Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

At about 1:30 this morning, local time, the Dali, a 985-foot (300 m) container ship operating under a Singapore flag, struck the steel Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, Maryland, that spans the lower Patapsco River and outer Baltimore Harbor. The bridge immediately collapsed.

Eight maintenance workers were on the bridge repairing potholes when the ship hit. Two were rescued from the water, but the other six remain missing. Search and rescue operations were complicated by twisted metal and debris from the collapsed bridge. This evening, the Coast Guard called off its search. Tomorrow morning, divers will begin recovery efforts.

It is possible there were motorists on the bridge, too, but fewer than there might otherwise have been. Crew members issued a “Mayday” call—an internationally recognized word meaning distress—that Maryland police heard. At 1:27, police radio recorded an officer saying a ship had lost control of its steering as it approached the bridge, and to stop traffic and evacuate the area. There were cars submerged in the water, but they may have belonged to the construction workers.

The loss of the bridge will tangle traffic and disrupt supply chains. Named for the Maryland lawyer who in 1814 wrote the poem that became the national anthem, the Francis Scott Key bridge carries I-695, the Baltimore Beltway, and is used by about 30,000 people a day.

The Port of Baltimore is one of the nation’s largest shipping hubs, especially for both imports and exports of cars and light trucks. About 850,000 vehicles go through that port every year. So does more than 20% of the nation’s coal exports. In 2023 the port moved a record-breaking $80 billion worth of foreign cargo. Now the shipping lane is closed and must be cleared of debris.

“There is no question this will be a major and protracted impact on supply chains,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said from Baltimore today.

Perhaps learning from the 2023 East Palestine, Ohio, train derailment, when the government response was fast but quiet and thus opened a window for right-wing complaints they weren’t doing enough, the administration was out front today. Buttigieg rushed to the scene from a trip out West, and Maryland governor Wes Moore told reporters Buttigieg had called him at 3:30 am, just two hours after the crash.

By around 6:00 am, the National Transportation Safety Board already had a team of 24 people on the scene to launch an investigation into the cause of the collision.

Speaking today, President Joe Biden said: “I’ve directed my team to move heaven and earth to reopen the port and rebuild the bridge as soon as…humanly possible. And we’re going to work hand in hand…to support Maryland, whatever they ask for. And we’re going to work with our partners in Congress to make sure the state gets the support it needs. It’s my intention that federal government will pay for the entire cost of reconstructing that bridge, and I expect…the Congress to support my effort.”

Former member of President Obama’s 2012 campaign Jason Karsh noted Biden’s speech and said on social media: “Because Biden got infrastructure spending done for the first time in over a generation, and because [Pennsylvania] was able to rebuild that bridge that collapsed in record time, Dem[ocrat]s have the credibility to say things like this. Competence in government matters.”

It remains far too soon for any solid understanding of what caused the deadly crash.

Despite the impossibility of solid information in the hours immediately after the collision—or perhaps because of it—verified accounts on X (formerly Twitter) began spreading conspiracy theories. They posted that the accident was linked to terrorism, Jewish people, or diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs. “Did anti-white business practices cause this disaster?” one posted. Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones wrote that the collision was “deliberate” and that “WW3 has already started.”

Technology reporter Taylor Lorenz, who studies social media patterns, explained in the Washington Post that many of these accounts are “engagement farming.” This is the practice of posting extremist comments to generate attention, which can then be monetized by, for example, getting a cut of advertising that appears near those comments. Comments with heavy engagement can receive thousands of dollars.

For a long time now, America’s political right has riled people up with wild political rhetoric to get them to buy stuff. Just today, Trump began to hawk Bibles for $59.99, plus shipping and handling, with a video message saying “Religion and Christianity are the biggest things missing from this country, and I truly believe we need to bring them back…. That’s why our country’s going haywire—we’ve lost religion in our country.”

That system appeared to be in play as Trump supporters apparently flocked to today’s public offering of the Trump Media & Technology Group, the company behind the Truth Social app, sending the stock upward 16%. That surge would value the company at more than $7 billion, although in the first nine months of last year it had only about $3 million in sales and lost nearly $50 million. Julian Klymochko, founder and CEO of Accelerate Financial Technologies, told NPR’s Rafael Nam that the $7 billion valuation “is completely detached from any sort of fundamentals.”

Buying stock in the company is “more of a political movement or just a speculative meme stock [a stock driven by social media] that’s completely detached or unrelated to the underlying business fundamentals of Truth Social,” Klymochko said.

As well as convincing supporters to buy products, extremist rhetoric can push them toward violence. Yesterday, John Keller, the head of a Department of Justice task force set up to protect election workers, told reporters Trump’s lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen has put the U.S. in a “new era” in which election workers are “scapegoated, targeted, and attacked.”

Today, on his social media network, Trump attacked individuals related to his upcoming election interference case. He lashed out at one of the prosecutors on Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg’s staff who previously worked for the Justice Department; Judge Juan Merchan, the judge in his upcoming criminal case for election interference; and the judge’s daughter. Of the judge and his daughter, Trump told his angry followers: “These COUNTRY DESTROYING SCOUNDRELS & THUGS HAVE NO CASE AGAINST ME. WITCH HUNT!”

Legal analyst Joyce White Vance of Civil Discourse called out Trump’s “rank effort at intimidating the judge by threatening his family,” which she said “merits a gag order but also serious pushback from [Republican] leadership—which we know won't come.”

Republican leadership indeed stayed quiet, but the judge noted Trump’s pattern of using “threatening, inflammatory, [and] denigrating” statements against individuals in his legal cases and placed a gag order on him. Merchan noted that in the past, Trump’s statements had intimidated the individual targeted and required them to hire protection.

Trump can still talk about Merchan or Bragg, but he cannot comment on any attorney, court staff member, or family member of prosecutors or lawyers. He can’t make statements about any potential or actual juror.

Other news today suggests that Americans outside the MAGA bubble are turning against the poisonous politics that appeals to fear and hatred so its perpetrators can gain money or power.

The outrage over NBC’s hiring of former Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel was so strong that today the chair of NBC News, Cesar Conde, emailed staff to tell them he had “decided that Ronna McDaniel will not be an NBC News contributor.” McDaniel had trafficked in lies to support Trump and had worked with him to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

When the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine today, observers thought the justices seemed inclined to back away from the decision of extremist antiabortion judge Matthew Kacsmaryk taking the abortion drug mifepristone off the market. Antiabortion activists have long sought to ban abortion nationwide, but a strong majority of Americans support reproductive rights and have made their wishes known at the ballot box.

Voters’ frustration with the extremists who have captured the Republican Party appeared to be behind the results in today’s special election for a seat in the Alabama legislature. There, voters in a swing district elected a Democrat, who ran on protecting abortion access, to replace a Republican. In 2022 that Democrat, Marilyn Lands, won about 45% of the vote. Today she won almost 65% of it.

The rotten sonofabitch is hawking bibles for 60 bucks.

I just can't...

One Purple State Is ‘Testing the Outer Limits of MAGAism’

On Nov. 5, North Carolina will determine whether a slate of Republican candidates who believe that the 2020 election was stolen, who dismiss Trump’s 91 felony charges and who are eager to be led by the most prodigious liar in the history of the presidency, can win in a battleground state.

Pope McCorkle, a Democratic consultant and professor at Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy, argued in an email that the results of this year’s Republican primary election on March 5 demonstrate that “the North Carolina G.O.P. is now a MAGA party. With the gubernatorial nomination of Mark Robinson, the N.C. G.O.P. is clearly in the running for the most MAGA party in the nation.”

As they are elsewhere, MAGA leaders in North Carolina are confrontational.

In February 2018, Robinson, the first Black lieutenant governor of the state, described on Facebook his view of survivors of school shootings who then publicly call for gun control. They are “media prosti-tots” who suffer from “the liberal syndrome of rectal cranial inversion mixed with a healthy dose of just plain evil and stupid permeating your hallways.”

In a March 2018 posting on Facebook, Robinson declared: “This foolishness about Hitler disarming MILLIONS of Jews and then marching them off to concentration camps is a bunch of hogwash.”

In an October 2021 sermon in a North Carolina church, Robinson told parishioners, “There’s no reason anybody anywhere in America should be telling any child about transgenderism, homosexuality, any of that filth. And yes, I called it filth.”

There are many ways to express MAGA extremism.

On May 13, 2020, Michele Morrow, the Republican nominee for North Carolina Superintendent of Public Schools, responded on X (formerly Twitter) to a suggestion that Barack Obama be sent to the Guantánamo Bay detention camp on charges of treason. Morrow’s counterproposal?

[quote]I prefer a Pay Per View of him in front of the firing squad. I do not want to waste another dime on supporting his life. We could make some money back from televising his death.

Did Trump just get…bailed out? At precisely the moment he needed a major infusion of cash, pushed to the brink by massive judgments against him, on the brink of liquidating his properties…

• Trump’s Truth Social valued at more than $9bn as it goes public in New York

The firm behind Donald Trump’s Truth Social went public on Tuesday at a price that values the minnow social network at more than $9bn.

Shares in Digital World Acquisition, the shell company with which Trump’s social media business is merging, have been surging since the turn of the year – and rallied by more than 40% as it combined with Trump Media & Technology.

The firm is trading under the ticker symbol “DJT”, using Trump’s initials.

Trump Media’s arrival on the market netted the former president a paper fortune of more than $5bn. After the deal closed on Monday, Bloomberg said that Trump had joined the ranks of the world’s 500 wealthiest people for the first time.

Business as usual, right? Not even close, by the looks of things. Let’s do some quick, non-scary math. Hold on while I put on my CEO hat.

Truth Social, Trump Media’s main “asset,” generated (go ahead and chuckle) $3.3 million in revenue last year. Meanwhile, it lost $49 million overall.

That’s because it has just…5 million subscribers. These days? That’s minuscule—single mid-level ad campaigns get (way) more than that, for example.

In a sane world, such a business would be valued, very, very generously, at maybe, maybe $20-$30 million, or so. You get there by doing a ten-times revenue multiples, and that’s if someone were delusional enough not to care about the overall losses.

So…now it’s valued at $5 billion? A company with revenues of $3 million, which is barely, these days a mid-size one, let alone worthy of a public listing on a major stock exchange?

What exactly happened here? Was this a bailout?

If It Looks Like a Bailout, and Smells Like a Bailout…

A “special purpose vehicle” called “Digital World” was created for the express purpose, more or less, of acquiring Trump’s weird internet ventures, when the time was right.

• CBS: "Special purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs, are shell companies created to take a private business public without conducting an initial public offering.

In 2021, DWAC announced its intent to merge with Trump's media group, sending shares of Digital World upward by more than 800%, sparking comparisons with meme stock businesses like GameStop. At that time, SPACs were also drawing outsized attention from small investors after some gained endorsements from celebrities and investors alike.

Investors who own DWAC stock will receive one share of the new company for each share of DWAC they owned, according to a regulatory filing."

So who’s behind “Digital World”? After all, they’re the ones taking the bath here: they created a “special purpose vehicle,” capitalized well enough to get floated on the stock exchange, meaning that they poured a lot of money into it.

• “DWAC was created with the help of ARC Capital, a Shanghai-based firm specializing in listing Chinese companies on American stock markets that has been a target of U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) investigations for misrepresenting shell corporations.

DWAC disclosed in an October 2023 regulatory filing that after investors had canceled $467 million of their commitments, the firm would return the remaining $533 million of the $1 billion it had raised."

Things are getting weird, no?

Basically, here’s what it looks like. An “entity,” think of it as a fund, was created to essentially bail Trump out. That entity was funded generously, to the tune of hundreds of millions, by shady “investors,” and then floated on the stock market.

If you doubt me, ask yourself. If you had a company worth $5 billion, $1 billion—it doesn’t even matter—or even just shares in such a company, would you “merge” it with one worth…literally billions less? $3 million is literally 0.1% of $3 billion.

So the original shareholders are now the proud “owners” of a business worth 0.1% of what they put into the fund. Go ahead and chuckle, because that’s why it smells like a bailout.

Nobody, and I mean nobody, in their right mind would make this as a business decision. You have to really, really love Trump to want to…basically throw this much money away, this transparently. We’re talking about burning billions.

I’m surprised more questions haven’t been raised by the financial papers, to be honest, because this reeks to high heaven, almost comically and laughably so.

Meet the World’s “Luckiest” Businessman

The interesting thing about all this is the timing, of course. It’s just a coincidence that all this happened just as Trump was in desperate need of cash, forced to the wall, on the brink of having to liquidate his properties and whatnot. Gee, what a lucky coincidence. I wish that when I needed a bailout there was a “special purpose acquisition vehicle” willing to acquire me by overpaying by 100,000%, which is exactly what just happened here.

The timing is enough to make enough Marlon Brando playing Vito Corleone roll his eyes so hard they practically explode. Talk about transparent. All of this happened just when it needed to, which is the really funny, weird, jarring, absurd thing—the bailout was waiting in the wings. We should all be so lucky, I guess. Either Trump’s the world’s luckiest businessman, or, well, this is a bailout.

It’s not fraud, because of course, hey, if you want to overpay for something by 100,000%, you have every right to. But it is…something in a whole twilight zone far beyond merely “odd.”

Who’s The Mark in This Con Game?

So who takes the bath here? The original investors, whoever they are, do. And whomever’s foolish to buy into this obvious contraption as a “shareholder” will, too. Because of course, there’s no way that Trump’s Truth Social ever gets close to justifying billions in valuation with mere low barely. millions in revenue—the share price will just fall, which I guess is a kind of cold comfort.

At least in the sense that the financial press is pretty shamelessly playing along with this nonsense, and describing all this as a “meme stock,” to be owned by hapless day traders, but of course, that’s not really true, either, because “meme stocks” are based on uncertainty (“this thing could rocket!”) but here we know the facts and numbers of what the business is really, actually worth beyond a shadow of a doubt.

There’s a deeper story here, behind the comedy-villain level financial machinations, and the absurdity of watching poor old fools who are gullible enough to buy shares in this mess get fleeced (“I’ll buy shares in Trump’s new company and show him how much I love him and get rich!”)

The Path Back to the Presidency Has Already Been Made

There’s sort of a predestined path set up for Trump to ascend back to the Presidency—and all he has to do is walk it. Think about it. What passes for his intelligentsia has already drafted a 1000-page agenda for what to do the moment he takes power, right down to details of purging and radicalizing every government agency. The GOP’s been cowed into submission, and he’s already something much more like it’s tyrant, it’s Putin, than any sort of vaguely democratic leader who can be questioned and has to offer reasons, explanations, and ideas.

And now we see that waiting in the wings, for just this eventuality—a “liquidity crisis,” in financial speak, or the possibility of bankruptcy, in plainer English—was a bailout, basically, ready to go.

Pretty incredible, in a way. But this is what the authoritarian side now excels at. Preparing, smoothing the way, making it all seem inevitable, by removing every obstacle and greasing every wheel in sight.

That tells us something, too. This is what a maturing political side looks like. When political factions mature, that’s when they become capable of smooth tricks like these. Here’s your agenda and plan, ready to go, sir. Here’s the cash you’ll need, should the eventuality arise. Here’s the army of loyalists, at your beck and command. If the goals were more normal, this would be the stuff of pretty normal politics, in the sense that this is what we expect from mature political parties and factions—expertise, competence, professionalism, resources deployed to where they’re needed most, fast.

But to see it in this context, which is authoritarianism, anti-democratic politics, is striking. It tells us that form has matured to the side that it’s capable of professionalism and competence, at least in the sinister way that authoritarians are at their worst, really, and I’m sure I don’t have to give you examples.

(Why) The Authoritarians Are One Step Ahead of Democracy

So all of this means something, too. It’s not just that Trump got bailed out exactly when he needed it most, by a gigantic planet-sized barrel of dry powder that was right there, not just ready and waiting, but willing to play the comical hand of “let me overpay you by 100,000%, and never mind who notices.” It’s also that all this is part of a pattern, which is the path for Trump back to the Presidency being cleared, sorted, practically garlanded with roses and sprayed with perfume.

We should think about all that pretty carefully, I’d imagine. I don’t really like to truck in conspiratorialism, and this isn’t that. If it looks like a bailout, it is one. And when a bailout’s ready and waiting for a figure who wants to destroy democracy, that should strike a sort of horror into all of us. Because what provoked that bailout, of course, was the people, literally, as in, the people versus. Cases, the rule of law, justice being done. This is a naked attempt to place Trump above the law, yet again.

And sadly, it’ll probably work, to an extent.

There’s another meaning to all this, which I’ll briefly touch on. The democratic side is terrible at this. I don’t mean laughably flimsy bailouts, fleecing people, and so on. I just mean working as a team, maybe, or this level of smooth operation. The democratic side, and this is true globally, but you can also think about it in terms of the Democrats in America—it sucks at this.

All this. Providing capital and resources—try being a politician on the democratic and lining up funding from parties or donors. It’s very, very hard to come by, much harder than on the fanatical side now. Certainly, “entities” aren’t lining up to bail you out. Then there’s the agenda and ideas aspect—the democratic side isn’t out there writing 1000 page missions. Why not? It damned well should be, too. The parts of democratic side don’t work together nearly as smoothly.

Now, partly, of course, you can cry, “you idiot, they’re authoritarians!” Democracy is always messier, but this time, the democratic side isn’t getting it together. The parts are stuck or corroded. The team isn’t working together, and the coalition of center and left is splintering, while the old generation of leaders is stuck or missing in action. The rising younger generation, like AOC or who have you, meanwhile, isn’t empowered, but demonized even within the establishment, the very one which painted figures like Liz and Bernie as “too radical.”

These are problems of what’s called “institutional inertia” in management science, and it’s killing the democratic side. The opposite of institutional inertia is what’s happening on the authoritarian side—a bailout ready to go before the fireworks went off, and then delivering at light speed. The planning that’s anticipating the return to office. And so on. They’re one step ahead of the democratic side, and that’s why it’s losing.

Democrat who ran heavily on abortion rights, IVF wins Alabama special election

Marilyn Lands won a decisive victory in a state House district that Donald Trump narrowly won in 2020

Donald Trump’s social network went public on Tuesday and almost immediately hit a valuation of almost $8bn (£6.3bn). The valuation fell back to a more modest $6.58bn by the time markets closed in New York, but that still represented a gain of more than 15% on its initial public offering (IPO) value. Shares rose again in volatile trading on Wednesday, and were up 13% by mid-morning, valuing it at $9.3bn. That enormous success has raised questions, and not all of them are easy to answer.

How can it possibly be worth $9bn?
The glib answer is “because the most recent price someone bought a share of the company at is $65.70”. The valuation of a publicly traded company such as Truth Social – officially, the “Trump Media & Technology Group Corp”, with the stock ticker DJT, referencing its founder’s initials – is just a product of multiplying the value of an individual share with the number outstanding.

Typically, that value, known as the market capitalisation, is kept in check by reference to the “fundamentals” of the company: how much money it makes or loses, and how fast it is growing or shrinking. But sometimes … it isn’t.

In the case of Truth Social, its revenue during the first nine months of last year was just $3.3m from advertising, and it recorded a loss of $49m.

Why don’t investors care about the fundamentals?
Historically, the big reason why stock valuations become detached from reality is speculative bubbles. Even if you don’t think a company is particularly valuable, it may still be worth buying their stock at a high price if you think you can sell it on at an even higher price.

But Truth Social seems to be part of a more recent phenomenon: the “meme stock”.

What is a meme stock?
The term was coined to describe a small group of publicly traded stocks that have attracted a big proportion of private “retail” investors. Those investors typically use zero-commission trading apps such as Robinhood to take a much more active role in the markets than has been typical for individuals until recently, and coordinate on social media, particularly sites such as Reddit, to share stock tips.

Infamously, the valuation of the American video game retailer GameStop rose by more than 1,800%, after a critical mass of investors coordinated on the WallStreetBets subreddit to take a stake. The investors’ theory was that an engineered “short squeeze” could force those who had “shorted” – that is, bet on GameStop’s share price falling – to buy the shares back at inflated valuations. Three years on, GameStop remains almost 10 times more valuable than it was just before it achieved meme stock status – and just a quarter off its peak.

Is Truth Social a true meme stock?
Investors in Donald Trump’s social network definitely have a lot in common with those in the GameStop bubble. Coordinating online to boost a share’s value with lots of little investments from individuals, rather than big corporate investors, is a similar story to GameStop and other meme stocks such as cinema chain AMC or rental company Hertz.

But unlike those shareholders, there is little sense that the Truth Social investors are driven by, or even care about, turning a profit on their stake. Instead, buying in is seen as a chance to invest in Trump – or even just to show your support for the man. In that way, Truth Social has less in common with other meme stocks and more with non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and cryptocurrencies – a market the former president has also dabbled in.

Can Trump sell out early?
With legal bills in the millions – including one reduced this week from $454m to a still hefty $175m – the big question for many is whether the Truth Social float will allow Trump to turn his newfound paper wealth into hard cash. Officially, the answer is a simple “no”: the IPO agreement requires insiders to hold their stake for six months after the company goes public.

But that can be overruled by a vote from the company’s board of directors, which includes such independent votes as Donald Trump Jr, and Linda McMahon and Robert Lighthizer, two former officials in Trump’s administration. Even if they choose not to authorise a sale, they may offer a halfway house, rewriting the agreement so that Trump Sr can use his shares as collateral for a loan.

Will Truth Social ever make money?
A few years ago, it was possible to foresee a rosy future for Truth Social: the increasing polarisation of American society meant the conditions were ripe for a rightwing social network, in contrast to the Silicon Valley ideology that dominated online. Truth Social, with its backing from Trump, felt like the most likely to succeed in that space, against the 4chan-inflected tone of precursor Gab and the Trump-allied site Parler.

Then Elon Musk bought Twitter. Under the billionaire’s ownership, the site, rebranded as X, has become the home of the online right on its own, shedding a fifth of its users in the process. There’s plenty of criticisms one can lay at the feet of Musk, but being censorious of rightwing viewpoints isn’t one: one of his first acts upon taking control was to rescind Trump’s ban from the platform – all for nothing, since the former president continued to post on Truth Social instead.

As they are elsewhere, MAGA leaders in North Carolina are confrontational.

In February 2018, Robinson, the first Black lieutenant governor of the state, described on Facebook his view of survivors of school shootings who then publicly call for gun control. They are “media prosti-tots” who suffer from “the liberal syndrome of rectal cranial inversion mixed with a healthy dose of just plain evil and stupid permeating your hallways.”

On May 13, 2020, Michele Morrow, the Republican nominee for North Carolina Superintendent of Public Schools, responded on X (formerly Twitter) to a suggestion that Barack Obama be sent to the Guantánamo Bay detention camp on charges of treason. Morrow’s counterproposal?

Quote:

I prefer a Pay Per View of him in front of the firing squad. I do not want to waste another dime on supporting his life. We could make some money back from televising his death.

In its annual count of militias, released today, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) identified 276 militia groups – up from 202 in 2014, a 37 percent increase.

The number represents a renewal of growth after several years of declines. The movement grew explosively after President Obama was elected, from 42 groups in 2008 to a peak of 334 in 2011 before declining in recent years.

You're really on a roll today, bobsal.