He probably would get away with just killing a guy.
It’s official, shares in Truth Social – under the ticker DJT – are for sale. Shares in the Special Acquisition Company (SPAC) created to take the social platform public has spiked ahead of the final vote. In what journalists used to call a “High Metaphor Alert” the price attached to the ticker symbol DJT is now as good a barometer as any on the Trump’s chances in November. His electoral fortunes, more or less, now hang on his ability to keep the DJT stock price at a level that even its own investors know is unhinged from reality through the middle of November. Something that will be impossible once the first wave of investors break rank head for the door.
The verdicts on the four trials don’t matter: People have already decided his guilt one way or the other and evidence isn’t going to change anything. Celebrity trials create more chatter than strong emotion. The border crisis doesn’t matter, neither does Ukraine. To judge by the blow back on the Tik Tok ban, neither does China, really. It’s all being manipulated for the camera and it’s only the true believers on either side who can’t see it. Trump famously said that he could shoot someone in the middle of the street and his supporters would still support him. That appears to be a fair point. The performance of America’s newest meme stock, however, will cause his true believers to melt-away for the simple, human reason that no one considers their money as an abstract. People get downright emotional about it.
Trump supporters have piled into shares of the SPAC – to juice the price with hashtags like #maketrumpatrillionarie, and maybe the average Truth Social investor does want to make Trump a trillionaire, but only if he takes them along for the ride. As trading started, the share price at the time of the merger of the SPAC and Truth Social placed the value at a baffling $6.8bn, and Trump’s stake close to $4bn. Institutional investors are steering clear because, down here reality, the company is hemorrhaging cash, has never turned a profit and is dwarfed by the major social platforms in a highly competitive environment. The price is pure, manipulated froth. Meme stocks work largely on the same principal as pyramid schemes, except that investors know that it’s a scam. The play is to get out with those massive returns before the price collapses. It’s like playing chicken with Charles Ponzi.
It’s a matter of when, not if. A quick look at Trump’s timeline and normally his $4bn stake in the company wouldn’t do him any good for six months, the time he’d usually have to wait to sell – which puts us at September 26. And there is the ankle-breaker for Trump: It is not in the nature of meme stocks to sink, they collapse once the investors start to sell. So, if Trump sells in late September or October, the stock price will collapse the month before the election. And those supporters who invested in DJT will be pissed.
Trump could get a special waiver from the executives of the SPAC to sell certain amounts early, but that would likely only speed up the process. The trap is that Trump starts to sell the stock that bears his initials it’s price will collapse and his true believers will still be left holding the bag as their investment evaporate. He may not care too much, but they will, and this will play out before November.
Some people are fanatics, true, but none of us are as ideological as we pretend to be. Celebrity sex scandals, tax and bank fraud electoral skullduggery are titillating abstracts to most people; the original reality TV. It’s fun to watch, we like to take sides, but it doesn’t affect us on a deep, operational level. In short our visceral ‘lizard brains’ don’t get involved. Standing by while your “champion and retribution” takes you to the cleaners in a meme stock, on the other hand, is very, very visceral.
Donald Trump has found the one thing that his supporters won’t abide. He has to keep the stock price of DJT at a bizarre level through the election, yet the price can only stay elevated until the first investors bolt. Then his stock will fall as fast as DJT.