Pity the poor fools who fell for it. Trump’s latest swindle. Remember last week’s frenzy about his “new company”? If you’d bought shares at their peak price of around $80, by now, just a few short days later, how much would you have made—or lost? You would have halved your money.
So imagine that some poor grandma put in $50K—now, that’s worth $25K. And it’s only going to get worse from there.
Last time we discussed this, I pointed out that Truth Social is a company with about $3 million in revenues. When we value companies—hold on while I put on my dusty Chief Exec hat—a “ten times multiple” is very generous. So at the outer limits, this enterprise is worth maybe $30 million, and that’s if you ignore the fact that it lost $60 million last year, which nobody in their right mind should.
Now, the reason I take you through all that is that the generally accepted minimum for a stock market listing is usually about $100 million in revenues. In other words, over thirty times what Truth Social has.
This never should have been allowed to happen. Not by the stock market itself, which looks terrible, and is almost certain to be sued, nor by regulators, nor by anyone, really, who oversees much of anything in the economy. This is as close to a scam as there’s ever been: a company with just $3 million “worth” $5 billion on the “market.” That happened because of an obscure mechanism called a “Special Purpose Acquisition Vehicle,” which appeared to have been set up a couple of years ago precisely for this eventuality: Trump needed a sudden, fast, and very large bailout. But in a sane economy? With a stock market that has rules for, I don’t know, basic sanity and legitimacy? Never, not for a moment.
Because this doesn’t stop here. The poor fools who bought into this have gotten swindled, and good. The stock doesn’t halt its drop here. What’s it actually worth? Zero. As close to nothing as you can get, which is precisely what “a $3 million company that’s losing twenty times that every year” should and would be valued at by anyone with the slightest degree of financial competence. You don’t have to be an investment banker or a finance professor to see that much.
Trump’s stock is now being “shorted,” hard, in massive amounts, which is stock-market speak for “people are betting that it’s value will fall.” It will fall, probably to very near zero, or just above it. That happens more often than you think: Peloton, for example, is worth very near zero, because it’s a company laden down by debt, and without much of a future, in corporate speak. And yet compared to Truth Social, it’s practically a shining beacon of financial rectitude and actual value.
The shares are worth, in truth, nothing. Everybody with half a clue left on Wall St knows that, and always has, which is why the “short ratio,” which is how many people are betting against this stock, is so high—so high, in fact, that it’ll cost you 500% to short the shares, meaning that even that has become costly, since it’s becoming so commonplace. In fact, it’s the most expensive stock to short in the entire economy, by a very long way, which is, in financial terms, like the Voice of God shouting (insert Morgan Freeman voice): this is worthless.
So consider the pitiable fools that bought into this, for a moment. In business speak, they’re “brand super fans,” which means that they were so entranced with the Magic of the Trump Brand, and so seduced by the politics of the authoritarian promise, that they probably believed…the Big Lie…all over again.
Many of the Big Lies you know by now. It’s their fault that America’s “not great anymore,” women, minorities, the LGBT, immigrants, journalists, dirty liberals, professors, hippies, anyone who’s against fascism, aka, the communists, and so on. That’s the sort of foundational Big Lie of fascism, which is soon followed up with the Next One. Get them, purify society of them, erase their existence, take away their rights, and that way, We Will Be Great Again. After that one, comes the Third Big Lie, which is that only by doing all this can you prove you’re one of the Pure and True.
This Big Lie was a little different, but only a little. Trump shares can’t lose! Buy into this, and why, you’ll get rich! There’s no way this stock is going to go down, because the Mighty Power of Trump is omnipotent. You’re going to be…one of the chosen few. See the basic message, and how it obviously sort of mirrors the other Big Lies?
It’s all a swindle, and all a con. This one is the most transparent of all. The company is worthless, and so the stock is plummeting—and it’s only begun to plummet, right down, inevitably, to zero (at which point, if I were a poor fool of an “investor” in this mess, I’d sue NASDAQ to high heaven for allowing this…mess, this obvious con game, because stock markets have rules, regulations, and requirements, too.)
No, you don’t get to be one of the chosen people just through the Magic Power of Trump. In this case, all you get to be is poorer. A whole lot poorer, if you were one of the people who sadly put a lot of their money into this incredibly obvious swindle, and weren’t stopped from doing so.
And yet that larger pattern is the game here. The other Three Big Lies—get the scapegoats, erase their existence, and that’s how you get to be one of the chosen people—are just that, too, Big Lies. Where do they end? They leave the very people enacting them poorer, too, in less visible ways, perhaps, but perhaps even more pernicious ones.
When societies devote themselves to ritual missions of purification, of course, they don’t do what’s useful, productive, or beneficial, and so such societies grow poorer. Their social bonds erode, their cultures decay into hate and spite, and their opportunities dwindle and diminish. You’d think that Trumpists would have learned all that by now—what really improved, even for them, during the last Trump era? Nothing: American life remained the bleak, brutal battle that it’s turned into, and Papa Trump hardly fixed any of that, or the broken lives, the shattered upward trajectories, the blighted communities, or any of the other forms of ruin that face the former working and lower middle classes.
It’s all a swindle, in other words. But what the shocking debacle of Truth Social shows us is that…the swindle is just allowed to go and on. In this particular case, the con should, emphatically, have been stopped—by NASDAQ, financial regulators, any number of parties whose job it was to prevent people from being bilked in this way. And in the other ways, the Three Big Lies—well, the Democrats are hardly doing a good job of debunking them, nor is media, and they continue to just permeate society, creating true and fervent believers, and passionate crusaders who are ready to go full ride-or-die in the mission of purifying society and elevating Trump to dictator, democracy be damned.
Even though it’s all a swindle, sadly, the swindles go on working. That’s why despite it all, Trump’s still a front-runner for President. So think about how shocking this is: even after Jan 6th, the abuses of power, all of it, Trump just ran the biggest swindle in the economy, and he’s still the leading contender for President. When I put it like that…go right ahead and shudder, because, yeah: that’s almost comically bad.
