Failed one-term, twice-impeached former president Donald Trump has bragged for decades that he’s a “great businessman” who built one of the biggest and most successful companies in the world.
The truth, however, is quite different from the Donald’s claims, as he has filed for bankruptcy multiple times, been in the verge of financial collapse more than once, and is now relying on his political supporters to pay his legal bills with contributions to a political action committee he formed to further fleece the MAGA sheep.
You may recall that in October of 2021, not long after he had been booted from Twitter for sharing lies about the 2020 election, Trump announced his own social media platform, which he dubbed Truth Social.
Truth Social was funded by in part by a start-up media venture with Miami-based Digital World Acquisition, which managed to raise $300 million from investors to get Truth Social up and running. All that remained was a formal merger between Digital World and the Trump Media & Technology Group (TMG).
That merger now seems doomed, meaning Digital World and its partner, Donald Trump, are about to be faced with returning that $300 million to investors, which would be the death of Truth Social, The Washington Post reports.
With the merger stalled for months, Digital World is fast approaching a Sept. 8 deadline for the merger to close and has scheduled a shareholder meeting for Tuesday in hopes of getting enough votes to extend the deadline another year.
If the vote fails, Digital World will be required by law to liquidate and return $300 million to its shareholders, leaving Trump’s company with nothing from the transaction.
For Digital World, it would signal the ultimate financial fall from grace for a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, that turned its proximity to the former president into what was once one of the stock market’s hottest trades. Its share price, which peaked in its first hours at $175, has since fallen to about $14.
Jay Ritter, a University of Florida finance professor explains that the company can’t keep extending the deadline for merger.
“The deal does seem to be running out of time. You can’t just keep getting extensions forever.”
As you’d expect, Trump is blaming the Securities and Exchange Commission for the delays, even going to far as to say the SEC has tried to “sabotage” the merger for political reasons with “a bureaucratic black hole of inaction.”
But the real reason for the endless delays can be laid at the door of Digital World and TMG, both of which have reportedly dragged their feet when it comes to being totally transparent with regulators who are simply trying to protect investors from being further fleeced by the Trump, who has a history of grifting.
It probably won’t surprise you to learn that Truth Social has itself been a failure, repeatedly missing its self-set goals for users, The Post explains.
Truth Social has attracted a relatively meager following. Though Trump Media projected in a 2021 investor presentation that the site would have 41 million total users by the end of this year, usage estimates from Similarweb, a data firm that analyzes web traffic, suggest it is a long way from reaching that goal.
According to Similarweb estimates, roughly 500,000 monthly active users in the United States visited Truth Social via its Apple and Android mobile apps in July, down from 600,000 in June.
Donald Trump is a failure at everything he attempts. He’s not a great businessman. He’s just a bullshit artist who knows how to lie to gullible fools.
