Separating dumb people from their money is easier than you might think

Donald Trump is a world class snake oil salesman...and there's quite a market for snake oil

Financial disasters are dull. They usually take someone with a degree in finance and a degree of business sophistication, like NBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin, to explain the inner workings of a business fuck-up. The problem is that Sorkin is the most interesting of a deadly boring lot. Most business reporters could manage to strip the joy from a screaming orgasm.

Of course, business isn’t an inherently exciting topic. I’m struggling against somnolence just typing this. Thankfully, I have a full cup of coffee to get me through this.

Then again, there’s one guaranteed way to make a business failure seem simultaneously glorious, engaging, and worth following—just add Donald Trump’s name to it. Before you know it, every cable network on the planet save for ESPN and Animal Planet will be covering it like their lives depended on it.

F’rinstance, the idea of a company doing an IPO, going gangbusters initially, and then tanking when investors and the public discover that there’s no “there” there is as old as time itself. But, in the case of Trump’s Truth Social, it was inevitable AND predictable…and yet the lemmings still rushed toward the cliff.

It’s like people lose their common sense regarding and control over their money when Donald Trump is involved.

Donald Trump kicked off his week by scowling through the opening day of his “no peener payoff” trial in New York on Monday morning. (And apparently falling asleep “slack-jawed,” per Maggie Haberman.) Not far away at the New York Stock Exchange, another disaster with his name attached was continuing its agonizingly slow descent into worthlessness. Which is kind of what living in America has felt like since he announced his first presidential run nine years ago, but never mind.

We’re speaking of the stock price of the Trump Media and Technology Group, parent company of social media site Truth Social. As we’ve been noting, the stock that stood at around $72 a share on the day of its IPO three weeks ago has gone down faster than [INSERT GOING DOWN JOKE HERE]. It has lost somewhere in the neighborhood of two thirds of its value and looks as if it will keep sinking until it is lower than a hermit crab’s junk.

How something as worthless as Truth Social roared out of the blocks at $72/share is a testament to the power of mass delusion. Investors were plunking their money down on an illusion, something they thought existed in material form but was purely mythical and existed only in the realm of fantasy. Investors bought a myth, more snake oil from the world’s leading purveyor of lubricious serpent excretions.

Before this trial even began, the judge ruled in our favor and found that Donald Trump did engage in years of significant financial fraud.

- New York Attorney General Letitia James

Why investors thought Truth Social would be anything different from a man facing numerous felony counts and the real possibility of being in prison before the November election defies rational understanding. How many people have been led down the garden path and stripped of their lunch money by Donald Trump, only to return for more fiscal abuse when he comes along with his next Potemkin village of an idea?

On Sunday The Washington Post had an amazing story on the Trump cultists who thought – and in some cases still think – that this company is going to do anything but go the way of all of Trump’s other business ventures like Trump Steaks and Trump Vodka. Seriously, almost every single sentence here is more incredible than the last. It’s like watching the captain of the Titanic yelling “It’s just a scratch, where are all of you going” as the water slowly crept past his chin.

Like this dude, who runs a tree-removal service in Oklahoma:

Jerry Dean McLain first bet on former president Donald Trump’s Truth Social two years ago, buying into the Trump company’s planned merger partner, Digital World Acquisition, at $90 a share. Over time, as the price changed, he kept buying, amassing hundreds of shares for $25,000 — pretty much his “whole nest egg,” he said. […]

“I know good and well it’s in Trump’s hands, and he’s got plans,” he said. “I have no doubt it’s going to explode sometime.”

Oh Jerry, you sweet summer child.

Yes, it’s going to explode, just not in the way Jerry Dean McLain expects it to. Donald Trump is going to take a massive dump on his nest egg and then laugh all the way to the bank.

It’s what Trump has always referred to as “OPM”- other people’s money. Why would he put his own money at risk when he can get suckers to buy into his schemes…and lose their money?

There’s a sucker born every minute- Donald Trump knows who they are, where they live, and what their favorite ice cream flavor is. He knows how to flatter and curry favor with them, sucker them into buying into his schemes, and convince them to believe in him enough to give him large sums of money.

There was also this guy Todd Schlanger, a MAGA fan in Florida, natch, who is watching about $20,000 of the vast fortune he’s earned as an interior designer in a furniture store currently disappearing faster than the polar ice caps:

In a Truth Social post last week, he encouraged “everyone who supports Donald Trump and Truth [Social to] buy a share every day” and asked, “Do you think we have hit bottom?” (The stock slid nearly 10 percent after that post.)

He suspects the recent drops in share price have been the result of “stock manipulation” from an “organized effort” to make the company look bad. There’s no proof of such a campaign, but Schlanger is convinced. “It’s got to be political,” he said, from all the “liberals that are trying to knock it down.”

No, Todd, it has nothing to do with Liberals. It has everything to do with you not being intelligent and prudent enough to pay attention using your brain instead of your heart. You desperately want this to work, so when it begins heading the other direction, you can’t accept that as the reality, so your inclination is to blame someone- Liberals, of course- for the stock tanking. The fact is that Truth Social is like betting on a steak that turns out to be made of angel food cake- there’s no substance.

And there never was.

We’re not much on investing – our retirement fund consists of a vial of cyanide and a comfy pillow – but we think the stock dropping faster than the engine cover of a Boeing jet has more to do with the company somehow being valued at several billion dollars when last year it lost $58 million on revenues of $4 million than it does with liberals saying mean things about it.

Or maybe the drop can be attributed to Truth Social flat-out saying that it has no intention of reporting any information that investors could use as a yardstick to see how the company is performing:

Truth Social has attracted a tiny fraction of the traffic other platforms see, according to estimates from the analytics firm Similarweb — one of the only ways to measure its performance, given that the company says it “does not currently, and may never, collect, monitor or report certain key operating metrics used by companies in similar industries.”

About the only thing the company is being transparent about is how much dang salary and bonus money it is paying its executives while its investors watch little Billy’s college fund swirl down the drain.

Of course, while Truth Social’s investors are seeing their piggy banks sucked dry, the company’s senior executives will hardly be feeling the pinch.

For instance, Devin Nunes, former congressman, current Trump Media CEO, and continuous giant tool:

“There’s not another company out there that has retail investors like this,” said Nunes, who this year will receive a $1 million salary, a $600,000 retention bonus and a stock package currently worth $3.7 million.

We presume that when Nunes says no other companies have retail investors like Trump Media, he means no other company has as many suckers willing to hand over their retirement accounts to a lifelong conman who has screwed more workers and contractors and investors than the mafia.

Not that the suckers care. They’re too busy yelling “No suckers! You’re the suckers!”

After the billionaire media mogul Barry Diller called Trump Media a “scam” stock bought by “dopes,” one account, @Handbag72, claimed to have bought more shares, arguing Diller didn’t “get it” or was “at risk of [losing] .” 

Yeah, what does Barry Diller know about investing in media companies, anyway.

Right; Diller’s old media, anyway. What could he possibly know about new, sophisticated social media like Truth Social, where you can find things like this:

(What has been seen cannot be unseen….)

Or this beauty:

Yeah, they’re not exactly sending their best, are they? That silliness accounts for why so many MAGAnauts are willingly throwing good money after bad down the Truth Social sewer.

Truth Social is where these social misfits can get their confirmation bias fix. They can trade bad ideas and conspiracy theories with people who think (or not) just like them. And because it’s like a hermetically sealed echo chamber, no one breaks in to introduce ideas that might knock them back toward the truth. It’s a big reason why, four years later, so many millions of MAGAnauts STILL insist that Joe Biden and the Democrats stole the 2024 election.

Grow up, y’all. The 2020 election was perhaps the best and cleanest election this country has ever experienced. You can’t handle the fact that your guy lost, and you’re in a cult. Also, some of you are losing your shorts because you’re betting on Truth Social and didn’t bother to do even the bare minimum of due diligence on the company or the stock before throwing your money at Donny Diaperfull.

You deserve every dime you’re going to lose.

Your trust in your hero has been so total- and so thoroughly unwarranted and misplaced- that you don’t believe you’re getting fleeced, even though it’s happening in broad daylight and right in front of your face.

And, as if things couldn’t get any get any worse, they’re about to get worse:

As of early Monday afternoon, Trump Media stock was down another nearly six points for the day, to a bit over $26 a share. Maybe all those supporters of the biggest political movement of all time figure they have yet to see the bottom of the dip.

And just to add to the hilarity, the geniuses running Trump Media on Monday filed to release another 21.5 million shares for sale, which could give the company a massive cash infusion to help it stay afloat. On the other hand, so many more shares could dilute the value of people’s investments and send the share price dropping even lower. Our vial of cyanide keeps looking like a better investment.

Yes, there IS a sucker born every minute, and most of them call MAGAWorld home. At least all of the voices know them by name.

The question now is how long Trump can continue doing this before his drooling pack of knuckle-dragging MAGAnauts will turn on him. Thus far, at least, there’s been no sign of any rumblings of dissent or discontent. It still appears that Trump can do no wrong from where most MAGAnauts sit. By the time any of them figure out Trump’s scam, he’ll have long since claimed his reserved parking space in Hell.

Until then, he’ll continue the grift until he’s fleeced all of them, and they all live under bridges.

Stupid is as stupid does, no?

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