The public is fickle
Oh dear, people are getting bored with Trump. How sad.
Donald Trump’s social media venture is losing users every month, hurting his bottom line and possibly showing that his rhetoric is losing appeal even among his own base.
The Guardian spoke to a right-wing media analyst, Howard Polskin, who said that Truth Social had only 2.11 million unique users in June, a decline of 38 percent from one year ago.
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The venture was supposed to be Trump’s cash cow, as the former president and convicted felon owns 60 percent of the company. But a series of setbacks since launching have ruined Trump’s financial fail-safe. The company had a net loss of $58.2 million in 2023, numbers that had to be reaudited after its accounting firm was charged with “massive fraud” and subsequently barred from ever serving as accountants again. The company lost an astonishing $327.6 million last quarter, only bringing in $770,500 in revenue.
I’m no expert, but that doesn’t sound like a desirable outcome.
After a failed airline, several casinos, mail order steaks, a university, a board game, and a few other weird things, you mean his social media platform is failing? Who would have guessed.
Might this spur Trump to further depths of outrageous behaviour in order to regain public interest? But then again, how could one tell? He’s already left the photic zone far behind and is in permanent, abyssal darkness.
I don’t love the media’s reporting about Truth Social because it often misses the bigger picture. The bottom line is that Truth Social was created for one purpose and it succeeded wildly at it: it is a sham product, a vehicle to sell shares on the Nasdaq stock market. How much money Truth Social itself generates or loses as a business enterprise is irrelevant. How many consumers actually use Truth Social is also irrelevant, at least in terms of Trump’s income.
As of this moment, Donald Trump’s 114,750,000 shares in Truth Social are worth $29.60 apiece, for a total of $3,086,775,000. That’s three billion dollars, generated virtually out of thin air — far and away the most profitable venture of his entire life, generating vastly more than his entire net worth was as recently as a few months ago, when he lost that big New York civil suit. Some questions remain about how and when exactly he’ll be able to cash in those stocks and make off with the money, because the moment he pulls the trigger and grabs the cash, everyone else who invested in Truth Social will lose their shirt.
It annoys me when reporters conflate Truth social’s revenue fluctuations with its stock valuation. The company’s revenue figures are in the millions; chump change compared to the stock valuation which is in the billions. They’re on entirely separate planets of relevance, and it’s lazy of journalists to try to build a story by mushing the two together. It’s also lazy of journalists to report of the stock value’s fluctuations as though Trump is losing money. That stock went from $0 to $5 billion in the last six months. In the turbulent in-between days it’s shot up to as high as $9 billion and as low as $3.5 billion. Still, none of those dollar figures represents a loss; that’s all free money for Trump any way you look at it, conjured out of a brazen and illegal stock trading scheme pulled off right in front of the authorities.
Still, it’s interesting that there appears to be less user activity on the website.
It could be simply because there are so many other outlets for Trump worshippers to get their fix now that the election is in full swing. He’s on all the news; he’s doing rallies. They don’t need to log into his little social media feed to keep abreast of the goings on in Trumpworld.
But it could also be a sign his followers are fickle, and are getting bored with the novelty of Trump’s outrageous schtick. Maybe the prospect of four more years of Trump, now that the possibility is closer to becoming a reality, is making people wary.
People used to love Kanye West and they lapped up his crazy, outrageous antics, until they suddenly didn’t. One antic too many gave people a sour taste, and Team Kanye quickly dissolved and scattered. Maybe Trump is finally reaching Peak Kanye.
WOULDN’T THAT BE NICE?
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