Former President Donald Trump hit the jackpot this spring when his social media company finally went public.
Even though Trump Media & Technology Group DJT generates very little revenue, investors are assigning an eye-popping valuation north of $9 billion to the company. Trump’s dominant stake in Trump Media is now valued at nearly $6 billion.
Yet new data shows its main product — the conservative-friendly social network Truth Social — remains a very tiny player in its industry, and it’s getting even smaller.
Truth Social’s average number of daily active US users on iOS and Android dropped by 19% year over year in April to about 113,000, according to data shared exclusively with CNN from Similarweb, a data intelligence company.
Let’s say you’re an organization (or foreign actor) who wants to get as many no-strings-attached dollars into Trump’s hands as possible. You can’t do that through campaign donations because those are watched way too closely. You can’t just cut him a check, because that looks suspicious too. What you can do however is buy stock in the company he mostly owns, and inflate the stock price as much as you want.
Which explains why it was standard procedure for presidents to put their money in a blind trust. And why Trump didn’t.
That is one hell of a theory. Not sure how you would even stop it.
You can stop it by enforcing the Emoulents Clause, and forcing Presidents to disclose all of their finances, and prove they are not taking money from any Foreign government. But Conservatives are very selective about which parts of the Constitution are worth upholding.
I really really hope a journalist somewhere is investigating the individuals and shell companies that purchase Truth Social stock, because I would bet that this is happening.
Russia in particular would find it useful because even if it’s done with plausible deniability, it’s another secret that, upon being revealed, would cause major problems for Trump. That is enough to function as leverage.