If there’s a political science term to describe a movement in which people are more willing to invest than participate, it certainly isn’t populism. Populist implies working-class, and the day traders who buy and sell meme stocks are seldom proletarians. This is a country where nearly half of all households own no stocks at all, where those that do typically possess them via retirement accounts managed by somebody else, and where the median value of stocks that are traded directly is a mere $15,000. No, the people buying Truth Social stock are either Apolitical Risk-Takers (APTs), hoping to ride the wave, or haut bourgeois True Believers (T.B.s). The T.B.s, I would guess, tend to be college-grad retirees, because about half of all MAGA types are retirees and not quite one-third hold college degrees.
Trump himself is part APT and part T.B. The big question for the Trump Media & Technology Group is which half of his brain will prevail. On the one hand, Trump wants to be president again, and Truth Social has the potential to become his Pravda, a very handy propaganda outlet under his complete control. On the other hand, Trump has this liquidity problem. Hence the temptation to Trump and dump.
As I’ve observed previously, Trump would rather swallow a fistful of crushed glass than use his own cash to put up, either directly or as collateral, the $175 million bond that’s due April 4 in his New York civil fraud case. My guess is that right now Trump’s leaning heavily on the insurance giant Chubb, which already bonded him for $91 million in the E. Jean Carroll judgment, to accept real estate as collateral for a $175 million bond. (Surety companies hate to accept real estate as collateral.) God only knows why Chubb would give Trump the time of day—its potential reasons are not flattering—but Chubb tried hard to put together an earlier deal to post the $454 million bond that an appeals court later reduced to $175 million.
