<Taking a break from discussing new evidence of Donald Trump's cognitive decline, conservative CNN contributor S.E. Cupp changed gears and told a panel that there is not enough attention being paid to how the former president's money problems make him a national security risk.

Speaking with host Kate Bolduan, Cupp made reference to Trump having to scramble to come up with more than half a billion dollars to pay for appeals bonds as he contests his most recent court losses. And, she said, that makes him "vulnerable" to foreign manipulation.

"A couple of things Trump is going to have to do that he has no problem doing and has done before, which is kind of grift off of his own supporters, right? Trying to get them to pay in to help stop the steal," she explained. "He's really using a lot of that to line his own pockets."

"He's using the RNC as a personal piggybank, he's going to rely on the existing infrastructure and his own fans to help pull him out of this financial morass," she continued before adding, "But the thing that worries me, that I don't see a lot of people talking about, is the legal and financial jeopardy that this would-be-president is in now would seem to me a national security issue."

"I think it's more dangerous than, just isn't it funny Trump could be bankrupted? Isn't it funny he's having to maybe use mismatched furniture?" she remarked. "Someone with that much to lose and who has to fork up that much cash, who has that many legal battles looming ahead?

"I think this is a really vulnerable, vulnerable person for our national security issues.">

<One of the moldiest political tropes around is the one that says a presidential candidate needs to run to the base during the primaries and then pivot to the center once he or she locks down the nomination. It makes some strategic sense, for sure, and we've seen it in action many times — but it doesn't always work. Donald Trump is not one for standard campaign strategy so even though he's the de facto nominee of the Republican Party for president, he's not making any kind of pivot to the center. If anything he's embracing the MAGA base ever more tightly, even though there is a substantial minority of his party that's rejecting him in these primaries.

Over the weekend Trump bagged some more wins in caucuses in Michigan, Idaho and Missouri, all three of which were the result of amateur hour mistakes by local and party officials who messed up the usual primary system. From what we can gather there still exists an anti-Trump vote among Republicans and GOP-leaning independents. We'll see on Super Tuesday if that phenomenon (which I wrote about last week) continues, even as it's obvious that Trump is the nominee. Nikki Haley won her first primary on Sunday in the District of Columbia, which Trump claimed he lost on purpose and immediately disparaged as nothing more than a win for "the swamp," calling her "Birdbrain" and the "Bird" in a series of furious posts on his Truth Social platform. He can't bear to lose anything, even when it doesn't matter.

The AP reported on the anti-Trump vote in GOP primaries from their APVotecast surveys over the weekend, noting that while many of those who voted for Haley are Democrats or independents who didn't vote for Trump in 2020 "about 1 in 10 early contest voters who said they supported Trump in the 2020 general election said they wouldn’t be doing so this year." So this group exists and it's a problem for the Republicans.

As a result, according to a different AP report, many in the Trump camp would like him to make that pivot to the center, the sooner the better. Campaign professionals understand that this Never Trump faction is his Achilles' heel but his people are committed to "let Trump be Trump" — mostly because they have no choice. People have tried to get Trump to soften his edges in his previous campaigns and he's simply incapable of doing it. They're still trying:

Former Speaker Newt Gingrich, a Trump ally who sometimes speaks to the former president, compared 2024 to 1980, when Republican Ronald Reagan won a landslide over Democratic incumbent Jimmy Carter, who was saddled with inflation, high unemployment and international conflict. Reagan, dubbed “the happy warrior,” won 44 states and a new Republican Senate with “a positive vision,” Gingrich said, that was about more than Carter’s record.“When you have the kind of numbers Biden has, what people need is about 70% positive, 30% anti-Biden,” Gingrich said,

That's downright hilarious. A "happy warrior" is the last thing anyone would ever call Donald Trump. A whining warrior, maybe. A vengeful warrior definitely. But he is the unhappiest presidential candidate in history and he never shuts up about it.

Trump campaign adviser Chris LaCivita told the AP, "Their role is to provide the organization 'to amplify and to force project' Trump’s message." And they insist that he is already running his general election campaign against President Joe Biden which means that what he's saying in his rallies right now is the general election message. Well, that message is so extreme it's very hard to believe that the 10 percent of Republicans who say they're not going to vote for Trump again will come around in the fall. He's going further than he's ever gone before and people are going to see all this eventually....>

<....He rambles on for hours at a time, often speaking off the cuff about strange notions like magnets don't work in water and suggesting that Abraham Lincoln could have negotiated the country out of the Civil War if he hadn't wanted to be famous. He calls the insurrectionists "hostages" and opens his rallies to the recording of the so-called January 6th prison choir. Even weirder, the finales of his prepared speeches are now accompanied by spooky Q-Anon-inspired music, which seems to send the crowd into paroxysms of ecstasy.

He vows to enact the greatest deportation program the world has ever known, describing immigrants in the most demeaning terms imaginable saying they are "poisoning the blood of our country." He calls his political enemies communist, Marxist and "vermin" who must be "purged" and promises not to allow anyone into the country who doesn't believe in "our religion." They are divisive, hateful diatribes that should make any decent person recoil in horror.

But that's just Trump, right? It's just a schtick and nobody should take it literally. He's just playing to the crowd because they love that stuff. But the truth is that his speeches seem to be written by Stephen Miller or are, at least, very Miller-esque in that they are full of plans and policies. It's not just Trump riffing away to please the crowd.

For instance, this past weekend, he threw a new idea into the mix, saying that he plans to withdraw all funding from any schools that require vaccines, which would be virtually all of them:

That was on the teleprompter and considering what we know about the planning for a second Trump term with Project 2025 and Agenda 47, I think it would be very foolish not to take such promises seriously. The Republicans have become so nihilistic that they would easily allow polio to once again ravage the children of this country if it would get big cheers at a Trump rally.

Republicans and independents who've been voting for Nikki Haley in these primaries should know that Trump doesn't want their vote. He made it clear this weekend when he said that MAGA now represents 96 percent of the party and they are getting rid of "the Romneys".

If that's what the campaign plans to "amplify and project" to their potential voters, good luck to them. He's openly purging his coalition of anyone who isn't MAGA and if these surveys are correct, that means he has no intention of doing or saying anything to appeal to that 10 percent (or more) who say they won't vote for him in the fall. Let Trump be Trump, I say. It can only help the Democrats.>

<A Donald Trump-themed, MAGA memecoin (TRUMP) has surged more than 700% over the last month, according to CoinGecko data, reaching a market cap of almost $500 million.

“It's evolved to become this kind of de facto betting market on the election for many investors," Steven Steele, the project's marketing director, told CoinDesk, noting that major events involving Trump have coincided with “a direct correspondence in the value of the coin.” Steele added that the MAGA coin project will track the election season, hypothetically gaining value if and when Trump gains momentum.

TRUMP, a coin on the Ethereum blockchain that traded at just $1.27 a month ago, is now almost $11.

While some see memecoins as the most deviant corner of crypto’s casino culture, others defend them as a type of respectful degeneracy, taking on the global finance system in an intentionally absurdist form. For instance, the Avalanche Foundation, an established future-proof blockchain, recently noted it would invest in these jokes-turned-commodities.

"My intention is really to have this up there with a DOGE or SHIB, that kind of scale and market cap and popularity," Steele added.

The canine-themed memecoins began as practical jokes from online communities, but each now commands an 11-figure market cap, with DOGE and SHIB up 95% and 193% over the past week, respectively, riding Bitcoin’s tailwinds. Since SHIB started trading in 2020, its proponents have even launched Shibarium, its own blockchain.

Steele envisions TRUMP as an early iteration of an experiment called PoliFi, which merges politics, finance, and community. That makes TRUMP coins quite similar to prediction markets, which allow a trader to sign a contract to hedge the likelihood of an event occuring. For instance, a contract regarding Trump's chances of winning the November presidential election on the prediction market Polymarket has amassed over $6 million in liquidity, with some bets exceeding half-a-million dollars. In contrast, a bet about President Joe Biden's odds of winning reelection has just under $4.5 million in liquidity. (These prediction markets, however, are often subjected to the same level of derision as memecoins due to the get-rich-quick gambling culture of some of the contacts, such as for the date of Taylor Swift’s potential pregnancy or John McAfee’s death.)

"Prediction markets do not offer the same return potential or profile as memecoins," Steele told CoinDesk. "While it is possible to achieve 100x or 1,000x returns with memecoins like TRUMP, prediction markets are not liquid enough to generate nine-figure returns."

However, the rival BIDEN memecoin has a market cap of just $22.49 million, arguably an indicator of both Biden’s pessimistic polling data or the crypto community leaning Republican.

But not all TRUMP investors are devout MAGA supporters. Some are just betting, as Trump fills arenas and remains in the headlines, that they can make a quick profit trading on his name.

Andrew Kang of the venture capital firm Mechanism Capital thinks investing in TRUMP hinges upon Trump’s media circus rather than his potential election win, according to a post on X.

"Meme coins are all about the attention economy," Kang wrote, "and Trump is probably one of the best attention monopolizers in the world.">

<Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy reported on President Joe Biden’s new strategy to try and win over critics on Monday and noted that some Republicans are trying to stop Biden’s State of the Union address, which the administration hopes will be part of a reset for the president.

“If voters are concerned about President Biden’s age, there’s nothing he can do to get any younger, but he can start to lean more heavily on younger members of his team,” Doocy began before playing a clip from Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg on a weekend show.

“I’m going to be on the road even more. You’re going to see the president continuing to be on the road. And look, we’ve also got to work with partners on the ground to make sure that their residents connect the dots,” Buttigieg said. Doocy then noted a recent statement from the Biden administration, “We are also told by the White House comms director we are fanning out aggressively, not only on Thursday, but in the weeks ahead to reach Americans where they received the news with the president’s message about whose side he’s on.”

“But there are actually lawmakers right now actively trying to prevent the State of the Union from happening,” Doocy added, rolling a clip of Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) on Fox Business from earlier in the day.

Ernst said, “It is unfathomable that we do not have a national security strategy from the president, nor do we have his budget for the upcoming fiscal year. And because of that, we want to stop him from actually delivering the State of the Union.”

“And there was some reporting over the weekend by NBC News that the Biden team is hoping to limit his appearances in front of large groups because they are worried about pro-Palestinian protesters interrupting him. He’s going to have a huge crowd on Thursday night, and it’s not unprecedented for lawmakers to interrupt a president’s State of the Union. Joe Wilson did it in 2009,” Doocy noted.>

<If you’ve been following MeidasTouch’s coverage of Trump’s posting manipulated news articles, you may have seen that Trump posts the word “excerpt” on his most egregious ones.

Trump has posted 14 manipulated articles in February alone and 4 of them were labeled with "excerpt." All of Trump's manipulated articles take the form of screenshots, and have formatting resembling an actual article, sharing the news outlet's logo, article's title, author's name, and publication date, but with all the unfavorables scrubbed from the body.

University of Surrey political professor and political historian Dr. Mark Shanahan, who had his comments scrubbed from a Newsweek article by Trump's deceptive, article repackaging efforts, blasted the GOP frontrunner for the tactics and weighed in on why attaching the word "excerpt" doesn't sanctify Trump's actions:

It is disingenuous of Trump to use other people's material in this way if his edits change the core argument of the original piece. 'Excerpt' has probably been added by his legal team, but it does not cover him for manipulation of content that changes the tone, framing and meaning articulated by the original work. To use all of the publishing information, but manipulated content, is dishonest, dangerous and deserves our derision. At the very least, it also deserves a 'cease and desist' from the publishers' lawyers.

Dr. Mark Shanahan: "To use all of the publishing information, but manipulated content, is dishonest, dangerous and deserves our derision. At the very least, it also deserves a 'cease and desist' from the publishers' lawyers."

Shanahan suspects "excerpt" may have been added to some of Trump's articles by his legal team, but notes that "it does not cover him for manipulation of content that changes the tone, framing and meaning articulated by the original work." Trump's redactions do exactly that. They change the original work of the article's writers.

No one with a shred of academic or journalistic integrity would endorse what Trump is doing here. Shanahan called Trump's use of manipulated content "dishonest, dangerous" and something that "deserves our derision" and even suggested the publishers' lawyers send Trump cease and desist letters.>