Trump owns ~114m shares @~$20 share. Call it ballpack $2.3B as of now. Daily market turnover value has been running less than $100m/day. For trump to sell 5% (6m shares * $20 = $120m/day, would completely overwhelm available buyers and probably put the price in a free fall. And there is no universe where this could happen 25 days in a row without driving the stock down to penny levels, and bouts of panic selling and stock dumping.
What oh what is a cheap huckster to do? Liquidation sale, driver the stock price toward zero and be seen as a loser? Hold on through the election hoping to win and be confident in the business model? Try to sell some stock on the sly to help cover the legal fund, and hope no one sees the quarterly disclosure reports until after the election?
I’ll take door 3 Alex, close my eyes and hope for the best.
So I had assumed this was some sort of money laundering scheme to buy influence from rich interests and foreign countries. And a few cultists grifted along for the ride. Obviously no serious investor is going anywhere near this. It’s also pretty solid evidence that the market is a scam or mass delusion - how can a business that makes hundreds of thousands of dollars of revenue per quarter be worth billions of dollars? It’s absurd.
Thing is - if it’s not a money laundering scheme - who in the world would buy the stocks that are being sold? It’s obvious to everyone but cultists that it’s worthless, and when Trump starts cashing out, the whole rotten sham just falls apart. You need a buyer on the other end of every stock sale, right? Who would possibly buy it when Trump is selling?
You start by rounding up the usual suspects — a Russian oligarch, a Saudi royal, an annoying techbro looking to curry favor. They buy out Trump’s position for 51% of the company in one swoop, but they keep Trump de facto in charge of everything.
And at the time of purchase, they announce that Trump has agreed to keep TS as his primary social media platform for X years because that’s the only way the whole thing won’t crater nose-first into the ground.
Or is there some SEC-type reason or whatever why none of that can happen?
I mean, if Kushner can get 2 billion bucks from the Saudis for nothing, at least with TS they’ve got something that borders on the tangible.
The problem is, you’re thinking about this in normal stock manipulation terms.
What he needs to do is turn this into a memestock, like GameStop, where a large group of people dedicated to this stock in particular prop it up, without regards to any “normal” evaluation of the stock itself. The real question is if he has that large an influence over that many people.
The crypto boys are gushing over his latest NFT sales, but the actual numbers suggest he doesn’t have that many people willing to actually put money down for him. With 22,000 buyers as reported for the NFTs, they’d have to buy an average of 5,000 shares each to buy all his stock in the company. Would all of these people have the about $100K needed?
If he wins the election, they own him. A few billion dollars to get the USA off their backs? Cheap at 10 times that price. Worth the gamble even if they think his odds of winning aren’t that great.
“Oh, but once he has the money, why would he do that?” One, he actually loves these guys, and wants their love in return. Two, his image is still tied up in the company, so they can threaten to tank the company and make him look bad in the process if he doesn’t play along. Three, he actually thinks fucking over the US in the way they want it fucked over is an actual good idea (See: tariffs and trade wars. He really is that stupid).
In order to funnel a lot of money to him in a (quasi) legal way, to give him a big boost of cash before the election. In order to increase his chances of winning the election.
Because with Trump in power, Ukraine is toast, Kim Jong will start calling in favors (good bye S. Korea as an ally), and the Saudis will own a president.
It is pretty clear, conspiracy theories aside, that nobody actually “owns” Trump; he doesn’t feel any sense of loyalty or obligation to creditors or investors, and it is hard to imagine what kind of компромат anyone could hold over him given how easily he slithers out of any consequences for scandals and even felony convictions. Trump just says random shit in a stream of consciousness and loves the idea of authoritarian strongmen so much that he willingly shares information. Why would other authoritarians—especially Lukashenko or Kim Jong Un who don’t have billions of dollars laying around or a means to purchase stock in an American company even by intermediaries—pay for what they are just going to get for free anyway?
That money would be far better spent in running propaganda networks undermining Harris than cutting a cheque for the Trump campaign which will just spend it on bigger rally venues that will highlight how much smaller the crowds actually showing up to hear Trump’s stream of verbal diarrhea. Trump isn’t going to win by promoting any kind of ‘message’—to the extent that he can even formulate one—but by undermining support for Harris such that swing voters just stay home.
There is a standing assumption that the Russian interference in the 2016 was because Putin wanted Trump to be elected. In fact, what the informed assessment from knowledgable observers of Putinist Russia such as Julia Ioffe is that the real intent was to sow chaos and render then-presumed President Hillary Clinton completely ineffectual and consumed with domestic strife. Clinton was a known factor, and frankly quite predictable in her borderline incompetence in foreign affairs, whereas Trump is complete wildcard who might bash NATO one day and turn around with effusive support the next.
Putin actually does not want the United States to bow out of NATO because while that might spell the death nell for the existing organization it would likely lead to a successor led by some union of Germany, Poland, France, and at this point likely Sweden and Finland, which will be more direct in their opposition to Russian expansion, and without American recalcitrance to ‘overarming’ Ukraine, might actually provide the weapons and aid needed to force the Russian Army back out of the Donbas and even the Crimea. Russia doesn’t want a NATO (or successor) that is absent of American influence; they want one hobbled by a United States that is too consumed with political infighting, civil conflict, and constipated funding lines to effectively lead, while still being in the primary role and blocking decisions to take more decisive action.
Quite frankly, the worst thing that could happen to Russia is that they actually ‘defeat’ the Ukrainian military and then have to spend the enormous resources to occupy the entire country, essentially precluding their ability to engage in further large scale military adventurism. The last few years of conflict by the under-equipped Ukrainian army has made them a well-experienced guerrilla force, and frankly they’ve been far more effective on the defense, hobbling the inept Russian advances, than they have in the more conventional force-on-force counterattacks. A occupation of all of Ukraine would actually accelerate the fiscal crises of Russia and accelerate its already catastrophic demographic and economic collapse. This invasion was always about making Putin look strong to his domestic audience regardless of the dire consequences even should the invasion have gone to plan.
I’d like to think this would make a lot of these people finally realize that TFG is a con man, but I fear it falls under the category of “you can fool some of the people all of the time”.
Seriously, if there Ever was an intent to run Truth Social as a serious business, it gave a horrible death rattle years ago. I’ve seen demi-liches with more body and structural integrity than TS.
Attributed to Lincoln, though the phrase didn’t appear until 20 years after his death. Quote Investigator says, ‘An intriguing precursor appeared in a popular 1684 work…’
… ont pû tromper quelques hommes, ou les tromper tous dans certains lieux & en certains tems, mais non pas tous les hommes, dans tous les lieux & dans tous les siécles.
The spelling “tems” was used in the original text instead of “temps”. Here is one possible translation into English:[2]
One can fool some men, or fool all men in some places and times, but one cannot fool all men in all places and ages.
In this thread, which is about one of Trump’s most blatant cons, I found it amusing to read the french tromper.
It is a meme stock. What is it not just now, is a successful meme stock.
In more detail …
The share price is defying gravity right now. But the price is not able to be stampeded either up or down as the sponsors want it to be stampeded. About the only thing the sponsors can really do now is control the timing of the total implosion to zero. And even then they only control it in the sense of being able to cause it on cue. They can’t prevent it from being caused by other players or by real world events.
Is there evidence of massive naked short positions to expose and take advantage of? The other thing that GME had going for it was that GameStop is a company with a sizeable brick and mortar retail position capable of potentially pivoting within its market. Truth Social is a social media experiment with no underlying capital or value.
So the holders of DJT are in a bit of a prisoner’s dilemma, but with the biggest holder, our star felon, in the most difficult spot.
He cannot sell much other than over a very long time before the value plummets to zero. Still he get something out of the con, and it was free money to begin with.
The only way he can prop up the stock as he gradually liquidates is to look like he is going to, and to, win. Bad luck with that!
