It's hard to see how this pathetic story helps him politically either.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/04/14/truth-social-investors-faith-trump/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 more than 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 $22 on Tuesday. But McLain, 71, who owns a tree-removal service outside Oklahoma City, said he’s not worried. If anything, he wants to buy more.
“I know good and well it’s in Trump’s hands, and he’s got plans,” he said. “I have no doubt it’s going to explode sometime.”
McLain is possibly spot on in his choice of the word explode but in the opposite way from what he thinks.
Or maybe I'm missing a great opportunity to become rich. It'll be difficult to feel sorry for people
like McLain nor should I feel sorry for myself if I'm wrong. People who remember Atlantic City or
Trump University....might urge more caution.
But for some Trump investors, the stock is a badge of honor — a way to show their devotion beyond buying Trump merchandise, visiting Trump golf courses or donating to Trump’s presidential campaign.
Trump Media has boasted that it has benefited from a flood of “retail investors” — small-time and amateur shareholders betting their personal cash. Its merger partner, Digital World Acquisition, said its shares were bought by nearly 400,000 retail investors, and Trump Media’s chief executive, Devin Nunes, told Fox News anchor Maria Bartiromo on April 7 that the company had added over 200,000 new ones in the previous couple of weeks.
“There’s not another company out there that has retail investors like this,” said Nunes, who this year will receive a $1 million salary, a $600,000 retention bonus and a stock package currently worth more than $2.6 million.
In an interview last month with conservative commentator Sean Hannity, the former Republican congressman recounted a recent discussion with Trump in which the men celebrated having “opened up the internet and kept it open for the American people.”
“I’ll never forget the conversation we had,” Nunes said. “He said, ‘You know, once we’re all dead and gone, this will last forever.’”
I'm sure Nunes is worth every penny."The value of history is, indeed, not scientific but moral: by liberalizing the mind, by deepening the sympathies, by fortifying the will, it enables us to control, not society, but ourselves -- a much more important thing; it prepares us to live more humanely in the present and to meet rather than to foretell the future."
Carl Becker, 1873-1945, U.S. historian
or PT Barnum
"Many people are gullible, and we can expect this to continue."
"No man ever went broke overestimating the ignorance of the American public."
Many of Truth Social’s investors say they’re in it for the long haul. Todd Schlanger, an interior designer at a furniture store in West Palm Beach who said Trump had been one of his customers, said he’s invested about $20,000 in total and is buying new shares every week.
Schlanger said he now watches his stock performance every day hoping for positive signs. In a Truth Social post last week, he encouraged “everyone who supports Donald Trump and Truth [Social to] buy a share everyday” and asked, “Do you think we have hit bottom?” (The stock has slid about 35 percent since that post.)
He 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.”
McLain is an amateur trader — he invested only once before and “lost [his] butt” — and said he hasn’t talked to his family about his investment, saying, “You know how that is.” But he believes the Trump Media deal is a sign he is “supposed to invest,” he said.
“This isn’t just another stock to me. … I feel like it was God Almighty that put it in my lap,” he said. “I’ve just got to hold on and let them do their job. If you go on emotion, you’ll get out of this thing the first time it goes down.”
No doubt Trump is going to make these people rich!