WASHINGTON—Some notebook leftovers from a bad day for democracy before the United States Supreme Court.
My Bad Faith Meter is broken, perhaps irretrievably. I sat there and listened to Justice Brett Kavanaugh spout off about the dangers of runaway special counsels, all the while remembering that he made his GOP bones working for Kenneth F*cking Starr and the Great Penis Chase of 1998. I also sat there and listened to Justice Sam Alito warn darkly of how future presidents could be imperiled if we held the most recent former president* liable for the crimes he committed against us all. I seemed to recall that, prior to the decision that Alito authored to strip women of privacy rights they’d enjoyed for a half century, people warned Alito and the rest of them about the potential consequences of doing that. With states running amok with anti-choice laws, the way they ran amok with voter-suppression laws after the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, women would perhaps die of the complications of a difficult pregnancy. We would end up with a patchwork of state laws that would require women to cross several state lines in order to obtain the care they needed. Alito, caught up in searching out precedents from seventeenth-century British witch-hunting judges, didn’t let these predictions of what might happen in this century if he did what he said he was going to do. All of that stuff has come to pass.
Bad Historical Theater got quite a workout as well. Kavanaugh cited Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon as being “very controversial in the moment—hugely unpopular, probably why he lost in ’76. Now looked upon as one of the better decisions in presidential history, I think, by most people.” Uhhh, no. Recent polling saw support for the pardon drop like a stone as the last presidency* ground on, which really should have taught Kavanaugh…something.
But the wildest and furthest off-the-wall reference came from Justice Clarence Thomas, who referenced the possibility of John F. Kennedy’s being prosecuted for participating in Operation Mongoose when he left office in 1968. (Of course, as The New York Times dryly pointed out, JFK never had a chance to be a former president.) According to Thomas:
“Over the not-so-distant past…certain presidents have engaged in various activity, coups or operations like Operation Mongoose, when I was a teenager, and yet there were no prosecutions. Why? If what you’re saying is right, it would seem that would have been ripe for criminal prosecution of someone.”
Mongoose was a CIA-sponsored campaign of terrorism against Cuba in the 1960s. It was the CIA’s response to the collapse of the Bay of Pigs invasion. It involved crop burnings, industrial sabotage, and proposed assassinations, some of them immortally wacky. (Exploding sea shells. Exploding cigars. Poisoning Castro. Making his beard fall out.) The Kennedy brothers probably let this go on too long, but they suspended the program in 1962, when the Cuban Missile Crisis erupted. Added historical note: There is considerable evidence that former Mongoosers may have been involved in the president’s murder a year later. This would have been an actual coup d’état. Thanks for the memories, Clarence.
I wish I had faith that the Supreme Court would rule unanimously against Trump. But having heard the arguments — having listened to Justice Brett Kavanaugh worry that prosecution could hamper the president and having heard Justice Samuel Alito suggest that we would face a destabilizing future of politically motivated prosecutions if Trump were to find himself on the receiving end of the full force of the law — my sense is that the Republican-appointed majority will try to make some distinction between official and unofficial acts and remand the case back to the trial court for further review, delaying a trial even further.
Rather than grapple with the situation at hand — a defeated president worked with his allies to try to overturn the results of an election he lost, eventually summoning a mob to try to subvert the peaceful transfer of power — the Republican-appointed majority worried about hypothetical prosecutions against hypothetical presidents who might try to stay in office against the will of the people if they aren’t placed above the law.
It was a farce befitting the absurdity of the situation. Trump has asked the Supreme Court if he is, in effect, a king. And at least four members of the court, among them the so-called originalists, have said, in essence, that they’ll have to think about it.
NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report)—In a development that has rocked the news industry, The National Enquirer has lost millions of subscribersamid revelations that some of its stories might not be factual.
After Donald J. Trump’s hush money trial exposed the Enquirer’s inner workings, the newspaper’s reputation for unimpeachable journalism suffered a severe blow, media insiders say.
Harland Dorrinson, an Enquirer subscriberfor over thirty years, said discovering that the weekly periodical was not a dependable information source was “a gut punch.”
“In a complex and confusing world, I always felt that there was one news outlet that could make sense of it all,” he said. “That’s been stolen from me.”
If the Enquirer distorted its coverage to support Trump’s election in 2016, Dorrinson wondered, “Does that mean Hillary Clinton wasn’t really dying? Or that she didn’t delete emails from her multiple lesbian lovers? Or that Bill Clinton didn’t have a sex romp in a pickup truck that was caught on video? Now I don’t know what to believe.”
The longtime subscriber said that the Enquirer’s sudden loss of credibility would force him to seek reliable reporting elsewhere, adding, “I guess I’ll give Fox a shot.”
Someone is making Trump do something he doesn’t want to do for the first time since Fred shipped him off to the cosplay military boarding school and the pasty doughboy is about to fall to pieces after three days.
NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report)—Judge Juan M. Merchan reprimanded Donald J. Trump on the first day of his hush money trial after he rejected a number of prospective female jurors as “not my type.”
The judge declared Trump out of order when he commented that one of the women was “a 5 or a 6 at best.”
“This is what happens when Joe Biden controls the justice system,” Trump said. “He doesn’t know how to pick women. I ran beauty pageants.”
Looking at the panel of jurors, he added, “This should never be allowed to happen in this country.”
Trump’s legal woes worsened further when his entire team of attorneys suddenly pleaded insanity.
The lawyers said they were claiming to be insane “on the grounds of expecting to ever be paid.”
In a nightmare scenario for Trump, Rudy Giuliani has volunteered to defend him.
Small-time investors in Trump’s Truth Social reckon with stock collapse
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.
That nest egg has lost about half its value in the past two weeks as Trump Media & Technology Group’s share price dropped from $66 after its public debut last month to $32 on Friday. But McLain, 71, who owns a tree-removal service outside Oklahoma City, said he’s not worried. If anything, he wants to buy more.
“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.”
For shareholders like McLain, investing in Truth Social is less a business calculation than a statement of faith in the former president and the business traded under his initials, DJT.
Even the company’s plunging stock price — and the chance their investments could get mostly wiped out — doesn’t seem to have shaken that faith. The company has lost $3.5 billion in value since its public debut last month.
As a business, Trump Media has largely underwhelmed: The company lost $58 million last year on $4 million in revenue, less than the average Chick-fil-A franchise, even as it paid out millions in executive salaries, bonuses and stock.
And in two years, 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.”
But for some Trump investors, the stock is a badge of honor — a way to show their devotion beyond buying Trump merchandise, visiting Trump golf courses or donating to Trump’s presidential campaign.
Trump Media spokeswoman Shannon Devine said in a statement that “Truth Social has created a free-speech beachhead against Big Tech for a fraction of the start-up and operating costs that the legacy tech corporations incurred, while having no debt, more than $200 million in the bank, and the support of hundreds of thousands of retail investors who fervently believe in our mission.”
Trump Media has boasted that it has benefited from a flood of “retail investors” — small-time and amateur shareholders betting their personal cash. Its merger partner, Digital World Acquisition, said its shares were bought by nearly 400,000 retail investors, and Trump Media’s chief executive, Devin Nunes, told Fox News anchor Maria Bartiromo on Sunday that the company had added over 200,000 new ones in the past couple of weeks.
“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.
In an interview last month with conservative commentator Sean Hannity, the former Republican congressman recounted a recent discussion with Trump where the men celebrated having “opened up the internet and kept it open for the American people.”
“I’ll never forget the conversation we had,” Nunes said. “He said, ‘You know, once we’re all dead and gone, this will last forever.’”
Many of Truth Social’s investors say they’re in it for the long haul. Todd Schlanger, an interior designer at a furniture store in West Palm Beach who said Trump had been one of his customers, said he’s invested about $20,000 in total and is buying new shares every week.
Schlanger said he now watches his stock performance every day hoping for positive signs. In a Truth Social post last week, he encouraged “everyone who supports Donald Trump and Truth [Social to] buy a share everyday” 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.”
That range of emotions is on full display on Truth Social, where thousands of mostly anonymous accounts have flocked to meme-filled investor groups, one of which is emblazoned with a computer-generated image showing Trump pumping his fist on a Wall Street trading floor.
Some accounts there have recently encouraged traders to keep investing in a fight they said was about “good vs evil” — a way to defend Trump from the liberal elites laughing at him and, by extension, them. The user @BaldylocksUSMC said “the fight has been long and hard on most of us” and that “this stock is not for the weak,” but that one day they would triumph over critics who were “brainwashed beyond repair.”
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] $$$$.” The next day, the account shared a 2021 blog post from the investing forum Seeking Alpha saying Truth Social could be worth $1 trillion in the next 10 years.
But there are also flickers of uncertainty and disenchantment, with some saying they faced thousands of dollars in losses or had “risked [literally] everything.” One user who had posted “Tired of WINNING yet?” earlier this year when the stock spiked posted that this week’s losses were “painful to stomach.”
“Come on DJT, every time I buy more, the price drops more,” the user @bill7718 wrote. “When will it be the BOTTOM!!” (He posted a chart Thursday showing the stock rising slightly alongside the caption, “moving!!” The price has since gone back down.)
The user @manofpeace123, who said they bought shares at $65 and that 71 percent of their portfolio was DJT stock, said on Wednesday that investing was a way of telling Trump, “I believe in you and I stand with you through good times and bad.” But a day later, the user added: “can’t help but feel sad. … feel like I’m trying to catch a falling knife.”
Another account, @realJaneBLONDE, posted on Sunday that she was “NOT panicked NOT worried” before, two days later, posting a message to Trump and congressional Republicans urging them to make it “illegal” to bet against or short-sell stocks.
“Sick of MY investment money being stolen!!” she wrote. “They’re stealing peoples money and you’re allowing it!!”
Some users said they were “baffled” by the stock’s ups and downs, and one asked for advice on how to tell her husband she didn’t want to sell. One user posted a meme image saying, “If you’re worried about your Money, Remember This, DJT stock is about FREE SPEECH & Without FREE SPEECH Money won’t mean much.”
But other users saw such questions as displays of unacceptable doubt. When the user @seneca1950 asked whether anyone was concerned that the company’s upcoming plans to issue tens of millions more shares would sink the stock price, two accounts criticized the account for spreading “FUD” — fear, uncertainty and doubt.
“Are you a Fudster,” wrote a user named “Jesus Revolution 2024.” Wrote another, called Rabristol: “You must be short with no way out!”
In moments of apparent despair, some users work to lift one another up by arguing that they are enduring the same kinds of “deep state” attacks that had long shadowed Trump himself. When user @BingBlangBlaow said they were embarrassed to be so “deep in the red” and questioned why “everyone [was] acting like everything is fine,” Chad Nedohin, a Canadian investor and prominent cheerleader of the stock on Truth Social and the video site Rumble, responded, “No [one’s] fine with it, but we are DJT now. The deep state is making their run at Trump … and us.”
The user, however, posted afterward that the argument left him unconvinced. “I’m tired of blaming the deep state,” he said. Later, he added, “You would think that the ‘biggest political movement of all time’ would want to support the man leading it and get much better numbers than” this. (The accounts did not respond to messages and offered no way to contact them.)
Carol Swain, a prominent conservative commentator in Nashville who previously taught political science at Vanderbilt University, said she invested $1,000 in Trump Media stock earlier this month, at $48 a share, over the objections of her financial adviser, who predicted the stock would dive.
“If I lose it, fine. If I make a profit, wonderful. But at the end of the day, I wanted to show my support,” she said. “There’s such an effort to destroy him and strip his wealth away, and so much glee about it. I would like to see him be a winner.”
She, too, suspects stock manipulation, arguing that “the people who hate Donald Trump would do anything to try to hurt him.” As for Truth Social itself, she said she posts there only sparingly and prefers X, where she has 35 times as many followers. “I have always wanted not to just preach to the choir,” she said.
McLain, the tree service owner in Oklahoma, said he believes the stock could “go to $1,000 a share, easy,” once the media stops writing so negatively about it and the company works through its growing pains. The company’s leaders, he said, are being “too silent right now” amid questions about the falling share price, but he suspects it’s because they’re working on something amazing and new.
McLain is an amateur trader — he invested only once before and “lost [his] butt” — and said he hasn’t talked to his family about his investment, saying, “You know how that is.” But he believes the Trump Media deal is a sign he is “supposed to invest,” he said.
“This isn’t just another stock to me. … I feel like it was God Almighty that put it in my lap,” he said. “I’ve just got to hold on and let them do their job. If you go on emotion, you’ll get out of this thing the first time it goes down.”
I Tried Being Tasteful... 