude and respect. Trump has never shown gratitude and respect for those who gave – absolutely just wrong on this issue.”
“I have never been so embarrassed to be an American than I have these last few months, and now, Donald Trump is completely disrespecting four of my brothers in arms to play golf,” Blythe Potter told me. She served in the Military Police Corps and was deployed to Iraq from 2005 to 2006.
“Given what Trump has done to geopolitical relationships, Poland and Lithuania have NO reason to concern themselves with doing us any favors by bringing our fallen soldiers home for us, but they have cared more for Staff Sgt. Jose Duenez Jr., Staff Sgt. Edvin F. Franco, Pfc. Dante D. Taitano, and Staff Sgt. Troy S. Knutson-Collins than Donald Trump has or will,” she added. “It is my opinion that the Commander in Chief doesn’t care about our troops dead or alive.”
“Unfortunately, many of our friends did not make it home from war,” Rebekah Sanderlin told me. She lives in Virginia Beach and is the wife of an Army veteran who served 26 years before retiring. “We were married for 17 of those years, all 17 spent during wartime.”
“I am very sad for our president, who was offered that honor and opportunity but chose not to accept it. I’m sure it would have meant a lot to those families to have our military’s Commander in Chief with them to greet our fallen heroes at Dover,” she added. “I hope he will reach out to those families in the coming days, and I hope they realize how grateful our nation is for their loved ones’ sacrifice and that we are all grieving with them now.”
“During my husband’s active duty years, I volunteered to lead Care Teams — volunteers who step in to help the families of the fallen in the days after they receive notification that their soldier was killed in action. That was, without a doubt, the greatest and most humbling honor of my life,” she continued. “Being allowed to sit with and help families who lost a loved one in service to our nation was a sacred experience for me. It was absolutely an honor, but it was the very least I could do for them after they sacrificed so much.”
“I’m appalled but not surprised by President Trump’s recent decision to skip the dignified transfer ceremony at Dover AFB of the four soldiers that tragically died in a training accident in Lithuania to attend the reception dinner for the Saudi owned LIV golf league event at his Florida golf club,” said Scott Peoples of Raleigh, NC. He is an army veteran and former Officer in the 82nd Airborne Division, and now works for the organization Veterans for Responsible Leadership.
“It is just another data point that proves President Trump doesn’t give a damn about America’s military service members or veterans,” he continued. “He can’t comprehend the concept of serving a cause greater than oneself. Nothing matters to him other than money, power, and ego, and that is why he looks down with contempt on those who would die in service to their country. He truly does see us as suckers and losers and for this he does not deserve the title of Commander in Chief. Our brave troops and their families deserve so much better than him.”
When reached for comment, the White House gave Mediaite the following statement from Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt: “The Secretary of Defense will represent the Administration at the dignified transfer for the four brave U.S. service members who tragically died during a training exercise in Lithuania.”
Vice President JD Vance is clapping along with the MAGA faithful to President Donald Trump’stariffs
this week, but in the past he has repeatedly insisted that U.S. manufacturing jobs were not coming back and dismissed efforts to force them to return with tariffs as a futile exercise by “hyper-protectionists,” according to a review
of his social media posts and interviews over the past several years by CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski and Em Steck.
The markets were rattled
after Trump’s plans were confirmed, with U.S. stock futures plummeting in after-hours trading, and continuing to have historically bad days
on Thursday and Friday. Even a number of Republicans
have spoken out
to criticize
the tariffs as causing unnecessary economicharm
.
The CNN article
found that tariffs were yet another Trump-adjacent issue where Vance
, who had once bashed the president as someone who could be “America’s Hitler
,” had radically reversed his previous views.
When Vance was gaining fame for his Hillbilly Elegy memoir beginning in 2016, as Trump was first running for president, he “argued in repeated interviews, speeches and social media posts that automation and technological change were the primary forces reshaping the American economy and said he opposed ‘hyper protectionists’ and their policies,” reported CNN’s Kaczynski and Steck, listing several direct quotes from Vance that rejected efforts to reverse longstanding U.S. support for free trade:
“So many of these jobs that have disappeared from these areas just aren’t coming back. They haven’t disappeared so much from globalization or from shipping them overseas,” Vance said in a January 2017 interview with Education Week. “They’ve largely disappeared because of automation and because of new technological change.”
Other comments and social media activity from Vance during that time directly took aim at Trump’s trade rhetoric. Shortly after Trump met with manufacturing CEOs in February 2017 and publicly railed against America’s trade deficits, Vance pushed back.
“Can’t be repeated enough: if you’re worried about America’s economic interest, focus more on automation/education than trade protectionism,” Vance wrote…
Even when Vance acknowledged that globalization had caused deep harm in some communities, citing research that linked increased exposure to Chinese imports with strain on local labor markets, he argued that those downsides did not justify a sweeping reversal of US trade policy.
“Now does that mean that we should be hyper-protectionists in our approach to trade? I would argue no,” Vance said at an April 2017 event. “But should we be cognizant of the fact that when you have some of those communities that are really exposed to trade, it can very often harm them or at least cause some pretty negative consequences, even as it might cause some positive ones. I think we have to.”
Vance insisted that it was not possible to “go backwards in time” to bring back these jobs, referred to such efforts as trying to fight “yesterday’s war,” arguing that instead the “solution to that problem” was to retrain Americans for “the 21st-century workforce.”
“Vice President Vance has been crystal clear in his unwavering support for revitalizing the American economy by bringing back manufacturing jobs and sticking up for middle class workers and families since before he launched his U.S. Senate race, and that is a large part of why he was elected to public office in the first place,” Vance spokesman Taylor Van Kirk told CNN.
A federal judge Friday ordered President Donald Trump’s administration to return a man mistakenly sent to an El Salvador prison back to the United States.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia was detained and deported as part of the administration’s use of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act in an effort to deport illegal migrants who are also gang members. Garcia was previously granted “protected status” in the United States and was deported due to an “administrative error,” according to the administration. Garcia is originally from El Salvador, but has been living in Maryland since 2011. Garcia was removed from the country on March 15.
U.S. District Court Judge Paula Xinis ordered that Garcia be returned to the United States by Monday. The court order came in response to a lawsuit Garcia filed over his deportation. USA Today added, “Abrego Garica’s wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, and their 5-year-old son, who are both U.S. citizens, have sued the government demanding his return.”
NBC News
reported that Erez Reuveni, a Justice Department lawyer representing the Trump administration in this matter, said at a court hearing that there has not been a “satisfactory” explanation for Garcia’s situation, admitting Garcia should not have been deported.
“I will say for the court’s awareness that when this case landed on my desk, the first thing I did was ask my client the same question,” the lawyer said. “I have not yet received an answer that I find satisfactory.”
At the hearing, Reuveni admitted he did not know the reason for Garcia being deported and he requested time for the administration to correct the mistake without “court superintendence.” ICE had previously noted in a court filing that it had no power to bring Garcia back as he is now in the custody of El Salvador.
Garcia’s lawyer noted that he does not have a criminal record, but White House officials continue to insist Garcia is a gang member.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavittclaimed
this week that Garcia was involved in “human trafficking” and he is an MS-13 gang member despite having no convictions for such crimes.
In an interview with Fox News, Vice President JD Vance also justified Garcia being removed from the country, referring to him as “not exactly father of the year,” and cited “traffic violations” while accusing
him of being a gang member. USA Today explained
Garcia’s past detainment in the US:
The court order protecting Abrego Garcia from removal from the United States grew out of an earlier case.
In March 2019, he was arrested outside a Home Depot in Hyattsville, Maryland, where he was looking for work, after a confidential informant testified that he was an active member of the MS-13 gang, according to government lawyers. His attorneys say he was not a member of MS-13, and the government offered scant evidence to back up its claim.
A court ordered him deported to El Salvador, but Abrego Garcia applied for asylum, asking for protection under the United Nations Convention Against Torture. In court filings, he said he had come to the United States because the Barrio 18 gang, which is rivals with MS-13, was extorting and threatening him and his family for their pupusa business in their San Salvador neighborhood and pressuring him to join the gang.
Stocks plummeted for a second straight day Friday with the Dow Jones down another 2,231 points, or 5.5% amid uncertainty about President Donald Trump’s tariffs.
The drop ended the worst trading week since March 2020, when the Covid pandemic closed down much of the economy and sparked a selloff.
The Nasdaq and the S&P 500 both closed down 5.8% and 5.9%, respectively. Fears of a global trade war were made real on Friday as well when China announced a 34% tariff on all U.S. goods — matching Trump’s levy.
Trump unveiled a sweeping “reciprocal” tariff plan at an event at the White House on Wednesday, which investors reacted to by selling
stocks en masse at the market open on Thursday morning.
The Dow closed Thursday down 11,679.39 points, or 3.98%. Meanwhile, the Nasdaq dropped 5.97% and the S&P 500 closed by 4.8%.
Trump has said that market uncertainty will be temprary and he expects a “boom” after the global economy adjusts to his shakeup on trade.
Wednesday, after he announced sweeping new tariffs on allies and adversaries alike, Trump wrote
on his Truth Social account:
THE OPERATION IS OVER! THE PATIENT LIVED, AND IS HEALING. THE PROGNOSIS IS THAT THE PATIENT WILL BE FAR STRONGER, BIGGER, BETTER, AND MORE RESILIENT THAN EVER BEFORE. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!
Just before the market closed Friday, Trump wrote
, “ONLY THE WEAK WILL FAIL!”
The Washington Post cited a source close to the president who claimed
that with no more elections to win, he had reached the “peak of not giving a fuck” about bad press.
The Postreported
that Trump’s attitude toward negative attention was directly tied to the economy and tariffs.
“He’s at the peak of just not giving a fuck anymore,” the person told the newspaper. “Bad news stories? Doesn’t give a fuck. He’s going to do what he’s going to do. He’s going to do what he promised to do on the campaign trail.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt downplayed the market downturn during an interview
with CNN Thursday.
“To anyone on Wall Street this morning, I would say trust in President Trump,” she told the network. “This is a president who is doubling down on his proven economic formula from his first term.”
(Photo by Rich Graessle/Icon Sportswire) (Icon Sportswire via AP Images)
Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE) pulled no punches on Friday in criticizing President Donald Trump for firing Gen. Timothy Haugh – the commander of the United States Cyber Command at the NSA.
Bacon told Fox News’s Chad Pergram, “The White House fired one of our best generals and the smartest on cyber operations, and with no explanation. Russia and China are laughing at us.”
Bacon, a retired Air Force general himself, later shared the Wall Street Journal report on Haugh’s firing and added, “General Tim Haugh is an outstanding leader and was doing a superb job at Cyber Command and National Security Agency. He was fired with no public explanation. This action sets back our Cyber and Signals Intelligence operations.”
Bacon, a moderate Republican from a key swing district, has been known to publicly disagree with the Trump administration on foreign policy, particularly on Ukraine and free trade.
GOP NE Rep Don Bacon on firing of NSA top Gen. Timothy Haugh: “The White House fired one of our best generals and the smartest on cyber operations, and with no explanation. Russia and China are laughing at us.”
Trump reportedly fired Haugh after a meeting
with far-right conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer in the Oval Office, in which she insisted heads should roll over Signalgate – the scandal involving top Trump officials discussing bombing Yemen on the messaging app Signal.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) also spoke to Pergram about Haugh being fired by Trump. “General Timothy Haugh is a patriotic, principled, and highly-prepared Director of the National Security Agency. The decision by Donald Trump to fire General Haugh is outrageous and makes the American people less safe in an increasingly dangerous world,” Jeffries told Pergram, adding:
There are changes that need to be made in the Trump administration. To begin with, the most unqualified Defense Secretary in American history should be fired. At the same time, the other national security officials involved in SignalGate must be held accountable.
“Donald Trump and House Republicans are taking orders from far-right conspiracy theorists like Laura Loomer. Enough. This is not America,” Jeffries added
.
