Trump Makes Billions, Thumps Bible
Plus: The logistical challenges of war-zone humanitarian assistance.
When a ship plows into and collapses a bridge, it’s no wonder many people’s minds jump to the possibility of terrorism. But every indication is that the destruction of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key bridge yesterday was a horrible accident: The ship issued a mayday that it had lost power and control of its steering, which gave authorities a few crucial minutes to close traffic to the bridge. “These people are heroes,” Maryland Gov. Wes Moore said of the first responders who sprung into action. “They saved lives last night.”
The only casualties from the collapse turned out to be members of a construction crew who were working on the bridge, two of whom were rescued. Six are still missing and are presumed dead.
President Biden is calling on Congress to fund the full cost of replacing the bridge. Happy Wednesday.
Brother, Can You Spare $4 Billion?
Donald Trump’s taken a lot of mockery over the years for some of his chintzier boondoggles—Trump Steaks, Trump Vodka, Trump University. But all those products, it turns out, were just ahead of their time. Trump’s only mistake was launching them before he became grand vizier of a cultish political movement.
That’s the main takeaway from Tuesday’s first day of public trading for Truth Social, the social media company launched in Trump’s name after he was kicked off Twitter and Facebook in the wake of his attempt to steal the 2020 election. Shares in Trump Media & Technology Group (trading under the ticker “DJT,” naturally) took off like a rocket Tuesday morning: After a day of volatile swings, the share price ended Tuesday at $57.99, giving the company—on paper, for now—a market value of approximately $8 billion. Trump’s 60 percent share—on paper, for now—is worth about $4.5 billion.
This is not bad money for a website that—I say this with all respect—is basically unusable. I wrote earlier this month about how Truth Social’s utterly broken search and archival features make it highly difficult to do even the one thing the site is useful for: keeping track of the public utterances of the former (and future?) president of the United States. And it must be stressed that this is the only thing the site is good for. The rest of the website is a soul-sucking sludge of hard-right ragebait, scam ads, and the lowest-rent broken-brain boomer memes imaginable.
The New York Times notes, with trademark understatement, that “Trump Media’s valuation is disproportionately high compared with other social media companies”:
The company took in $3.3 million in the first nine months of 2023 and recorded a loss of $49 million, yet its market value—based on Tuesday’s share price—is nearly 2,000 times its estimated annual revenue . . . Other social media companies trade at far lower price-to-sales ratios than Trump Media’s: Reddit is around 10, Meta is 7 and Snap is 6, according to FactSet. Superstar tech stocks like the chipmakers Nvidia and ARM trade at price-to-sales ratios of about 25.
But of course the market motivations behind buying “DJT” are a little different than the market forces behind buying Nvidia. Truth Social is on its way to becoming a “meme stock,” since most of the purchasers are either get-rich-quickers or Trump superfans, as the Times notes:
Trump Media’s shareholders tend to be individual investors, rather than institutions. Many say they are buying the stock as a sign of support for Mr. Trump personally and his support for an alternative social media platform.
“We do appreciate President Trump, but it’s more about free speech,” said Mark Willis, 63, who lives in Indian Trail, N.C. “We believe this is the only social media platform that is not heavily influenced by the government.”
Scott Lewczak, a graphic designer in Nokesville, Va., and another longtime shareholder, said that he was going to make money on the big surge in the price of Trump Media, but that his investment was to support Truth Social and Mr. Trump.
“Even if I lose every penny, I will fight to the end,” Mr. Lewczak said.
We hope Mr. Lewczak really doesn’t mind losing his pennies, because Axios has a meme-stock reality check: “While the app does sell some ads, its business is practically non-existent.”
“Truth Social earned $3.4 million in revenue for the first nine months of 2023 and it lost around $49 million,” Sara Fischer notes. “By comparison, Facebook (now Meta) earned $3.71 billion in revenue the year before it went public and was profitable.”
For Sale, Trump Bible, Never Used
All this Truth Social silliness is enough to knock Trump’s other notable swindle of the day down to “in other news” status, when on pretty much any other day it would be front page above-the-fold Morning Shots content, believe me:
“It’s just very important and very important to me, I want to have a lot of people have it,” Trump says of the product, which marries two sacred texts: The Bible and Lee Greenwood’s most popular patriotic anthem. “You have to have it for your heart and for your soul. Many of you have never read them and don’t know the liberties and rights you have as Americans and how you are being threatened to lose those rights—it’s happening all the time, it’s a very sad thing that’s happening in our country, but we’re gonna get it turned around. Religion and Christianity are the biggest things missing from this country.”
What a rich vein this is, if only we had the time and space to dwell on it! There’s the insane civil-religious chutzpah of literally putting the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the Pledge of Allegiance, and the lyrics to “God Bless the USA” in the Bible. There’s the delicious fact that the company selling this Bible bills it as “inspired by Lee Greenwood’s hit song.” There’s the totally phoned-in Trump video sales pitch. There’s the fact that a non-negligible number of Americans find a sales pitch like that (and seriously, go watch it) spiritually meaningful. But we don’t have the time or the space, so we’ll just say: If you want one, you can buy it here!
—Andrew Egger
Why Humanitarian Aid Is So Hard
Bulwark Military Affairs Fellow Will Selber, a retired Middle East foreign area officer in the Air Force, has some thoughts on an under-covered element of Israel’s ongoing war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip—the huge logistical difficulty of delivering war-zone humanitarian aid:
I spent over half of my 1,500 days in Iraq and Afghanistan at the tactical level. As an enabler for predominantly Army maneuver units, I regularly delivered, scheduled, and planned humanitarian assistance (HA) operations. I’ve delivered school supplies and food, coordinated vaccination campaigns for young Afghans, and even brought in an American veterinarian to help Afghan farmers care for their flocks.
Everyone loves these operations at higher echelons because they are good news stories. But those conducting them on the ground find them maddening.
The biggest knock on Israel’s successful battlefield operation is that they’re not delivering enough HA to Gazans. Understandably, many people are stunned when they see hungry people on their social media accounts. They underestimate how difficult these operations are to organize, plan, and execute.
First, you need a local partner to help you access a needy population. At least we had provincial and district-level government officials in Iraq and Afghanistan who were ostensibly our partners. In Gaza, the state is Hamas, so that’s out of the question. The IDF is stuck without a partner to coordinate deliveries.
Second, you need to have security. The IDF has to establish a perimeter and checkpoints. They’re probably also coordinating intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance assets to provide an eye in the sky. That’s hard to get when you have troops in contact throughout the battlefield. Who receives those assets? You or the team doing kinetic operations?
Third, you have to control the crowd. Your soldiers need to set up multiple screening locations and watch for terrorists who may have infiltrated the line. HA operations are juicy targets for terrorists. Any HA/non-kinetic operation is fraught with danger.
In Afghanistan, after a strike inadvertently killed women and children, one of my airmen went to meet with some of the locals. The Taliban found out about our mission and planted a double-stacked anti-tank mine that not only killed our brother-in-arms but left my interpreter a double amputee.
Lastly, once you deliver the goods, you lose control over who gets them. Insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan often swallowed up American largesse. It was all too common to find insurgents feeding off of our HA. That doesn’t mean HA shouldn’t be delivered, but it’s important to keep in mind that what’s intended as humanitarian might not end up as humanitarian.
The Israeli government needs to do more on this front, not only to help Gazans stuck in the middle of this conflict but also to blunt Hamas’ political strategy of isolating Israel. Nevertheless, these operations are not easy. They are dangerous. And people will be killed either during the operations or because they provide aid to the enemy.
—Will Selber
Catching up . . .
“They have a point”: Biden says of pro-Palestinian protesters: Axios
Supreme Court appears likely to dismiss challenge to abortion pill: NBC News
Investigators seek answers on how ship lost power and hit Baltimore bridge: New York Times
The Baltimore bridge collapse is the latest—and least—of global shipping’s problems: Vox
Yellen to warn China against flood of cheap green energy exports: New York Times
Democrat Marilyn Lands wins Alabama House special election after IVF, abortion rights campaigning: NBC News
Biden, Democrats have (mostly) stopped saying “Bidenomics”: Axios
Quick Hits: MAGA Isolationists, In Their Own Words
Speaking of Truth Social, Tamar Jacoby bravely plunged into the bowels of the site for this important piece on what’s really driving Trumpworld opposition to Ukraine’s resistance against Russia. A few days plumbing the MAGA id left her “far more scared than I was before about what might lie ahead for U.S. foreign policy”:
One group of MAGA supporters thinks it’s all just fake news—there is no war. “I think the whole thing is fabricated,” one woman in a sequined jacket covered with MAGA insignia told a correspondent from The Daily Show. “Where is the war footage?” a conservative commentator and former Fox News producer tweeted to his 315,000 followers in February 2023, a year into the war. “This smacks of a scam.” Conservative podcaster Stew Peters echoed the sentiment, telling his 163,000 Twitter followers, “The world is a stage. It’s ALL fake.”
A second big group concedes the conflict is real but believes Ukrainians are at fault—that they started the war or are somehow so evil that they deserve the death and destruction raining down on their heads. Among this group’s wild and completely unsubstantiated beliefs: that Ukraine is killing Christians and building weapons of mass destruction . . .
“People are blindly supporting genocide by virtue signaling for Ukraine,” someone calling himself Redneck Patriot posted this month on Truth Social, where he has 226,000 followers. He endorsed a post by someone who goes by Shadow Defense: “If you support Ukraine, you support 1. Organ trafficking 2. Human trafficking 3. Nazis 4. Bioweapon labs 5. Money laundering for biden’s [sic].”
Still others who blame Ukraine buy Moscow’s nonsensical claim that Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s Jewish president, is a Nazi. Truth Social contributor “TrollHunter” (@Jeanette159) isn’t sure if Zelensky is a Nazi or if Ukraine is a Communist country—in fact, she thinks both are true. But either way, she’s convinced “it was Ukraine’s aggression” that started the war. Drak7 agreed: “Putin is a Patriot protecting her [sic] people only.”
A third group of MAGA supporters believes the war is Biden’s personal project—that he started it or is advancing it out of some demonic death wish. “BIDEN MAY LITERALLY CAUSE NUCLEAR ANNIHILATION UPON THE EARTH,” Maximumhaleem screamed on Truth Social.
Cheap Shots
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OMG that Bible thing is some serious blasphemy. It's Lafayette Square^3.
The rank and file may be excused for not knowing or remembering, but the trained pastors know damn well that's not OK.
"It is written" [Jesus said to the money changers in the temple, shortly before he kicked their asses], "my house will be called a house of prayer, but you are making it a den of robbers" (Matthew 21:13).
The fact that Trump can touch a Bible and not burst into flame is further proof that atheists are right. The fact that anyone proclaiming to be Christian follows him is evidence they don't read their holy book - descriptions in Revelation kind of fit him. Of course, the book also predicts that many believers will follow the anti-Christ. Still, this is on-par for Trump, and his followers.