It’s been a while since my last note on the stock price of Trump Media & Technology Group, known as DJT. Back on June 22, it was priced at $17.83. Today?
Source: yahoo! finance
Not a great deal of movement.
But, and yes I’m way behind on my reading, last week Steve Benen, writing about the Trump Administration, had this note, and it caught my eye in connection with DJT valuations:
4. Making up data: The same president who condemned his own administration’s jobs data as “rigged,” “ridiculous,” “phony” and a “scam” boasted a few days later that he has successfully lowered the costs of prescription drugs by up to “1,500%” — which remains a literal impossibility.
But this happens practically every day. Trump keeps claiming that gas prices have fallen below $2 per gallon in several states, which is demonstrably false. Confronted with discouraging public opinion research, Trump also has a habit of making up imaginary approval ratings for himself.
He makes up inflation data. And figures related to construction costs. And tax data. And trade data. And crime data.
How is this different from the White House’s routine lying? As MSNBC’s Catherine Rampell recently explained in a column for The Washington Post, “For months, President Donald Trump has waged war on objective, reliable federal statistics. By ‘statistics,’ I mean the bits of information, large and small, that Americans might take for granted but need to make sense of the world. These figures help families decide where to live, physicians how to treat their patients, and businesses what to sell or whether to hire.”
Really, the entire post is worth a look, especially if you have DJT in your portfolio. But what it comes down to is this: When Trump doesn’t like reality, he makes up his own reality and tries to sell the public on it, trusting that when reality bites him on the ass, he can lie his way out of that, too.
So if the reality of Trump Media & Technology Group, and how it affects DJT, displeases him, what will he do? Lying is a good bet, particularly as he considers himself immune to legal consequences.
But investors hate lies, and as each lie comes to light, they’ll look on DJT with more and more disfavor. If enough are paying attention, especially those who invested their life savings in DJT, the price will drop. He’ll discover that he’s not immune to civil suits, and investors will start taking chunks out of him.
President Trump may transfer his funds overseas, out of reach of investors, if he can’t find a way to forbid the courts from raiding his accounts to satisfy judgments. And if he can find a way to forbid such actions, the entire market may become unstable.
Part of our problem these days is public distrust of public servants, from Congress people to the military. The biggest liar of them all, the Mendacity Machine, could cause a collapse of the American economy.
As ever, I’m not a financial advisor and this is not financial advise. Just an observation on human nature.
