Wynn expressed optimism about Cruz’s chances within the crowded GOP field. Wynn then lambasted Trump, the frontrunner at the time, castigating the real-estate mogul’s record as a “businessman” and “casino owner.” Wynn snickered about how Trump’s Vegas property stood pitifully far from the Strip, the stretch of land coveted by any hopeful casino or hotel owner in the city. “He was just clowning on him,”
.. So when, on the eve of Trump’s decisive victory in the Nevada caucus two months later, the candidate touted his support from none other than Steve Wynn, Cruz’s camp was stunned. Wynn, standing alongside fellow casino mogul Phil Ruffin, beamed from the crowd.
.. In the space of a year, Wynn would become a member of the president’s cadre of informal advisers, his hand-selected finance chair of the RNC, and as such, an indispensable fundraiser for the party.
.. Multiple Republican sources say Wynn’s retreat from the political scene will have a lasting and negative impact on the GOP’s fundraising prowess. “No small number of GOP lawmakers have stayed at Wynn Resorts in the last two years and relied on him for donations,” the Republican strategist Steve Schmidt said. “This could be devastating.”
.. not one seemed to think that the president would simply sever ties with Wynn.
.. The initial bout of friction between Trump and Wynn dates back to the 1990s, when the two engaged in a vicious legal battle over Wynn’s efforts to expand to Atlantic City that included allegations of fraud, money laundering, perjury, and even claims that an investigator working on behalf of Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts Inc. had become a mole for Wynn’s Mirage Resorts,
.. “They hate each other’s guts. It’s like poison,”
.. The president still nurses the wound of those years and the insults Wynn lobbed at him
.. “It was always just billionaire ego bullshit,” said one Trump campaign official who witnessed their exchanges. “Like, ‘Haha, my building is a couple feet taller than your building.’ That kind of thing.”
.. Yet far from keeping Wynn at a distance, Trump seemed insistent on tightening their relationship. “They became pretty close,”
.. the president took great pleasure in how their roles had reversed.
.. During the transition, Wynn bordered on “sycophantic” in his outreach .. particularly on the topic of China.
.. Wynn, who runs a massive casino operation in Macau, often urged Trump to reconsider his pledge to be “tough on China.”
.. Wynn then volunteered to arrange entertainment for Trump’s inauguration
.. Not even Wynn’s extensive rolodex of celebrities could help him nab the artists he wanted most, including Tim McGraw, Faith Hill, and Elton John. “As soon as he’d get close to bringing one on, word would leak out, and they’d immediately deny,” the source said. “Steve got very frustrated. He was clearly upset.”
.. it raised a record-breaking $107 million in the first three quarters of 2017
.. “He’s been a bigger success as a fundraiser than people thought he would be,
.. Wynn spoke with no notes, “as he’s mostly blind.” (Wynn suffers from a degenerative eye disease.)
.. The Wall Street Journal reported that Wynn hand-delivered a letter from the Chinese government urging the return of Miles Kwok, the Chinese businessman who fled the country, seeking asylum in the U.S.
.. But one source directly familiar with the matter remembered notably how Wynn was able “to work Trump up into a tizzy” over the situation, playing into the president’s well-known desire “to get the bad guys out” of the country.
.. “The president will want to keep Steve around him. He likes him—he’s gonna be last to throw a rock at a buddy of his.” Which means that Wynn’s access to Trump could very well continue unfettered—in the shadows, off the schedule, as it largely has been until now.
Can Donald Trump Handle the Truth?
Debating crowd sizes may seem inconsequential and petty, and it is. But Mr. Trump was the one who had been unable to let go of the issue during his first week in office: On Thursday, The Washington Post reported that on the morning after he was sworn in, the president himself pressured the director of the National Park Service to locate more photos of the crowd in hopes of disproving news media accounts of its size. With behavior like this, Mr. Trump has reminded the nation of an essential truth about his personality: He sees what he wants to see, and nothing else.
.. Any information that challenges his worldview does not lead him to reconsider his beliefs; it “gets flushed down the sort of emotional and intellectual dispose-all that I think he carries around with him,” Timothy O’Brien, one of Mr. Trump’s biographers, told Politico recently.
.. We have had incurious presidents before, and they also displayed tremendous self-certainty. Yet even The Decider himself, George W. Bush, proved willing to rethink his views as contrary facts came to light — like the failure of Iraqis to garland American occupiers with flowers. Mr. Trump is not merely uninterested in facts; he repels them. In their place, he confects his own reality to feed his bottomless emotional and psychological needs. It is not America First, it is Donald Trump First, and always.
Who did those moronic thugs trashing downtown Washington on Inauguration Day hurt the most? Immigrants.
A limo driver was injured while the stretch limousine he drove was torched and destroyed by protesters near the intersection of 12th and K Streets NW in Washington, DC.
Muhammad Ashraf, the owner of the company, Nationwide Chauffeured Services, is now speaking out against the protesters for what they did.
.. It’s ironic to think that protesters are angry with President Trump for his proposed plan to harm and demonize immigrants and Muslims, yet they personally have a hand in destroying the livelihood of a Muslim immigrant.
Donald Trump: Press Lying About Inauguration Crowd Size
“And the reason you’re my first stop is that, as you know, I have a running war with the media. They are among the most dishonest human beings on earth,” Trump said.
The approximately 400 CIA employees broke out into applause after Trump said this.
.. “We had a massive field of people. You saw that, packed,” Trump said. He then noted that when he woke up Saturday morning, he turned on the TV and noticed, “I get up this morning, I turn on one of the networks and they show an empty field. I said, wait a minute. I made a speech. I looked out. The field was, it looked like a million — a million and a half people. They showed a field where there were practically nobody standing there. And they said, ‘Donald Trump did not draw well.’”
He added, “We have something that’s amazing because we had it looked — honestly, it looked like a million and a half people. Whatever it was, it was. But it went all the way back to the Washington Monument. And I turn on [the tv], and by mistake I get this network, and it showed an empty field.”
“So, we caught them,” he said. “And we caught them in a beauty, and I think they’re going to pay a big price.”
.. So Zeke, Zeke from Time Magazine” wrote a fake news story, Trump said. “I would never do that. I have great respect for Dr. Martin Luther King. And it was right there. But this is how dishonest the media is.”