The Art of the Con
Don Jr. testified for the defense in the NY fraud trial on Monday and spent his time talking about his father’s brilliance and his company’s success:
n a return appearance at a trial that has featured a parade of Trumps on the stand as they fight for the future of their family business, the junior Mr. Trump testified in bursts of hyperbole and platitudes. His rhetoric sounded as though it had been ripped from the pages of an airline magazine or a travel brochure, and he saved the highest praise for the man who he said made it all happen: his father, a “visionary” who is “an artist with real estate” and “creates things that other people would never envision.”
Yet some of his high-flying claims clashed with present-day reality.
In recent years, the Trump Organization has shrunk, as the family name was scrubbed from some of the properties he extolled, taken off buildings in New York, Washington and, soon, Hawaii. Trump Tower and 40 Wall Street have also, at times, lost a number of tenants. Some of the former president’s properties struggled even to turn a profit.
In fact his father is just a rich kid who had a knack for self-promotion and was a dud at business. It’s just that he inherited a lot from his father and happened on a lucrative TV deal that perfectly fit his only real talent.
He’s proving that he’s nothing more than a hype artist even as we speak:
Former President Trump’s social media platform Truth Social has lost $73 million in less than two years, according to an SEC filing on Monday.
Why it matters: The filing from Digital World Acquisition Corp., a special purpose acquisition company, indicates more trouble with its planned merger with Truth Social owner Trump Media & Technology Group — including a “request and subpoena” from the SEC for documents related to its investigation into the proposed SPAC deal.
DWAC said the SEC sought information “regarding, among other things, meetings of Digital World’s Board; communications with and the evaluation of potential targets,” including TMTG.
“TMTG believes that it may be difficult to raise additional funds through traditional financing sources in the absence of material progress toward completing its merger with Digital World,” the filing states.
The big picture: Truth Social launched in February 2022 as a free speech app for conservatives and Trump has become the face of the platform, but it has for months faced financial stress and been mired in legal and regulatory limbo limbo, per Axios’ Sara Fischer and Dan Primack.
He’s a failure and a loser. But for some reason he has almost half the country convinced that he’s a God. This is the nature of cults. They’re all built on a very wobbly foundation of lies. It will come crashing down at some point, they always do, but the big question is whether he’s going to take the country down with it.