The Washington Post gives us a view of how the Trump Cult is responding to the collapse of the Scam Yam’s latest scheme:
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…
It’s already pretty sad that the hollowing out of the middle class has put this man in a position where he has a hopelessly inadequate nest egg and is still doing a rather strenuous job at age 71.
And now Trump has suckered him into losing even that, for the sake of whatever satisfaction he gets out of membership in the cult:
...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...
Of course, the True Believers have explanations for everything that goes wrong:
...[$20,000 investor Todd Schlanger] 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.”…
They also have ideas for how to fight the Evil Librul Conspriacy:
...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...
Free market? What’s that?
The story does mention a few examples of nervous investors who dare to suggest that perhaps the Great Pumpkinhead’s stock value will not rise up out of the pumpkin patch and fulfill McLain’s belief that it could “go to $1,000 a share, easy”. Naturally, each is met with a flurry of angry denunciations of such defeatist attitudes, and confidence that the stock would “explode” if only the mean old liberal media would quit sabotaging it.
Well, I have to agree, sort of. Truth Social is definitely going to “explode” — much like one of Wile E. Coyote’s ACME contraptions.