Justin Bieber took to his Instagram Stories on Wednesday to apologize for promoting Morgan Wallen‘s Dangerous: The Double Album, six months after the embattled country singer was caught on video using a racial slur.
The since deleted post, captured in a screenshot by PopCrave and the Bieber fan page JBiebertraacker, read, “Love this album,” written over a screenshot of Wallen’s album.
Soon after, Justin apologized, explaining, “I had no idea that the guy’s music i posted was recently found saying racist comments.”
“As you know i don’t support or tolerate any sort of racism or discrimination. I had no idea, I sincerely apologize to anyone i offended,” he continued.
“When I was a kid, I was incredibly ignorant and said some very hurtful racist jokes that clearly were not funny,” Justin shared in a second post. “I hurt a lot of people especially the Black people in my life but was fortunate enough to have had them educate me on the horrifying origin of the n-word. This brings those painful memories back up, I will always take ownership for my ignorance and my past because I know I am not that person.”
In a third post, Biebs noted, “I have so much more to learn and I’m grateful for my black brothers and sisters for being patient with me as i have a long way to go.”
Justin was referring to a video that surfaced in 2014 in which he, then 15, could be heard making a racist joke using a racial epithet. He quickly apologized. A few days later, another video of Bieber came out also capturing him using the slur, followed by yet another apology.
Debates over masks and mandates might make it seem like 2020.
It might also well be a taste of 2024. President Joe Biden’s admonition that lawmakers who are blocking vaccine requirements should “get out of the way” accomplished nothing of the sort — and may have had the opposite reaction.
“I am standing in your way,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said Wednesday, declaring that Florida will remain a “free state” where no one will be required to show proof of vaccination or force children to wear masks.
DeSantis and other potential presidential contenders who are Republican governors — including Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem — have sought to one-up each other when it comes to establishing themselves as champions of personal liberty before and now during this troublesome period of the pandemic.
New polling shows Biden’s trust in handling the pandemic slipping among voters. Quinnipiac University numbers out Wednesday found the president’s approval on COVID at 53% of Americans — down a dozen points since May.
Biden aides, meanwhile, have begun calling out states, including Texas and Florida, where the delta variant is contributing to spikes in cases. White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Wednesday “that’s not meant to be political,” and is simply “meant to convey that more action is needed in some part of the country.”
Of course, it is political. Republican leaders don’t need the contradictory messaging of former President Donald Trump to make resistance to vaccine and mask mandates a mantra, and skepticism of conflicting advice from scientists crosses party lines.
Now with the concept of “vaccine passports” gaining currency in some localities and businesses, partisan lines are hardening as quickly as campaign fundraising pitches can be written.
The RUNDOWN with Averi Harper
The walls are closing in on disgraced New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
After the announcement of the devastating findings in the state Attorney General’s report on Cuomo’s misconduct and an avalanche of calls for him to resign, state lawmakers could move toward impeachment.
The New York State Assembly, where Democrats hold a vast majority, needs 76 votes to proceed with impeachment. According to ABC News’ Aaron Katersky, at least 82 of the state Assembly’s 150 members are in favor authorizing an impeachment trial. This as Cuomo clings to power with no sign of voluntary resignation.
If impeached, Cuomo would be the second New York state executive to face impeachment. The first was William Sulzer who is the only New York governor to be impeached and convicted. His removal followed accusations of campaign finance fraud in 1913.
If Cuomo were to be removed from office, it would make way for the state’s first female governor. As laid out in the New York’s constitution, Lt. Gov. Kathy Hochul would immediately become the acting governor during an impeachment trial. If Cuomo is convicted, she would continue in that role through the end of his term.
The assembly’s judiciary committee is slated to meet Monday morning to discuss their impeachment investigation.
The TIP with Meg Cunningham
Four Republicans vying to oust California’s Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom criticized his response to the coronavirus pandemic in a debate Wednesday night on some of the top issues facing the state.
The candidates who joined Newsom all opposed mask mandates, but their solutions to curbing the spread of the virus and its variants differed.
Former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer encouraged viewers to get the vaccine (he and his family got it) but said he does not support mask mandates in schools, which are currently in place ahead of the 2021 school year.
Businessman John Cox took a different approach, saying he doesn’t support mandates or believe that people who have had the coronavirus should get the vaccine, because they have antibodies that protect them against it.
Former Congressman Doug Ose and state Assemblyman Kevin Kiley both pushed back against mandates, saying they have faith that Californians can make the right decisions for themselves and their families. Kiley took the opportunity to call out Newsom’s response directly, saying the governor was “bright lights and cash giveaways,” in an attempt to conceal a broken state government.
(WASHINGTON) — Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin is expected to announce his recommendation to President Joe Biden that COVID-19 vaccines be made mandatory for troops, officials told ABC News Wednesday evening.
A senior official said the announcement will come “soon,” while a separate U.S. official said an announcement is expected by the end of this week.
The president last week directed the Department of Defense to look into how and when vaccines could be mandated for service members. Austin’s recommendation in response to that request is expected to be in favor of vaccine requirements, but for Austin to implement such a policy, he’ll need a written waiver from Biden.
Because COVID-19 vaccines are available to the military under the Food and Drug Administration’s emergency use authorization (EUA), the shot has so far been strictly voluntary.
According to the Pentagon’s latest statistics, at least 70% of military personnel have received at least one dose, compared to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s reporting that 58% of the total U.S. population has received at least one dose.
Pentagon officials have publicly said they would consider requiring COVID-19 vaccinations, as is done with more than a dozen other vaccines, after the FDA fully approves the vaccines.
“I believe that when it’s formally approved, which we expect pretty soon, we probably will go to that, and then that question will kind of be moot,” Vice Adm. John Nowell told a sailor in a town hall question-and-answer video posted to Facebook last month.
It’s reasonable that the FDA will fully approve the Pfizer vaccine by early September, a senior White House official familiar with the FDA approval process told ABC News Tuesday night.
However, while the two-shot Pfizer vaccine is considered suitable for most troops, the single-dose Johnson & Johnson is preferred in some cases, such as for those who are deploying overseas or aboard ships. A waiver from Biden would mean the DOD wouldn’t have to wait for all of the vaccines under EUA to be fully approved before being able to require them, which would afford the Pentagon more options.
(WASHINGTON) — The Biden administration will announce a set of actions on Thursday intended to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and pollution from cars and trucks, reducing planet-warming emissions from the No. 1 sector contributing to climate change in the U.S.
President Joe Biden is expected to sign an executive order on Thursday setting a goal that half of all new vehicles sold by 2030 are zero emissions vehicles, specifically electric vehicles powered by batteries or fuel cells or hybrid-electric vehicles. A senior administration official called it a “paradigm shift” for the country and the industry.
“A decade ago, we were talking about reaching around 50 miles per gallon of gasoline in 15 years. Today, for new autos we’re talking about reaching around 50% of vehicles that don’t require even one gallon of gasoline to go a mile in less than a decade,” the official said on a call with reporters, adding that automakers like Ford and GM are expected to be at the White House to support the executive order and announce their plans to meet Biden’s goal.
Automakers Ford, GM and Stellantis endorsed the move in a statement Wednesday night, saying they aim for 40-50% of all new vehicles sold by 2030 to be electric. They also said that goal can only be met with resources to expand electric charging stations that it part of Biden’s proposed Build Back Better plan.
“With the (United Auto Workers) at our side in transforming the workforce and partnering with us on this journey, we believe we can strengthen continued American leadership in clean transportation technology through electric vehicle innovation and manufacturing,” the companies said in a joint statement. “We look forward to working with the Biden Administration, Congress and state and local governments to enact policies that will enable these ambitious objectives.”
The administration will also announce fuel efficiency standards that will more than reverse the rollback of the clean car standards under former President Donald Trump. A senior administration official said the administration will build on higher fuel efficiency standards set by California the senior official said will ultimately save 200 billion gallons of gasoline and reduce 2 billion metric tons of carbon pollution, according to the senior official. Those rules will still need to go through a formal rule-making process at Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Transportation.
“What we’re hearing across the board is a consensus about the direction where this industry is going. And a coming together around the recognition that this is the moment of truth, not just for climate action for economic action as well,” the official said.
Former President Barack Obama issued similar fuel efficiency standards meant to require new gas-powered vehicles to use less gasoline, which would reduce greenhouse gas emissions and pollution from cars and trucks. Under Trump the EPA relaxed those standards, prompted a legal battle between the administration and California over more stringent goals set by the state.
(ATLANTA) — When the pandemic hit the U.S. in March 2020, Schantayln Sherman, a single mother of a daughter with special needs, faced a series of medical and financial setbacks that left her unable to pay her rent.
As she received rental assistance, Sherman said she tried to look for more affordable housing but that it was the “hardest thing” because stock is low, demand is high, waitlists are long and restrictions in terms of credit scores and income levels are limiting.
“I have been looking to find more affordable housing, and, unfortunately, here in Atlanta, or if I even moved to another city in Georgia, it’s just not there right now. The rent is expensive everywhere,” she told ABC News.
According to affordable housing advocates and experts, Sherman’s experience is part of a national crisis that predates the pandemic: a shortage of affordable housing for low-income communities.
According to a July report from the National Low Income Housing Coalition, rent is “out of reach” for most low-wage workers in every U.S. state — a crisis that disproportionately harms people of color. A full-time worker has to earn at least $20.40 per hour to afford renting a modest one-bedroom home or $24.90 per hour for a modest two-bedroom home, according to the report.
Henry Louis Taylor Jr., a professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Buffalo, said the housing shortage also is a root cause of poverty.
“If poor people were paying 15 to 20% of their income on housing, poverty, as we know it, would have disappeared,” he said. “You can’t attack these issues without government intervention aimed at reducing the costs of housing and raising its quality.”
Housing and Urban Development Secretary Marcia Fudge wrote in the NLIHC report that the findings highlight “the urgent need for our government to expand affordable housing.”
She also outlined how the Biden administration’s budget and “Build Back Better” agenda, which includes funds for rental assistance and investments in building or modernizing affordable housing units that “would serve as a critical down payment toward his plan to put housing assistance in reach for every household in need.”
‘A landlord’s market’
Taylor said that the private sector has always failed to provide a sufficient stock of quality housing options for low-income communities and the government hasn’t done enough to correct that market failure.
Jonathan Cappelli, an affordable housing advocate and director of the Neighborhood Development Collaborative in Colorado, echoed Taylor’s sentiment, describing the environment as “a landlord’s market.”
Cappelli told ABC News that rental assistance funds are meant for tenants and landlords who are experiencing financial hardships during the pandemic, but in states like Colorado the majority of the funds have not been distributed.
And as landlords struggle to recover, many are likely to raise rents that are already surging, Cappelli said.
“Those rents are just going to keep on climbing up, and it will continue to serve just higher and higher incomes and create more and more scarcity for low and moderate income households,” he added.
Hannah Adams, a staff attorney at Southeast Louisiana Legal Services, said much of the current rental housing stock is “incredibly substandard, and really much of it is unlivable” — and landlords have no incentive to improve it.
“When you have people lined up down the street for one available affordable housing unit, there’s really no competition in the market,” she explained.
Adams represents low-income renters experiencing housing instability or health-threatening living conditions in the New Orleans area and beyond, where COVID-19 cases are surging. She said she’s been flooded with calls from tenants during the pandemic over deteriorating living conditions.
The shortage “forces the lowest-income, most vulnerable tenants into really substandard housing conditions, which can exacerbate the health impacts of the pandemic,” she added.
Mass evictions loom
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued an order on Tuesday barring evictions for 60 days in counties with “substantial and high levels” of community transmission, but that relief is temporary and housing insecurity continues to haunt millions.
More than 15 million people already live in households currently behind on their rent payments, putting them at risk of eviction, according to a report released last week by the nonprofit think tank Aspen Institute.
Sherman is one of them.
Amid the pandemic, her 18-year-old daughter Jasmine, who is nonverbal, in a wheelchair and requires around-the-clock care, lost access to her therapy sessions and had to stay home. And as Sherman struggled to find affordable caregivers, she suffered an injury that required surgery and eventually took unpaid, family and medical job-protected leave from her job as a clinical administrator to care for herself and her daughter.
Although she was initially able to receive rental assistance, Sherman received an eviction notice last week after a payment for the month of July was not received by her property manager.
“I was very shocked and it was really heartbreaking when I received that notice,” she said. “Sometimes things happen to people out of their control. And, you know, I was seeking assistance … it just didn’t come fast enough.”
Sherman told ABC News on Wednesday that her property manager agreed to cancel the eviction filing while payment is processing, but her ongoing housing insecurity is leading to “a lot of anxiety and stress.”
“You don’t know from day to day what’s going to happen,” she said, adding that she has been looking for more affordable housing every day but feels “stuck” because prices are so high.
“I’m trying to move out of Atlanta, to move somewhere where maybe, possibly, you know, the rent can be a little bit more affordable. But every time I look everywhere, the prices are expensive,” she said, adding that her dream of becoming a homeowner for now seems “out of reach.”
“I’m hoping you know, that I will be in a place where I can have my own dream home, but right now it’s just very difficult, and it’s just not looking good right now. So I’m going to have to continue to rent.”
(NEW YORK) — With gun violence on the rise across the country, the trauma extends beyond those hit with bullets to entire neighborhoods suffering the sounds of gunshots, according to a crime prevention company executive.
“Just because someone doesn’t get hurt or killed by a bullet, just going to bed to the sound of gunfire, waking up to the sound of gunfire, assuming the risk of moving around a neighborhood that has being held captive by a few criminal serial shooters completely rewires the way, especially in young children, how their brain works,” ShotSpotter CEO Ralph Clark told ABC News Chief Justice Correspondent Pierre Thomas.
ShotSpotter is known for their acoustic gunshot technology, which takes “pops, booms and bangs,” from sensors posted around a neighborhood or city and triangulates timestamps, and pushes an alert out to police departments within 45 seconds of the trigger being pulled exactly where the shooting took place, Clark explained.
Ten people were shot over the weekend in the New York City borough of Queens and New York Police Department Commissioner Dermot Shea told ABC News the city saw a 73% increase in shootings in May 2021 when compared to the same time last year.
“The real cost is, is the trauma, and the emotional trauma and the mother that lives on that block and now won’t send our kids outside because she knows every night there’s gunfire,” Shea explained in an interview last week.
Children who see gun violence or are victims of gun violence experience trauma over and over again, Dr. Eraina Schauss, director of the BRAIN Center at the University of Memphis, told ABC News.
“Kids who have been shot, their body is in such shock there’s just such fear,” Schauss explained. “They’re afraid to do anything. Some of the kids are catatonic, meaning they have a hard time speaking they have they have a hard time just doing daily tasks. They’re reliving that moment and their body is still in that trauma.”
Strauss treats children immediately after they have been shot in Memphis, not for physical wounds but for mental health. She explained that children who have witnessed shootings have a difficult time expressing their feelings in some cases and doctors at the BRAIN Center identify manageable ways they are able to cope with seeing their friend or loved one shot.
“There’s that feeling when you feel like there’s no control in your environment, and you can’t control your situation and things feel hopeless. You know that something that we perpetuate that cycle of violence, just because it’s all driven by fear, it’s a fear reaction,” she said.
As for investigating shootings in New York, Shea said ShotSpotter is an immensely helpful tool.
“Even if we don’t find the casings, we’ll have the video on the block. And we’ll see the person who were they with? What color was there? Who were they arguing with? Countless countless times it helps and puts a narrative to a story where without it, you would have literally nothing, it’s very hard to search all of New York City, but when it when when it allows you to start zeroing down, that’s where and then there’s a lot of other benefits in terms of actually recovering ballistics,” he said.
Clark said the technology is useful even if police do not make an arrest on the day the shooting occurred.
“If they’re not dealing with the perpetrator or aiding a victim, they’re much more likely to be able to recover physical forensic evidence in the form of shell casings as well as interview witnesses. Right. And that’s critically important to follow on investigation around who might have been involved in that shooting. So, although you might not put cuffs on the perpetrator at that point in time, oftentimes they link critical clues about who they were,” he explained.
“Twenty percent causing 80 percent,” Clark said, quoting Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto who explained that roughly 80% of the consequences come from 20% of the causes. “We know at least in Oakland, there was at least 100 times where officers, through a ShotSpotter alert, were able to get to that location and find a victim and basically apply life saving measures to save a persons.”
Critics say however that ShotSpotter disproportionally targets African-Americans, especially in a city like Chicago.
“High-tech tools can create a false justification for the broken status quo of policing and can end up exacerbating existing racial disparities,” Jonathan Manes, an attorney with the MacArthur Justice Center at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law said. “We needed to know whether this system actually does what it claims to do. It does not.”
Manes studied the ShotSpotter technology and found that 89% turned up no gun-related crime and 86% led to no report of any crime at all.
“This system puts police on high alert and sends them racing into communities; but almost nine times of our ten, the police don’t turn up evidence of gun crime or any crime at all. It creates a powderkeg situation for residents who just happen to be in the vicinity of a false alert.”
The CEO said the technology is 97% effective and in 2020, the company published 240,000 gunshot alerts to police departments around the country who purchase their technology.
Often times, Clark said it is not the first time a gun has been used in a shooting.
“Does anyone really believe that that’s the first time that that gun has been fired,” he asked. “That homicide, that gun that was used in that homicide has been fired before that homicide and is likely to continue to be fired after that homicide if, in fact, there isn’t some kind of organized intervention.”
ShotSpotter is not a one-size-fits-all approach to curbing gun violence, Clark explained, saying that the technology is another tool in their tool belt.
“What we believe is that when a police department takes a comprehensive gun violence reduction strategy, utilizing a number of tools, just not ShotSpotter, but other tools as well, we can show progress,” he said.
For Clark the issue is personal, as he grew up in Oakland, a city which has experienced 72 homicides this year alone, according to the local police department.
“I would say as a company, our original founding is really about being purposeful and having impact and making a difference,” Clark said.
(WASHINGTON) — At the dawn of the COVID-19 pandemic, when offices and restaurants began shuttering, the federal government scrambled to keep small businesses afloat — ultimately spending over a trillion dollars to help protect the American Dream for millions of workers and business owners.
But even before the first checks went out, alarm bells went off.
The person ringing those bells the loudest was Hannibal “Mike” Ware, the inspector general of the Small Business Administration. The veteran internal watchdog says he participated in a series of meetings with Trump administration officials and SBA program analysts that were laced with “testy exchanges” about how to expeditiously dispense funds without leaving them vulnerable to fraudulent claims.
His warnings went unheeded, Ware said, and the fallout has taken him “from a black-haired guy to a gray-haired guy.”
“My frustration level was extremely high,” Ware told ABC News in a recent interview. And now, a year and half later, he said “the magnitude of the fraud we are seeing is unheard of — unprecedented.”
As small businesses emerge from the pandemic, the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) and the Economic Injury Disaster Loans (EIDL), two key relief programs passed as part of the congressional CARES Act, are winding down. But for all the jobs they’ve rescued, their legacies may be tarnished by unprecedented amounts of fraud — a reality that experts fear may impair efforts to pass future emergency relief programs.
“In terms of the monetary value, the amount of fraud in these COVID relief programs is going to be larger than any government program that came before it,” Ware said.
All government programs suffer some amount of fraud, experts say. And emergency programs are even more susceptible, due to the inherent tension between the pressure to approve loans quickly and the need to screen applications and maintain other fraud-prevention measures that may prolong the process.
In an October 2020 report, Ware’s office found that “to expedite the process, SBA ‘lowered the guardrails’ or relaxed internal controls, which significantly increased the risk of program fraud.”
A senior SBA official in the Biden administration agreed with Ware’s analysis, noting that “it should not be an expectation that we need to sacrifice speed for certainty — you can do both.”
“The story of 2020 for both PPP and EIDL is the fact that the previous administration’s leadership did not have sufficient controls in place for determining individual identity or business identity,” the official said. “Different choices could have absolutely been made to limit fraud vulnerabilities.”
“With limited staff, few technological tools to conduct prepayment verification, and crushing need, SBA and other agencies abandoned many traditional controls and simply approved applicants with little or no verification of self-reported information,” according to Linda Miller, the former deputy executive director of the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, a government task force established as part of the CARES Act.
“Best practice calls for due diligence at the front end to avoid making the fraudulent or improper payment in the first place,” Miller wrote in June, after leaving PRAC. “But in the rush to quickly distribute pandemic relief, we failed to do that and so now we are chasing [funds that were fraudulently granted] … but the recovered funds will be a fraction of what was stolen.”
Ware said this is precisely what his office sought to avoid. Before PPP and EIDL were even finalized, the SBA inspector general’s office submitted three reports to the SBA “detailing the importance of up-front controls,” according to Ware. During the testy exchanges in the spring of 2020, he said he warned the SBA to “pump the brakes” on the process.
“Fraudsters are going to do what fraudsters are going to do,” Ware said. “But the upfront controls mitigate exposure to fraud, and doing so would have saved taxpayers a whole lot of heartache on the back end. Unfortunately, the heartache was not avoided because of the way these programs were implemented up front.”
Jovita Carranza, the former SBA administrator who resigned when President Trump left office, could not be reached by ABC News for comment. Last October, in a letter responding to Ware’s report, Carranza wrote that the inspector general “failed to acknowledge the enhanced and effective system controls and validations that SBA is using” to weed out fraudulent applications and “grossly overstates the risk of fraud, waste and abuse.”
Carranza’s successor as SBA administrator — Biden nominee Isabella Casillas Guzman — has said that “reducing the risks of fraud and waste and abuse” in the distribution of relief loans and grants is a top priority. She said a series of steps implemented in December — including up-front verifications and tax information from applicants — has already produced “a sharp decline” in fraud, and that she is working closely with Ware to further improve safeguards and vigorously track down and recover prior fraudulent dispersals.
Ware agreed that controls put in place late last year helped curb fraud, but said the efforts were too little, too late.
“By then, well, you already know how much money was gone,” he said. “A lot of money was out.”
Among the relief programs, the previous administration’s EIDL rollout has attracted particular scrutiny. James W. Connor, a former federal prosecutor who is now with the law firm Arnold & Porter, called the program a “fraud magnet,” citing a provision that allowed recipients to receive up to $10,000 up front “with essentially no strings attached.”
“That money is gone,” Connor said.
But that hasn’t kept Ware from trying to recover it. His investigative efforts have resulted in 307 indictments, 205 arrests, and 69 convictions tied to PPP and EIDL fraud, resulting in the recovery of more than $600 million so far.
(WASHINGTON) — Donald Trump may be out of office, but political donor money continues to pour into his properties across the country.
In just the first six months of this year, dozens of Republican campaigns and political groups have together spent at least $750,000 at Trump properties, with nearly half of that coming from fundraising committees directly affiliated with or linked to Trump himself, according to federal and state campaign disclosure reports.
Of that $750,000, the largest chunk was spent by the Make America Great Again PAC, Trump’s presidential campaign committee-turned political action committee, which paid the former president’s businesses more than $210,000 from January through June.
Much of that came from five monthly rent payments of $40,000 each for office space at Trump Tower in New York City, while the rest came from nearly $8,000 in lodging expenses at Trump hotels.
Trump’s new PAC, Save America, also reported paying nearly $80,000 to the “Trump Hotel Collection” for lodging and meals over the six months since Trump left the White House.
Trump properties have also continued to serve as a favorite venue for high-dollar fundraisers for his political committees.
His joint fundraising committee with South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham spent more than $22,000 for a golf tournament hosted at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida, in May, which reportedly cost participants $25,000 each. Make America Great Again Action, a new pro-Trump super PAC led by former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, spent about the same amount at a fundraiser at Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. The committee’s disclosure filing doesn’t show how much it raised from the fundraiser, but overall it reported raising roughly $705,000 in April and May.
The Republican National Committee, which continues to raise money off Trump’s name in fundraising emails and messages, spent at least $191,000 at various Trump properties over the last six months, including $176,000 at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club for a spring GOP donor retreat earlier this year.
On the Trump campaign’s spending at Trump’s properties, former Trump campaign spokesperson Tim Murtaugh previously said that “the campaign pays fair market value and abides by all FEC laws and regulations.”
Since leaving the White House in January, the former president has settled in Florida, bringing dozens of his close allies and other Republicans to his properties in the Sunshine State.
A number of Republican politicians and political hopefuls have visited his Mar-a-Lago Club over the last six months for fundraisers, photo ops and other political events in the hope of appealing to Trump’s loyal supporters or netting an endorsement from the former president himself.
Two Republicans who earlier this year voted to overturn the 2020 election results, Alabama Rep. Mo Brooks — who is vying for an open Senate sit in 2022 — and Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, spent $26,000 and $32,000, respectively, at Mar-a-Lago.
Another Alabama Senate hopeful competing for Trump’s endorsement, Lynda Blanchard, also spent close to $25,000 hosting a fundraiser there.
And at least a dozen other GOP campaigns together spent tens of thousands of dollars at various Trump properties in Florida, including Trump National Doral and the Trump Golf Club in Palm Beach, during the first half of the year.
While Trump associates and supporters have long flocked to his properties in Florida and New Jersey, their preferred Washington, D.C., destination while Trump was president was the Trump International Hotel, on the site of the city’s historic Old Post Office. Since opening in late 2016, shortly before Trump took office, the D.C. hotel has raked in millions of dollars hosting numerous fundraisers for various campaigns and political groups, as well as serving as his supporters’ favorite place to gather, lodge and dine in the capital.
But so far this year, it appears that the action — and the money — has followed Trump from D.C. to Florida. Trump’s D.C. hotel hasn’t hosted many big events, with several congressional campaigns reporting smaller-scale meal and lodging expenditures that total only $15,000.
The National Republican Senatorial Committee and Florida Sen. Rick Scott held a fundraiser featuring Newt Gingrich at the D.C. hotel in late June, but that expenditure has yet to be reported.
In total, since Trump began his run for president in 2015, his political operation and various other federal campaigns have paid Trump’s businesses $20 million, including more than $7 million during the 2020 election cycle, according to ProPublica’s analysis of federal campaign disclosure reports.
August 19 marks the seven-year anniversary of the release of Nicki Minaj‘s hyper-sexual “Anaconda” music video.
The rapper took to Instagram on Wednesday to reminisce about the iconic video, which landed her a racy figurine at Madame Tussaud’s wax museum in Las Vegas and an MTV Award for Best Hip Hop Video in 2015.
“Seven years later. Who remembers witnessing the internet break when I dropped this picture?” Minaj wrote in the caption of her post. “[The] first solo female rap video to reach a billion views [and the] first one to break the VEVO record for most views in a day…Yes, ma’am, always inspiring the girlies.”
She continues about “Anaconda,” which samples Sir Mix-a-Lot‘s 1992 classic “Baby Got Back,” “[Shoutout] to Sir Mix-a-Lot. Love you guys for holding me down this long.”
“Anaconda” hit #2 on the Billboard Hot 100, while the explicit music video, filled with big butts and a cameo from her Young Money label mate Drake, racked up 19.6 million views on the day of its release in 2014. It broke Vevo’s record for having the most views within 24 hours. In April this year, Chart Data reported that the “Anaconda” video had surpassed one billion views on YouTube.
It could be a coincidence that Nicki chose to reminisce about her monumental milestone just three days after Chart Data reported that Cardi B‘s “Bodak Yellow” video obtained a billion views faster than any other song made by a female rap artist. But others might say the shade is real.
Almost Monday‘s return to the road is a major moment in the band’s history.
The buzzy trio — made up of vocalist Dawson Daugherty, guitarist Cole Clisby and bassist Luke Fabry — released their first two EPs amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Now that they’re starting playing live shows again, including last weekend’s Lollapalooza, Almost Monday’s sets now include more than just one released song.
“It’s kind of our first time actually playing live with more than one song out,” Daugherty tells ABC Audio. “Before COVID, we were on tour with…AJR, and we had one song out online, so it’ll be cool experiencing shows where people hopefully know the music, more than just one [song].”
Almost Monday’s debut EP, Don’t Say You’re Ordinary, was released last October, and its follow-up, Til the End of Time, just dropped this past July. Given that both EPs were released when the only feedback they could receive happened online, Almost Monday’s been excited to bring the music to people in person.
“You put out music, and you see responses and DMs and things online,” Daugherty says. “It’s not that you get used to it, but it’s such a different effect, even just going out playing this first show, you realize, ‘Oh yeah, this music’s actually impacting real people,’ and they show up to shows and know the songs.”
“It’s always cool seeing people online interact and DM and comment,” he adds. “But it’s kind of interesting stepping back out into the world and being, like, ‘Oh yeah, those people, those monthly listeners are real people actually listening.'”
Almost Monday’s next scheduled show is a set at Bonnaroo in September.
