Trump's presidential 'heir' plunged into gay porn scandal
Last Friday, Virginia Gov Glenn Youngkin asked Republican nominee for lieutenant governor John Reid to drop out of the race amid allegations he ran a social media page filled with naked pictures of men.
Reid, who is gay and married, denied that the page was his and refused to resign, claiming the page was created in an effort to sabotage his bid to become lieutenant governor.
Now Youngkin is stuck in a bind between needing to publicly back the Republican candidate in Virginia's statewide elections and not wanting to align himself with the man hit by controversy.
The crisis, which could damage Youngkin's chances on the national stage in '28, escalated further over the weekend as one of the governor's top aides resigned.
Matt Moran, who ran Youngkin's Spirit of Virginia PAC, stepped down after he was accused of pressuring Reid to remove himself from the GOP ticket.
Moran has publicly denied he pushed Reid to step aside.
It comes after a GOP top brass tried to pressure Reid to quit over the alleged lewd social media page.
Under Virginia law, Youngkin cannot run for a second consecutive gubernatorial term in the commonwealth.
Many feel that instead, he could launch a 2028 presidential bid as President Donald Trump completes his second term.
Coincidence? The candidate's Instagram handle is 'jrdeux,' the same username a Tumblr account has used to repost hundreds of explicit images
But Youngkin is not an early frontrunner when it comes to the 2028 race.
Instead, Republicans seem to prefer the likes of VP JD Vance or the President's eldest son, Donald Trump Jr, to take over Trump's political legacy, polls show.
In an interview with NBC News on Sunday, Trump named Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio as his potential replacements.
Reid is the first openly gay candidate for statewide office in Virginia.
Youngkin is unable to run for a second consecutive term for governor under Virginia law.
His Republican lieutenant governor Winsome Earle-Sears is running to be the next leader of the commonwealth.
'The Governor was made aware late Thursday of the disturbing online content,' Youngkin's Spirit of Virginia PAC wrote in a statement.
'Friday morning, in a call with Mr Reid, the Governor asked him to step down as the Lt Governor nominee.'
Reid was connected to explicit posts on a Tumblr account with the handle 'jrdeux', which the candidate has used on other social media sites like Instagram and Threads.
Reid's husband, Alonzo Mable, has tagged his spouse in social media posts using the 'jrdeux' moniker.
The Tumblr account includes a litany of gay pornographic images and kinks.
The former radio host says that Youngkin's political operation is threatening him with further damaging information in an effort of hurting his chances at election to be Virginia's next lieutenant governor.
'I can tell you that's not my account,' Reid said in a five-minute video posted on X last week addressing the controversy.
In the clip, Reid notes he was approached by individuals who warned him the account could be damaging to his campaign.
'I demanded to see the evidence, and someone created a social media account with my Instagram name, a name, which I've had for years, but this fake account reposted nude pictures of other people, models, and porn models,' he says.
'That's not my account, and anyone on the Internet can open accounts with the same or similar names as other people.'
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Telegraph
32 minutes ago
- Telegraph
Sex sells for Sydney Sweeney – and so does being a Republican
It has been a busy few days for people who like getting hysterical about Sydney Sweeney. First came the frenzied outrage in certain Left-wing circles after she starred in a provocative advert for American Eagle jeans; the actress, who is white with blonde hair and blue eyes, was accused of promoting eugenics by riffing on genes and jeans. 'Sydney Sweeney has great jeans,' runs the tagline. Then came reports that the 27-year-old Euphoria and Anyone But You star is a registered Republican, further enraging those who abhor the idea that a young performer could have conservative politics or endorse the liberal bogeyman that is Donald Trump. One particularly hysterical social media critic accused Sweeney of parroting 'Nazi propaganda', while others variously said the language in the adverts were reminiscent of '1930s Germany' and championing 'white supremacy'. A few years ago, during the peak woke era, such stories would taint a star, who would rush to reverse their way out of things and apologise for any offence that they unwittingly caused for fear that they would suffer incalculable career damage. But woke is waning and it is hard to see this as anything other than confirmation that Sweeney is the hottest, most talked-about film star in the world right now. Wokeism's censorious peak has passed as the movement's worst excesses have been curbed by champions of free speech and feminists who refused to accept new orthodoxy on gender, as well as a sense that many find constant culture wars wearying. Being young is no longer a guarantee of holding progressive views: Trump did better than ever with young voters last year (earning 42 per cent of votes from the under-30s), while polls suggest Reform UK would be the second-biggest beneficiary of the franchise being extended to 16- and 17-year-olds. Sweeney is, in many respects, a throwback to an earlier Hollywood era: conventionally beautiful, aware of it, interested in making mainstream hits and game enough to regularly get her clothes off on camera. 'I am always very supportive of nudity, of sexual scenes, if the story of the character warrants it,' she told Vanity Fair last year. Much of her performance on Saturday Night Live in March last year was focused on her breasts – at Sweeney's insistence. She knows that sex sells – and, in 2025, so might being a Republican. It is less than a year since Trump was re-elected and, for the first time in his three tilts at the presidency, he comfortably won the popular vote. Just by virtue of being a registered supporter of the Grand Old Party in Florida, Sweeney is much closer to the median American than, say, her peers who drank the California Kool-Aid. Trump himself was asked by reporters about Sweeney's apparent support of him on Sunday night. 'She's a registered Republican?' he said. 'Now I love her ad. You'd be surprised how many people are Republicans.' Later, on his Truth Social website, Trump contrasted the fortunes of American Eagle with those of Jaguar, which had a botched rebrand in November and whose chief executive, Adrian Mardell, retired last week; Budweiser, which lost billions of dollars in market value after teaming up with a transgender influencer; and Taylor Swift, who endorsed Kamala Harris. 'Ever since I alerted the world as to what she was by saying on TRUTH that I can't stand her (HATE!). She was booed out of the Super Bowl and became, NO LONGER HOT,' he wrote in his characteristically statesmanlike style. 'The tide has seriously turned – Being WOKE is for losers, being Republican is what you want to be.' The American Eagle share price subsequently surged by 16 per cent. Even if Sweeney, who has not commented on her voting record, is a Republican she is hardly an unthinking Maga headbanger. Over the years she has publicly expressed support for the Black Lives Matter movement and gay rights, while last year she starred as a novice nun in Immaculate, much of which is an unsubtle commentary on how modern society treats women with unwanted pregnancies. 'I don't like getting into political topics, but I do believe that a woman has the right to be able to decide over her body,' she told Flaunt magazine in 2021. we need to do better. the hate in this world needs to end. #BlackLivesMatter — Sydney Sweeney (@sydney_sweeney) May 31, 2020 This desire to not get into political topics is reflected in the films she stars in, which tend to be firmly in the mainstream and provide escapism from the world beyond the cinema. She and Glen Powell (a Texan who it is also speculated tends towards having conservative politics) basically revived the romcom with Anyone But You, a modern-day take on Much Ado About Nothing. Unlike so many Hollywood stars, Sweeney comes from humble beginnings and is almost as far away as it is to get from being a nepo baby. She grew up in Spokane, Washington state, the daughter of a lawyer mother and hospitality worker father; her brother, Trent, is in the US Air Force and stationed in the UK. Sweeney caught the acting bug as a child, after auditioning to be an extra at the age of 11; two years later, her family relocated to Los Angeles as she tried to make it in Hollywood. Life was hard, with the family spending the best part of a year sharing a one-bedroom hotel room as they struggled to make ends meet. They were forced to sell their home in Washington and, by 2016, her parents had divorced and filed for bankruptcy. That modest background has drilled a remarkable work ethic into Sweeney, who works on evenings and weekends and gets four hours' sleep each night. 'There's 24 hours in a day, obviously,' she said earlier this year. 'But I make sure that there are 26 for me.' Sweeney is just as prolific when it comes to advertising. As well as endorsing American Eagle's jeans, she has shilled for Samsung phones and Baskin-Robbins ice cream, as well as selling soap made using some of her own bath water. She is reported to be launching a lingerie brand with backing from Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos. Her family members, and their apparent politics, have caused her problems in the past. She threw a hoedown-themed 60th birthday party for her mother, Lisa, that became notable when photographs showed that some guests were wearing Trump-style baseball caps with the words 'Make Sixty Great Again' on them. Amid a liberal backlash, Sweeney complained in a post on X that 'an innocent celebration for my mom's milestone 60th birthday has turned into an absurd political statement, which was not the intention'; the following year she said that there had been 'so many misinterpretations' of what had happened. 'The people in the pictures weren't even my family,' she said. 'The people who brought the things that people were upset about were actually my mom's friends from LA who have kids that are walking outside in the Pride parade, and they thought it would be funny to wear because they were coming to Idaho.' For Hollywood the increasingly pugnacious, and litigious, Trump is the 800lb gorilla in the room. There appears to be a tacit acceptance among the entertainment industry's elites that the woke shift that was partly sparked by the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements went so far that it alienated a large swathe of possible viewers. David Ellison, the son of Oracle multi-billionaire Larry, managed to secure US government approval for the purchase of Paramount by his Skydance venture partly by promising to do away with diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies. Meanwhile, Disney – whose chief executive, Bob Iger, was an outspoken critic of Trump's policies during his first term – has rowed back on its blatantly progressive plots in an effort to appeal to as broad a cohort of viewers as possible. For instance, it axed a transgender storyline in February's animated series, Win or Lose. 'When it comes to animated content for a younger audience, we recognise that many parents would prefer to discuss certain subjects with their children on their own terms and timeline,' a spokesman said in December. Taylor Sheridan – the creator of Yellowstone and its spin-offs – has become arguably the most successful TV showrunner of his generation by providing an underserved market of people who do not want high-handed lecturing from the series they watch. A ranch owner in Texas himself, Sheridan romanticises America and its frontier history, rather than scorning it as many liberals have done in recent years, and has huge audiences for his Western revivals. Country artist Morgan Wallen is one of the biggest music stars in the world for similar reasons. Other studios are embracing religious stories as a way to connect with more conservative viewers, while the genre has the added benefit of being relatively cheap to make but a cash cow. The changing tastes of Hollywood can perhaps be best summed up with how two Trump-adjacent projects have fared in the past couple of years. The Apprentice, Sebastian Stan's unflattering Trump biopic, struggled to get a distributor last year, but Amazon has spent tens of millions of dollars on a documentary about Melania, the first lady. Harrison Ford, the veteran Indiana Jones star, told Variety last month that this vibe shift was inevitable. 'The pendulum doth swing in both directions, and it's on a healthy swing to the right at the moment. And, as nature dictates, it will swing back.' Lest we forget that Ronald Reagan, the president who originally coined the 'Make America Great Again' slogan, was a Hollywood star who served as leader of the Screen Actors Guild for almost as long as he was in the White House. For Sweeney, it appears unlikely that her apparent outing as a Republican will do much, if any, damage to her career or cost her industry friends. Her first film set to be released next year is directed by her Euphoria co-star Colman Domingo, who is gay and black, in which she stars as actress and artist Kim Novak. Appropriately enough, it is called Scandalous!
Times
an hour ago
- Times
Trump praises Sydney Sweeney's ad campaign and criticises Taylor Swift
President Trump has praised Sydney Sweeney for starring in the 'hottest' commercial and said 'being woke is for losers' after the actress was identified as a registered Republican in Florida. Sweeney, 27, is the poster girl for an American Eagle jeans campaign that has sparked days of debate about traditional beauty standards. Trump compared the advertising campaign favourably with the recent Jaguar rebrand, which he described as a 'seriously woke advertisement' and a 'total disaster'. 'Sydney Sweeney, a registered Republican, has the 'hottest' ad out there. It's for American Eagle, and the jeans are 'flying of the shelves'. Go get 'em Sydney!' Trump wrote on Truth Social. In the same post, Trump also criticised the 'woke singer' Taylor Swift, having previously clashed with the 35-year-old when she endorsed Kamala Harris at last year's election. He said: 'Ever since I alerted the world as to what she was by saying on TRUTH that I can't stand her (HATE!). She was booed out of the Super Bowl and became NO LONGER HOT. The tide has seriously turned — Being WOKE is for losers, being Republican is what you want to be. Thank you for your attention to this matter!' A public database in Florida's Monroe county shows Sweeney, who has starred in the TV series Euphoria, The White Lotus and the romcom Anyone But You, was registered there as a Republican voter last June, only weeks after Trump was convicted in New York of criminal falsification of business records in the run-up to last year's election. Her registration was discovered by a YouTuber who said she came across it while putting together a profile of Sweeney. • The campaign features a reclining Sweeney, raising her midriff to zip up her jeans while declaring that 'genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair colour, personality and even eye colour'. Turning to stare into the camera, she says: 'My jeans are blue.' This and other advertising spots featuring the same pun were received in some corners of the internet as a 'eugenicist dog-whistle' implying the genes of a blonde, white woman were superior to others'. This, in turn, was seized on by conservative commentators as proof of extremism on the American left. Stephen Cheung, the White House communications director, called it 'cancel culture run amok' and added: 'This warped, moronic and dense liberal thinking is a big reason why Americans voted the way they did in 2024. They're tired of this bullshit.' On the conservative podcast Ruthless, JD Vance, the vice-president, said his 'advice' to Democrats would be 'continue to tell everybody who thinks Sydney Sweeney is attractive a Nazi'. He added: 'You have a normal, all-American, beautiful girl doing, like, a normal jeans ad … and they have managed to so unhinge themselves over this thing.' MARIO ANZUONI/REUTERS Informed of Sweeney's party affiliation as he flew back to Washington from New Jersey on board Air Force One on Sunday night, Trump said that 'you'd be surprised at how many people are Republican'. He added: 'I'm glad you told me that. If Sydney Sweeney is a registered Republican, I think her ad is fantastic.' The podcaster Megyn Kelly claimed the advertisement marked a turning point in the presentation of beauty. 'We have been suffering with the elevation of homely people in our fashion ads and our fitness ads for years now and we are over it,' she said. 'We miss attractive people. We are sick of trying to pretend that these objectively unattractive people are the new beauty standard. They are not.' The campaign has generated controversy but American Eagle insists there is no political subtext American Eagle said the advertisement was simply about jeans, saying: 'Great jeans look good on everyone.' • Aliza Licht: Sydney Sweeney ad proves brands can be sexy again Sweeney has not responded to the controversy. It is not the first time she has become the apparently unwitting focus of an argument about her political affiliation. In 2022 she threw a party for her mother's 60th birthday in which guests wore red caps mimicking Trump's Maga slogan, bearing the legend: 'Make Sixty Great Again.' Photographs of the party showed some guests apparently wearing 'Blue Lives Matter' outfits, referencing the backlash against protests over police brutality in 2020. In a post on X Sweeney complained that 'an innocent celebration for my mom's milestone 60th birthday has turned into an absurd political statement, which was not the intention'. The following year she told Variety that there had been 'so many misinterpretations' about the party. 'The people in the pictures weren't even my family,' she said. 'The people who brought the things that people were upset about were actually my mom's friends from LA who have kids that are walking outside in the Pride parade, and they thought it would be funny to wear because they were coming to Idaho.'
The Guardian
2 hours ago
- The Guardian
Talking politics has bartenders on edge in Trump's Washington DC
Deke Dunne relocated to Washington DC from Wyoming in 2008 to pursue a career in politics. Though a progressive himself, he worked as a legislative aide for Republican senator Mike Enzi and spent many nights at local watering holes, guzzling $10 pitchers and eating wings with fellow broke staffers from both sides of the aisle. Long before he began moonlighting as a bartender, he learned that talking politics in DC bars was always a recipe for disaster. 'When I used to work in politics, I would spend a lot of time in bars near Capitol Hill,' said Dunne, 'so I was exposed to more political professionals. In those spaces, you often find yourself witnessing knockdown, drag-out arguments about politics.' Today, Dunne is one of DC's most influential mixologists, having abandoned politics almost a decade ago for a hospitality career. Serving drinks in a city that is more ideologically divided than ever, Dunne says he exercises more diplomacy behind the bar now than he ever did working in politics. There has always been an unspoken rule among Washington DC bartenders, according to Dunne, that political conversations across the bar should be avoided at all costs. It is generally understood that maintaining neutrality is critical to ensuring that guests of all political persuasions feel welcome. But the partisan rancor in Washington during the early stages of Donald Trump's presidential encore has created palpable tension in hospitality spaces, placing undue strain on staff to manage the vibes. 'It's always been an accepted truth in DC that every four to eight years, you get a whole new swath of people in from a different political ideology and if you want to have a strong, viable business, you don't talk politics,' said Dunne. 'Trump broke that rule.' According to local bar professionals in the nation's capital, the 'tending' part of bartending has never been more challenging. 'Politics in DC is not only something that a lot of people care about, but it's also a lot of people's livelihoods,' said Zac Hoffman, a bar industry veteran who until recently managed the restaurant inside the National Democratic Club near the Capitol. 'When you're talking about work, you're talking about politics. That's just the reality of where we live. It's a company town.' At Allegory, where Dunne oversees the beverage program, the bar has always taken a progressive approach, which occasionally provokes more conservative-minded guests who stay in the Eaton, the boutique hotel and cultural hub in downtown where the bar opened seven years ago. Its aesthetic and cocktail menu reimagines Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, but featuring a young Ruby Bridges, the iconic civil rights activist who faced a jeering mob when she desegregated a Little Rock elementary school. 'Our very presence as a mission-based bar has sparked many conversations surrounding our concept, but also gender-neutral bathrooms, provocative art and advocacy,' he said. 'We've had people that are clearly uncomfortable with our concept leave and then post a negative review but frame it about something else.' The resurgent, and often strident, brand of conservatism that dominates the political sphere in Washington today has many of the city's more progressive bar owners on edge. At The Green Zone, a Middle Eastern cocktail bar in Adams Morgan on the city's north side, politics have always been integral to the bar's identity since it opened in 2018. Bar owner Chris Hassaan Francke, whose mother is Iraqi, has earned a reputation for being outspoken about political conflicts, especially those in the Middle East. But since Trump's return to office, he admits to having toned down some of the rhetoric. 'We changed the name of one of our most infamous cocktails [which contained an incendiary reference to the current president],' said Francke. 'It kills me that I can't always say everything I want to say, but ultimately the safety and wellbeing of my staff [are] more important than that.' While the city may be under Republican rule at the moment, DC itself is still overwhelmingly liberal (Kamala Harris won over 90% of the vote in the 2024 election), which means that a majority of its hospitality workers are liberal, too. 'I know some bartenders who will say the opposite of what they believe around customers they don't agree with politically,' said Hoffman. 'There are plenty of socialists who make great tips talking shit about liberals with Republicans.' It isn't only the more progressive venues around town that have become targets. After recent articles in the New York Times and Washington Post championed upscale Capitol Hill bistro Butterworth's as a haven for Maga sympathizers, backlash ensued. According to chef and co-owner Bart Hutchins – who, like Dunne, also left a career in politics to work in hospitality – being perceived as pro-Trump has attracted crowds to his fledgling restaurant, which opened last fall. But it's also created some unwanted operational challenges. For one, a serial provocateur with an air-horn routinely disrupts his weekly dinner service by sounding it through the front entrance, often multiple times a week. Despite Butterworth's reputation for being a sanctuary for high-profile Trump supporters such as Steve Bannon, not every political conversation at the bar is peaceful. 'I've broken up at least three political arguments since we opened,' said Hutchins. 'It always starts with somebody who's really, really insistent that everyone agrees with them, someone who's watching way too much cable news who's really determined to have their Sean Hannity or Rachel Maddow moment.' Another unfortunate byproduct of being known as a right-leaning restaurant in a left-leaning town, Hutchins says, has been difficulty hiring and retaining staff. 'There have been times where it's been really hard to hire people,' he said. 'Early on, we had some servers self-select out and say: 'I don't want to serve these people.' But a lot of those people have moved on.' Over time, the staff has found ways to put their political convictions aside for the good of the restaurant. 'Our No 1 rule that's written on a door in the back is: 'Everybody's a VIP,' said Hutchins. 'We're not interested in using politics as a measuring device for whether or not someone deserves great service.' For DC bars, proximity to Capitol Hill has historically increased the likelihood that the conversations inside them will revolve around politics. And while some bars on the Hill may welcome these spirited conversations, many older, legacy bars prefer that patrons leave their partisanship at the door. Tune Inn, a well-loved dive bar that originally opened a few blocks from the Capitol in 1947, outwardly discourages political conversations of any kind. 'You can always tell the newbies because they want to come in and immediately start talking about politics,' said Stephanie Hulbert, who has worked as a bartender, server and now general manager at the bar for more than 17 years. 'They get shut down very quickly.' To keep the peace and maintain nonpartisan decorum inside the bar, she and her staff regularly intervene and admonish guests to keep their politics to themselves. These interventions occur at least two or three times every week, according to Hulbert, which is why the TVs inside the bar are deliberately set to sports channels rather than news outlets. 'I'll argue about sports all day long with you,' she said. 'But I won't argue about politics.' Despite the heightened anxiety in Washington, Dunne is optimistic that healthy dialogues in more progressive bars including Allegory can effect positive change. In January, Trump's inauguration drew conservative revelers to the Eaton, where inclusivity and multiculturalism is essential to its brand and mission. That led to some uncomfortable conversations with Republican patrons about the bar's progressive ethos. 'I don't know how effective the conversations were, but they were constructive,' he said. 'We found middle ground about the fact that what Ruby [Bridges] went through was tragic. It's common ground you don't find very often around here anymore.'
