On Tuesday, Donald Trump’s latest grift went public—in the stock-market sense of the word. Trump Media & Technology Group, which at this point consists of the cobbled-together fake-Twitter social media site Truth Social and not much else, completed its merger with the gloriously sketchy special-purpose acquisition company Digital World Acquisition Corp, and will now be traded under the ominous ticker symbol “DJT.”
It’s difficult to explain just how weird this all is. Digital World’s stock price has skyrocketed this year, driven largely by Trump supporters, which has even The Wall Street Journal shaking its head, calling it “reminiscent of the 2021 meme stock craze.” And Business Insider ran down the numbers as of Monday, and the whole scheme sounds ridiculous.
For instance, Truth Social—the only meaningful product here—made just $3.4 million during the first three quarters of 2023—and lost a whopping $49 million during the same period. Those are catastrophic numbers, and there’s no reason to expect them to get better. The social media site has a microscopic reach by industry standards, with only about 5 million members as of February, according to CBS News. The site is most known as the place Trump and his acolytes go to share memes with his right, alt-right, and even-more-alt-right-than-that fans.
The newly merged company, however, “could be worth around $5.7 billion and a timely $3 billion boost for Trump,” reports Business Insider. That’s because Digital World shares closed above $45 on Monday, soaring as Trump fans publicly boosted the stock and bragged to each other about buying it.
The price soared again on Tuesday morning, bringing the company value to an even less plausible $6.8 billion or so. Trump owns nearly 60% of the post-merger company, which doesn’t just mean he suddenly becomes, on paper, over $4 billion richer. It also more than doubles his total net worth, catapulting him for the first time in his sorry life into becoming one of the world’s 500 richest people.
And again, this is because of a flippin’ meme stock. From The Wall Street Journal:
“I bought several times last Monday & Tuesday, little by little to show support of the stock,” said a Truth Social user going by the handle of fantasticblush.
“This is a Truth Movement and no matter what happens tomorrow this merger will happen tomorrow or in the future,” said Truth Social user ajdelval. “We will win this war no matter what.” […]
DWAC shares, which closed Thursday at $42.81, are “not trading on fundamentals, absolutely not,” said Kristi Marvin, chief executive of SPACInsider.com. “Institutions are not trading this.”
Institutions may not want to touch DJT with a 10-foot pole, so it’s been up to Trump’s fans to boost the stock in what appears suspiciously like a pump-and-dump scheme egged on in the usual meme-stock way—but one that may or may not include Donald Trump himself. In theory, Trump is barred from divesting himself of his stock for about six months; in practice, according to Liz Dye at Public Notice, all Donald needs to do to break that prohibition is the approval of the company’s board—and the “board” of this market abomination is so stuffed with Trump’s own personal allies as to make that a nonissue.
So far, Dye has provided the best summary of the Truth Social rise into public trading. She identifies this as less a “meme stock” and more a “cult.” In this case, it’s a cult of people who are absolutely hellbent on handing Donald Trump all their money.
As with everything Trump does, this entire thing appears to be a series of nested grifts. What’s unclear is whether this is a short term play — like the Trump NFTs and trading cards, only scaled way up — or a long term scheme — along the lines of the Trump Hotel in DC, where corporations, foreign governments, and the GOP faithful opened up their wallets to curry favor with the sitting president.
Will Trump dump his shares quickly and cash out before the whole thing goes belly up? Will he hang onto the shares in hopes that he wins the White House and can then spend four years selling high-priced ad space to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, coal companies, and every Republican candidate who knows what’s good for him? Will he wait until he takes office and then avoid a huge tax bill by calling the sale of his shares a forced divestiture incident to government service?
Baked into this is assumption that a guy who owns a majority of shares in a publicly traded company would get the board to alter the lockup so he can execute what is essentially a pump and dump scheme in order to pay a massive civil fraud fine and legal fees in connection with dozens of criminal charges across four indictments. Or that he would openly monetize public office by accepting emoluments. All of which is so crazy that it doesn’t even make sense in any context other than Trump.
Dye notes that past meme-stock episodes were from small-time investors “trying to make some cash and stick it to the hedge funds,” but in this case, the pro-Trump memers appear to be buying up the stock as an expression of fealty to the coup-attempting flesh-lump of financial fraud they’ve devoted themselves to propping up.
But few of those memers appear to understand that handing your money to Donald Trump is, as it turns out, one of the most effective ways to lose money. There already was a “DJT” stock ticker once upon a time, after all, and would-be investors might want to learn what happened to that former Trump enterprise before signing on for the new version.
It’s difficult to know how to feel about all of this. On one hand, having the leader of a new worldwide fascist resurgence make off with $4 billion or more in stock is thoroughly enraging. On the other hand, there is so far no evidence of any institutional investing in this new absurdity of a company; we don’t yet have word that it’s Saudi royalty or Russian oligarchs trying to launder their cash through this scam, and so far, it appears that the company’s stock price is being propped up largely by pro-Donald cultists who are handing him their money without even considering the scenario in which Trump dumps his stock and leaves them holding an empty corporate shell.
And if anyone truly deserves to have Trump steal their money and ruin their lives, it’s his fans. You really can’t argue against it. The face-eating leopards have to eat somebody’s faces, after all, and if people are lining up to get their faces eaten, then it’s difficult to muster up the energy to try to talk them out of it.
A whole lotta people are likely going to become much poorer by the time this latest episode of the Trump Grift reaches its denouement. Unfortunately, those people are among the loudest, angriest people in the country—and they probably won’t take it very well if and when it happens.
But there’s something else odd about this situation. Donald Trump’s remaining noninstitutional fans have millions of dollars to throw at Dear Leader? Really? That’s … very surprising.
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The President and CEO of Center for American Progress Action Fund, Patrick Gaspard, joins us to give his thoughts on what the Republican Party’s actual message is.