Welcome back to the Surge, Slate’s Saturday-morning rundown of the most impactful and/or hugely embarrassing figures from the week in politics. I’m Ben Mathis-Lilley, filling in for Jim Newell, who took the week off to launch a 24-hour fresh-pasta delivery service called Newell’s New Noodles Nightly. (We wish him the best of luck in overcoming the Washington Post’s description of his product as a “nightmare noodle no-no.”)
This week, we’ve got a surprising dropout in the state that simply refuses to have a normal Senate race, a big hubbub at NBC about whether journalists should help overthrow the government, and a classic case of accidentally trying to get the Gonzaga men’s basketball team deported. But first, it’s time for more of this newsletter’s trademark analysis of the equities markets.
By Ben Mathis-Lilley
America’s most frequent courtroom visitor is in a bit of a pinch right now. He needs to find $175 million, stat, or Big Tony (New York Attorney General Letitia James) is going to break his legs (potentially seize some of his assets in order to cover the judgment that was entered against him in his civil fraud trial). This week, though, the company that operates Trump’s small-time Twitter-esque Truth Social platform went public; you can now buy shares of Trump Media & Technology Group Corp. on the NASDAQ, ticker symbol DJT. Those shares are worth $62 as of press time, and Trump owns 58 percent of them, which means that he’s technically got more than $4 billion in Truth Social stock. The problem is that the value of the stock appears to be dependent on MAGA “retail investors” who are holding it in order to show their solidarity with Trump and/or hoping that he’ll win reelection and it’ll gain value by being the president’s company. If he starts trying to dump $175 million of it to cover his legal needs, he might crash its price by flooding the market and triggering a sell-off. And given that the company’s actual assets are almost worthless, there’s basically no floor to how low the price could go. (Well, “zero” is the floor.) In sum, the deep state and the rules of supply and demand might have him over a barrel on this one.
Joe Biden’s been doing better lately in head-to-head polls against Donald Trump, like the one Quinnipiac released Wednesday. The general election, though, isn’t a head-to-head race: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is running as an independent, as is Cornel West, and........