Donald Trump’s Vampire Presidency
We know for a fact that Trump invested no cash in Truth Social. He nonetheless was gifted with a majority of company shares, worth today about $2 billion. If Trump were to cash out, he would crash the company’s stock price and put Truth Social out of business. That wouldn’t be very nice, but Truth Social is a money-losing company anyway whose only financial purpose is to enrich Trump. Would the cultish shareholders who got wiped out even complain?
Trump may have invested some money in his various crypto partnerships, but if I know our boy he’s a freeloader there, too. (According to the Times, it’s the partners who “invested most or all of the capital.”) According to Forbes, Trump has made about $1 billion from crypto. That breaks down to $390 million from World Liberty tokens, $742 million from memecoins, and $7 million from NFTs. What these assets have in common, along with Trump’s shares in Truth Social, is an absence of intrinsic value. Their worth lies exclusively in enriching Donald Trump. According to the Times, Trump’s crypto holdings might conceivably be worth as much as $7.1 billion.
Melania, it should be said, is no slouch as a rentier herself. Her annual financial disclosure form shows that the Log Cabin Republicans paid her about $700,000 for two speaking engagements last year, one in New York and one in Palm Beach. If this LGBTQ+ group imagined it was buying Trump’s support, it was badly mistaken. The once and future first lady also collected about $217,000 to license Melania NFTs. And Amazon, of course, paid Melania $40 million to participate in a documentary about herself.
Rentier politics is a little bit like the end of It’s A Wonderful Life, when the townspeople gather at George Bailey’s house to bail out his savings & loan. In this version, though, they’re gathering to bail out Mr. Potter, George’s stingy and corrupt business rival. The sums are considerably greater than in Bedford Falls, and the motive less exalted. Investors gave Trump $3 billion on the hunch that he’d become president, or (after November 5) the certainty that he’d become president, or (after January 20) the fact that he was president already. It’s an unstable foundation on which to build a fortune because in three and a half years Trump will no longer be president. Perhaps a few hard-core fans will keep shoveling money Trump’s way for sentimental reasons, but the business model will have collapsed.
