Presidential elections as boiler room stock scams

This guy decided he didn’t want to roll the dice:

One of the biggest shareholders in former U.S. President Donald Trump’s media company has all but eliminated its stake following the recent end of selling restrictions.

United Atlantic Ventures, managed by Trump Media cofounder Andrew Litinsky, who had appeared on Trump’s hit reality TV show “The Apprentice,” cut its 5.5% stake in Trump Media & Technology from over 7.5 million shares to just 100 shares, according to a filing late on Thursday.

United Atlantic had been one of the company’s top three shareholders. Republican presidential candidate Trump owns about 57% of Trump Media.

Shares of Trump Media, which operates the Truth Social app, have been volatile over the past five trading sessions following the end of insider trading restrictions related to the company’s March stock market debut.

Shares of the company dipped about 1% on Thursday, ahead of the filing, leaving it with a stock market value of $2.8 billion.

Trump Media is up about 7% today. Now this is in conventional terms a worthless stock, since it represents the equity value of a company that does not have any prospect of ever turning a profit from producing any sort of good or service, but we left conventional terms about three counties over, and are in Trump World, where the play is this: If Trump gets re-elected, Trump Media will be a convenient drop spot for bribing the president, whether by foreign or domestic “investors” in this “company.”

Trump owns 145 million shares, which means that on November 6 or shortly thereafter, his stake will be worth either something like $10 billion or, essentially, zero.

What’s important to remember here is that if you or me were elected president would be overwhelmed by the sheer awesome responsibility of being entrusted with the job of chief executive of the world’s most important country. Trump doesn’t think that way. For him, this has always been just another grift. I’m being quite literal about this. The only reason he cares about the presidency is because he can make money from it, and can get people to bow and scrape before him (“Sir,” he said to me with tears in his eyes . . .).

Trump Media is the most literal embodiment of this set of priorities. Trump wants to get re-elected to cash in on the particular grift he’s been running since June 2015. He also wants to punish and humiliate his enemies and less than fully loyal supporters (which is all of them naturally), but mainly it’s about the money, because that’s the only thing that has ever mattered to him. And it matters to him because he is an ideal representative of a particular type Keynes identified nearly 100 years ago:

When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession -as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life -will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semicriminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease. All kinds of social customs and economic practices, affecting the distribution of wealth and of economic rewards and penalties, which we now maintain at all costs, however distasteful and unjust they may be in themselves, because they are tremendously useful in promoting the accumulation of capital, we shall then be free, at last, to discard.

If the Trump era is any indication, we may be waiting a while longer.