The billionaire head of a Berlin-based global mass media behemoth that owns influential outlets including Politico, reportedly met with White House chief of staff Susie Wiles on Wednesday.

Mathias Döpfner serves as chairman and CEO of Axel Springer SE, a publishing group that operates in dozens of countries and counts U.S. private equity firm KKR — co‑founded by Republican donor Henry Kravis — among its principal owners. According to Forbes, Kravis gave one million dollars to Donald Trump‘s 2017 inauguration committee.

In the U.S., Axel Springer also publishes Business Insider and Morning Brew.

New York Times media reporter Ben Mullin reported that Wiles met with Döpfner in, according to a source, “an introductory, get-to-know-you meeting.”

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The meeting comes just one day after President Donald Trump delivered his controversial State of the Union address and less than nine months before the midterm elections.

Döpfner sent an email to his top executives before the 2020 election, asking if they would like to join him to pray for the re-election of Donald Trump, according to reports. The email came one year before Axel Springer sealed the deal to purchase Politico.

“Do we all want to get together for an hour in the morning on November 3 and pray that Donald Trump will again become President of the United States of America?” Döpfner wrote in the email, The Daily Beast reported, citing an article in The Washington Post.

“No American administration in the last 50 years has done more,” Döpfner added.

“When asked about the message,” The Daily Beast reported, “Döpfner initially denied it existed, going so far as to say: ‘It has never been sent and has never been even imagined.’ When confronted with a printout of the email, he explained that he may have sent it ‘as an ironic, provocative statement in the circle of people that hate Donald Trump.’ ‘That is me,’ he added. ‘That could be.’”

In a 2022 analysis titled “The Scandalous History of America’s Newest Media Baron,” Foreign Policy reported: “The new owner of Politico, Axel Springer, has a decades-long record of bending journalistic ethics for right-wing causes.”

READ MORE: ‘Bloodshot Eyes of Crazy People’: Trump Lashes Out at Two ‘Deranged’ Dems in New Wild Rant

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President Donald Trump escalated his criticism Wednesday of two progressive congressional Democrats who shouted at him during his State of the Union address, denouncing them as “mentally deranged.” In his wild rant he said that the lawmakers had “the bulging, bloodshot eyes of crazy people” and, suggesting deportation, added, “we should send them back from where they came.”

“When you watch Low IQ Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, as they screamed uncontrollably last night at the very elegant State of the Union, such an important and beautiful event, they had the bulging, bloodshot eyes of crazy people, LUNATICS, mentally deranged and sick who, frankly, look like they should be institutionalized,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

U.S. Reps. Omar and Tlaib had denounced the fatal shootings by federal agents of two U.S. citizens in Minnesota. “You have killed Americans!” the two yelled, according to NBC News.

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“When people can behave like that, and knowing that they are Crooked and Corrupt Politicians, so bad for our Country, we should send them back from where they came — as fast as possible.”

Trump’s targeting of the left did not end there.

He suggested that the two members of Congress should join with Hollywood star Robert De Niro.

They “should actually get on a boat with Trump Deranged Robert De Niro, another sick and demented person with, I believe, an extremely Low IQ, who has absolutely no idea what he is doing or saying — some of which is seriously CRIMINAL!”

Trump did not specify which remarks he believed to be criminal.

“When I watched him break down in tears last night, much like a child would do, I realized that he may be even sicker than Crazy Rosie O’Donnell, who is right now in Ireland trying to figure out how to come back into our beautiful United States,” Trump also wrote.

“The only difference between De Niro and Rosie is that she is probably somewhat smarter than him, which isn’t saying much. The good news is that America is now Bigger, Better, Richer, and Stronger than ever before, and it’s driving them absolutely crazy!”

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President Donald Trump will get his first opportunity to “test drive” his midterm message “later this week, when he travels to Texas, where the Latino voters whose shift toward Trump in his successful 2024 reelection campaign highlighted how he had reshaped the Republican coalition,” according to the Associated Press.

Recent polls show that the Latino vote surge that helped push Trump back to the White House in 2024 has declined from that level.

Trump on Wednesday “will spend much of his time participating in meetings at the White House, including policy sessions and a sit-down with Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy.” President Joe Biden, the AP noted, “went to swing states such as Wisconsin and Pennsylvania the day after his speech in the last two years of his term.”

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“In 2024, Trump won 48 percent of self-described Hispanic or Latino voters, the highest mark for a Republican presidential candidate in at least a half-century, driven largely by economic anxiety,” Politico reported. “But polling shows Trump’s approval among Latino voters cratering as their satisfaction with the economy and immigration enforcement plummet.”

Texas is about 40 percent Hispanic.

“Senior White House officials have promised that Trump will travel the country regularly until the midterms,” the AP adds. “He so far has hit critical battleground states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania and North Carolina on his economy tour, but he also traveled to reliably conservative Iowa and the congressional district of former Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. He has boosted candidates — in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, he bantered with Republican Michael Whatley and promoted his Senate run — while sometimes veering far away from the economic points the trips are meant to emphasize.”

Late last year, The New York Times raised the question of whether Republicans had overplayed their hand by pushing to redistrict in Texas.

“Republicans redid their voting map so they could flip five seats to help keep control of the U.S. House,” the Times reported. “But achieving that goal is far from guaranteed.”

READ MORE: Trump Slammed for ‘Bragging’ He Kicked Millions Off Food Stamps

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