Meet the Ambitious, Duplicitous, Semi-Fictitious MAGA Upstart Driving Trump World Nuts
Plus: Tim Pool becomes persona non grata at TPUSA party.
Welcome back to False Flag! Laura Loomer’s lawsuit against HBO host and comedian Bill Maher over Maher’s joke that Loomer was sleeping with Donald Trump is not faring well. How can we tell? Loomer’s lawyer Larry Klayman posted a blurry YouTube video earlier this month begging Donald Trump to intervene and get the case settled. In the video, which has just over 400 views as of this writing, Klayman proposed that Trump use Maher’s visit to the White House earlier this year as leverage.
“Play a role here if you could, Mr. President,” Klayman said. “Get ahold of Bill Maher, and say, ‘Look, settle this thing with HBO. Laura Loomer’s a good person who’s been hurt.’”
He goes on to portray Loomer as an utterly devoted supporter. But not like that! “I know that she loves you—not in a sexual sense, of course,” Klayman said. “And I do, too!”
Why the desperation? Perhaps it’s because on November 6, the Florida Supreme Court issued a ruling suspending Klayman’s license in the state. Klayman now has thirty days to wrap up his representation on active cases, including Loomer’s.
Speaking of legal trouble, potential Florida gubernatorial candidate James Fishback—a trash-talking new right-media star—is facing a lot of it. But that’s not what’s driving Trump world crazy. It’s that Fishback may be trying to take down one of their own. Read on for more!
–Will
REP. BYRON DONALDS (R-Fla.) should be cruising into the Florida governor’s mansion, primarily because he possesses the most important currency in GOP politics: Donald Trump’s endorsement. But despite that leg up, Donalds has not been able to clear the primary field.
Thirty-year-old DOGE advocate James Fishback is reportedly on the verge of announcing a gubernatorial bid, telling me in an email that he’ll make an announcement “imminently.” And though he possesses a pipsqueak-ish energy, he also has racked up a little credibility in MAGA circles.
Fishback has invented his own anti-woke version of high school debate. Elon Musk praised his idea for a “DOGE dividend” that would give Americans checks for money saved through DOGE cuts. Podcaster Benny Johnson suggested that Fishback, a critic of Federal Reserve chief Jerome Powell, might be appointed to the Fed board. In August, Fishback earned online right cred when he was kicked out of an economic conference for confronting Lisa Cook, the Federal Reserve board member who has been a target of Trump’s ire.
Fishback, who now runs his own investment firm called Azoria Capital, has described himself as the son of a bus driver and as a college dropout who left Georgetown University to enter finance. He does not appear to have run for office before.
Despite that rags-to-riches backstory, not everyone in GOP circles is a fan. In fact, bigwigs inside the White House and the inner Trump orbit appear to have been driven a bit insane by Fishback’s bid.
Last week, Politico reported that Trump allies like White House deputy chief of staff James Blair and adviser Alex Bruesewitz had urged Fishback not to run. After that article appeared, both men criticized Fishback for the possibility that he’ll launch a scorched-earth primary bid against Donalds, whom Fishback has dubbed “DEI Donalds” and “H1-Byron.” In an email to me, Fishback said Donalds is a “slave to his donors.” (Donalds is black).
Bruesewitz posted a photo illustration of Fishback’s head in a goldfish bowl, apparently a play on his last name. Blair called the idea that he was concerned about Fishback’s bid “a lie.”
Rep. Randy Fine, a Florida Republican who fashions himself a Trump ally but is mainly a House GOP oddball, dubbed Fishback a “groyper.”
“He’s a total wierdo [sic],” Fine, an ardent supporter of Israel, declared on X.
Ultimately, Fishback’s electoral chances are slim. Donalds, despite being dogged on the campaign trail with questions about when he’ll debate Fishback and why young voters should trust him more, is the favorite. Though current Gov. Ron DeSantis is not a fan, his efforts to find a more respectable challenger have, so far, floundered.
And yet, Fishback’s rise is extremely edifying, if only because it serves as an example of what it takes to succeed in right-wing media these days: questionable claims of anti-conservative bias, some pluck, and plenty of purchased social-media likes.
WHILE HE HAS A GROWING POLITICAL PROFILE, Fishback is better known for his time in the world of finance. More specifically, he’s better known for being at the center of a much-ridiculed legal battle with his former hedge fund.
Between 2021 and 2023, Fishback worked as a relatively junior “research analyst” at Greenlight Capital, a hedge fund run by billionaire David Einhorn. In Fishback’s telling, he quit in 2023 to launch his own hedge fund after facing discrimination at the firm for being a Republican. According to Einhorn, Fishback was so bad at his job that he quit just hours before he would have been fired.
The legal fight between Fishback and Greenlight began after Fishback left, with the hedge fund alleging that he was harassing and defaming them, had formed a competing fund, and was misrepresenting his title and responsibilities in pursuing new clients. Greenlight alleged that Fishback was a lowly “research analyst,” while Fishback had given himself a more exalted title—“head of macro”—with responsibility for analyzing high-level economic trends like interest rates. Fishback, in his defense, cited a single email where he was described that way.
There were other pearls in Greenlight’s still-ongoing lawsuit. The fund accused Fishback of taking confidential company information, and trying to use the firm’s charity gift-matching program to direct $10,000 to a debate nonprofit Fishback himself ran in a way that raised questions about his “personal integrity.”
Greenlight didn’t respond to a request for comment. In an email, Fishback broadly dismissed most questions about the suit as relying on “unproven, unsubstantiated allegations” and called Einhorn a “Soros-aligned billionaire hedge fund manager.”
In the suit, the fund noted that, at times, Fishback’s attempts to become a right-wing media figure conflicted with his actual job, as when he told one executive he would miss work in the morning to go on Bret Baier’s Fox News show to promote his anti-woke version of high school debate.
“Well—it’s a workday,” the executive responded, in an email later made public in court filings. “You ought to be working.”
Fishback ended up getting the conservative media clout he craved—just maybe not in the manner he imagined. The idea of a junior employee like Fishback inventing a “head of macro” title for himself became a finance-world meme.
Fishback’s tireless self-promotion was a theme throughout the lawsuit. So was his duplicity. In an effort to put pressure on Einhorn, he teamed up with a conservative college student, whom he had create dummy email accounts to plant stories critical of the billionaire.
“OMG I LOVE YOU, No Diddy,” Fishback wrote in one exchange, after the student earned a response from a reporter, using a slang reference to Sean “Diddy” Combs.
“lol we gonna bring this man down,” the student replied.
“YES WE ARE….!!!!” Fishback wrote.
In one of the more embarrassing exchanges entered into the record, Fishback urged the student to send an anonymous email to Bari Weiss’s Free Press praising an article Fishback had written for the site. The article was, to be kind, fairly unoriginal and reductive. In it, Fishback made the case to scrap debate moderators and have presidential campaigns go at it like Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas in their 1858 Senate race.
Perhaps for that reason, Fishback ended up writing the anonymous laudatory email praising his column himself and urging the Free Press to have Fishback write a follow-up article.
As part of another scheme aimed at Greenlight, Fishback told the student to get the student’s father to place a phone call with a reporter.
“Your dad needs to do it,” Fishback wrote. “Has an older voice.”
“Uh I don’t think my dad would be comfortable doing that,” the student replied.
“WTF,” Fishback replied. “My dad will do it then.” (It’s not clear if Fishback’s father participated in the plan.)
Fishback waged a tireless social media battle against Einhorn. At one point, he urged his college-student associate to reply to every X user posting critically of Fishback.
“I need this done now,” Fishback wrote in one exchange.
The student wasn’t so gung-ho about the directive. “Sir are you sure these are accounts worth responding to?” the student replied. “The last one has an anime profile picture lol.”
Other text messages show Fishback trying to boost his side of the social-media battle with Einhorn, telling the student to “buy 250 likes” for pro-Fishback tweets with the student’s credit card.
As part of his anti-Einhorn campaign, Fishback wanted potential investors in his new hedge fund to ask Greenlight if he had worked as “head of macro,” which Fishback felt would lay the groundwork for a suit he later filed and eventually dropped. After one investor agreed to do so, Fishback and his father rejoiced over text.
“He da GOAT,” Fishback’s father wrote.
“[Investor] SCOTT is DA REAL ONE,” Fishback replied.
“DAY 1 HOMEBOY,” his father wrote back.
“HOLDING IT DOWN FOR THE GANG,” Fishback agreed.
Fishback and his father also talked about politics. In one 2024 text, the younger Fishback praised ESPN commentator Stephen A. Smith for delivering a pro-Trump monologue, writing “The blacks get it.”
Fishback’s efforts, though, ultimately ended in disaster. In late September, the two sides signed a joint agreement where Fishback admitted to taking confidential information from Greenlight at least 33 times, and promised to pay the hedge fund’s legal fees. Exactly what that legal bill will be is still in dispute, but Greenlight’s white-shoe law firm, Akin Gump, has asked for more than $1.8 million. Adding in the more than $200,000 in loans that Fishback took out from the hedge fund while working there, and the aspiring politico is looking at potentially more than $2 million in looming payments.
No wonder he was advocating for a DOGE dividend!
Tim Pool snubbed by TPUSA
SKATEBOARDER/CONSERVATIVE PODCASTER Tim Pool has been snubbed by Turning Point USA, in the latest sign of turmoil on the right in the wake of the assassination of the group’s founder, Charlie Kirk.
For three years, Pool and his entourage have broadcast their online show in Phoenix for TPUSA’s annual AmericaFest convention, one of the MAGA movement’s premiere destinations (and occasional street-fight venues). It’s a whole production. Pool has to build a new set, and bring his crew and various hangers-on to staff his show. In the past, however, Pool said Kirk made it all run smoothly, even dispatching a private jet for Pool’s crew.
“It made me feel like part of the cool kids, you know what I mean?” the beanie-clad Pool said in a Tuesday video. “Like Charlie was the popular kid, he had built this thing, he had the charisma, the style, the gumption. And he said, ‘No you’re with me, brother.”
That’s all over now, according to Pool. In his video, Pool said he had been disinvited from AmFest over “comments that I had made that were deemed hurtful.”
“I don’t need to be there if they don’t want me there,” Pool said.
What set off TPUSA staff? In early October, less than a month after Kirk’s murder, Pool appeared on a comedy podcast and predicted that TPUSA was likely doomed without its founder. Saying he anticipated that the comments would get him “in trouble,” Pool added that Kirk’s security team had been “complacent” about the prospects of a shooting and said Kirk’s remaining staffers were trying to put on a brave face for donors.
“Without Charlie, I am not confident Turning Point can persist,” Pool said on the podcast.
TPUSA did not respond to a request for comment.
Pool’s ouster from the event marks the latest example of splintering on the right among Kirk’s friends. While Candace Owens has been pushing off-the-wall conspiracy theories about Kirk’s death that often implicate TPUSA staffers by name, Kirk eulogizer Tucker Carlson has thrown the conservative movement into turmoil by palling around with white nationalist and Kirk nemesis Nick Fuentes.
For his part, Pool says he won’t push the issue, using Dungeons & Dragons typology to explain why he’ll let it slide.
“I’m a rogue, not a paladin,” Pool said.
"He's Head of Macro" is going to become my new go-to insult.
Will....for your heroics and slime busting, I dub you Sir Will Sommer of the Rogue and Paladin Round Table.