Trump swindles his followers
Let's say you're an ardent Donald Trump supporter and you decided to invest $100,000 of your retirement savings into Trump Media because your favorite former president says it's a “highly successful” company.
Well, if you bought in during the recent initial public offering at the peak of $79.38 a share, your $100,000 nest egg was worth only $57,000 this past week when the stock hit a low of $45.26 after an April Fool's Day crash - a 43 percent loss in just three trading days.
Not for the first time, Trump has played his supporters for suckers.
The skid came after Trump Media reported this past week that it lost $58.2 million in 2023 on sales of just $4.1 million which suggests that Trump Media is practically worthless. The shares are bound to collapse further unless some wealthy entity - Saudi Arabia? China? buys shares to gain leverage over Trump, who can't dump his own stake for six months.
Now comes word that, of course, Trump has filed a lawsuit against two of the company's co-founders, both former contestants on “The Apprentice.” Trump Media's lawsuit accuses them of “mismanagement,” saying they “failed spectacularly at every turn” and “made a series of reckless and wasteful decisions.”
Trump Media is sounding more and more like the Trump presidency.
I thought about the Trump stock bubble while watching the former president and presumptive GOP nominee address adoring supporters last Tuesday here in Green Bay, where he held his first rally in 17 days. In a sense, what he did with Trump Media was just a variation on what he does to his supporters every day, whether convincing them to buy Trump-endorsed Bibles and sneakers, or selling them on election lies and white nationalism.
Three thousand die-hard Trump fans had come to the convention center to see him. In their rapturous reception for the “real president,” as election-denying pillow magnate Mike Lindell called Trump during a warmup speech, I saw the kind of unshakable faith in a man that could lead someone to invest hard-earned money in a worthless company.
And Trump was, as always, rewarding their adoration by selling them one self-interested swindle after another.
He announced that he had won his fraud case in New York: “The appellate division said,
`You won the case, that's it.'” (The court has not yet heard his appeal of the fraud judgment against him.)
He also announced that “it came out that we won this state” in 2020. (Trump lost Wisconsin by 20,682 votes.)
At the heart of the speech was his original swindle, and still his go-to scam: convincing his supporters that their lives were being destroyed by dark-skinned invaders. It was the story of how “Crooked Joe and his migrant armies of dangerous criminals” are producing a “bloodbath” among innocent, native-born Americans.
It's not the least bit true. Homicide and violent crime, after rising during the pandemic, have dropped for two straight years and are lower than during Trump's final year in office. There is scant evidence that immigrants - legal or undocumented - commit more than their share of crime, and a lot of evidence that migrants are more law-abiding.
“They're not humans. They're not humans. They're animals,” Trump said. “I'll use the word `animal' because that's what they are.”
He blamed migrants for “coming into our country with contagious diseases.” He warned of “illegal alien criminals crawling through your windows and ransacking your drawers,” where they “loot the jewelry.” When migrants aren't busy doing that, they're fixing to “obliterate Medicare and Social Security” and fill schools with “new migrant students who don't speak a word of English.”
To illustrate the fictitious wave of “migrant crime,” Trump, at his stops in Michigan and Wisconsin, cited violent crimes committed by undocumented immigrants. You could just as easily cherry-pick from police blotters to make it appear as though there's a crime wave being perpetrated by evangelical Christians, or Trump supporters - and it would be just as dubious.
“They're coming from the Congo, Yemen, Somalia, Syria,” he said at another point.
“They're country-changing, country-threatening and they're country-wrecking.”
To reverse this “invasion,” he told the Green Bay crowd, which was almost entirely White,
“we're going to end up with the largest deportation in American history.” It was one of the biggest applause lines of the night.
And, so, the fearful masses buy in. Watching Trump sell his swindle about migrants, it occurred to me that those suckered by the Trump Media IPO got a better deal, relatively speaking. Those who bought “DJT” shares lost only their shirts. But those who have been snookered into seeing migrants as diseased animals have lost part of their souls.