I watched Trump’s acceptance speech on Thursday night; it was the only part of the RNC that I watched, other than a random 15 seconds of Vance’s speech the previous night. It lasted 92 minutes, breaking the modern record for “major party Presidential nomination speech length” previously held by… Trump.
That 92 minutes appeared to be two-thirds prepared remarks read from the teleprompter, and one-third digressions on topics he typically covers at his rally speeches. As noted in a Brookings article: “The last hour saw him continuing to claim several times that the 2020 election was stolen, praising authoritarian leaders around the world, saying he would lead the most massive deportation in the history of the United States, bizarrely mentioning the serial killer Hannibal Lecter, and promising that Russia and China would fear him so much they would stop their aggressive actions.” That was on top of the customary level of misrepresentations and falsehoods generally seen in a Trump speech.
The general view afterwards was that if Trump had somehow found the mental discipline to stick to the speech on his teleprompter, it could have been a very powerful and effective moment for his campaign. Instead, he delivered a performance that, as one MSNBC host said right afterwards, would have had people talking about invoking the 25th Amendment if it had been given by Biden.
Speaking of the President, the situation around his candidacy remains in flux but there have been fewer developments in the past 48 hours than I was expecting. Since Trump’s speech 4 more Senators have joined Senator Welch in calling for Biden to drop out, including two prominent red-state moderates, Tester (up for re-election this fall) and Manchin (who declined to run for re-election this fall). My former Representative in Chicago, Chuy Garcia, recently became one of the first minority members of Congress to join the call for a new candidate. The Biden contract on PredictIt has been pretty stable in the low $0.30s so far this weekend, after having dipped into the teens on Thursday.
A fact-check on the situation around Ohio ballot access, which I had previously discussed: It turns out that on June 2nd the Ohio governor did sign legislation that, on its face, moved the deadline for inclusion on this fall’s Presidential ballot from August 7th to September 6th. However, the Ohio state Democratic party chair appears to distrust that Ohio Republicans are operating in good faith and still is advocating for a virtual roll call to settle the Democratic nomination before August 7th.
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Election 2024: DJT
As discussed in my last post, earlier this week a SPAC called DWAC officially acquired the Trump-owned parent of social media concern Truth Social, TMTG. The merged company is called TMTG, but its stock ticker symbol is DJT. Which is particularly appropriate here, since the market price of DJT appears to be almost entirely disconnected from the fundamentals of TMTG as a business venture.
A very instructive comparison is Reddit, the social media concern that had its IPO last week. Reddit stock has performed quite strongly, with the IPO price being at the top of the suggested range, followed by a very nice day one pop, and continued price appreciation since then. The stock closed down today, at about $58 per share, giving it a market capitalization of $9.2 billion. While Reddit has never been profitable, it did have $800 million in 2023 revenue, and it has 73 million active daily users and 267 million active weekly users. To my tastes as a value-oriented investor, RDDT is massively over-priced; but at least it is an established company, with real revenue sources, and a large, devoted user base.
TMTG, by contrast, only reported $3.4 million of revenue for the first nine months of 2023, on which it had $10.6 million of operating losses. It has never reported active user counts, unlike other social media platforms, but external parties have estimated that Truth Social has maybe 1 million active monthly users. And yet… at today’s closing price of about $66 per share, TMTG’s market capitalization is $9.4 billion, slightly more than Reddit’s.
If RDDT is, arguably, massively over-priced, what words suffice to describe the extent to which DJT is over-priced? Clearly, the market for DJT stock has almost nothing to do with TMTG the company, and everything to do with Donald J. Trump the personal brand. With Trump’s paper net worth having gone up by billions this week, it will be interesting to see how much cash he can ultimately realize from his TMTG holdings, and what the eventual path of TMTG’s stock price looks like.
However, the immediacy of Trump’s potential need to convert TMTG stock to cash was alleviated on Monday by a New York appellate court decision in the Trump Org fraud case, reducing the amount of his appeal bond to $175 million and giving him a further 10 days to post the bond. The appellate court decision also stayed many of Judge Engoron’s findings, such as the order prohibiting Trump and his sons from serving as an officer of a New York corporation, pending appeal; however, the appellate court did not stay the requirements for an independent monitor over Trump Org, or for Trump Org to hire an independent director of compliance.
In other news, yesterday the Democrats unexpectedly won a by-election for an Alabama State House seat. In 2022 the Democratic candidate, a white woman named Marilyn Lands, had lost the seat 45-52. The victor was then indicted for voter fraud and resigned his seat several months ago. Lands ran again and this time focused her campaign on reproductive rights, which is currently a hot-button issue in Alabama due to a State Supreme Court decision several week ago that frozen embryos are human beings. She won yesterday by the surprising margin of 62-38, continuing to underscore the extent to which the Dobbs decision is impacting the electoral landscape in red states.
However, perhaps the most important political news of the week came on Monday, when Judge Merchan announced that the criminal trial in New York v. Trump (the hush money case) would indeed commence on April 15th.