On the menu today: On paper, Donald Trump has just enjoyed a quick infusion of cash, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. But the newly released financial records of Truth Social paint a picture of a social-media site with limited audience, advertisers, and revenue — raising the question of how long that new stock is going to stay all that high. Meanwhile, Trump travels to Grand Rapids to denounce what he calls “Biden’s Border Bloodbath,” and a little-noticed figure reveals that since 2019, there are 5 million more asylum-seekers residing in the U.S. awaiting a court date — a court date that is, in some cases, not expected until 2033. A policy that keeps those who have crossed the border in the country and waiting for nearly a decade for a decision may not be “open borders” in name, but it is close to open borders in practice.
The Truth about Truth Social
You’ve probably heard that Donald Trump is facing a cash crunch. As our Andy McCarthy reported, Trump sought to block New York State from enforcing the $454 million judgment against him won by Attorney General Letitia James in her recent civil-fraud case. Interest on that owed sum accrues at more than $112,000 per day. According to a court filing, Trump posted a $175 million bond in the case on Monday in the case, halting collection of the larger sum he owes and preventing the state from seizing his assets to satisfy the debt while he appeals.
Last week, it appeared that Trump received a giant infusion of cash when he needed it most; as our James Lynch summarizes:
His social-media company Truth Social went public on Tuesday, and shares immediately soared, giving Trump a multibillion-dollar boost to his net worth, despite the company’s poor financials. Shares of Truth Social dropped on Monday with the release of its latest financial statement.
Truth Social’s debut on the Nasdaq exchange last week happened after the company finalized its $300 million merger with Digital World Acquisition Corporation, a shell company designed to merge with Truth Social. Trump’s stake in the company is worth roughly $3 billion.
But that stock — trading under the symbol DJT on the Nasdaq exchange — has dropped from a high of over $71 per share on March 27 to $48.66 at the close of the markets yesterday.
As for those “poor financials . . .” yeesh:
Trump Media and Technology Group, which operates the Truth Social platform, reported it lost $58.2 million in 2023 while generating total revenues of $4.1 million, according to the Monday filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Trump Media listed its largest expense for the year as interest payments totaling more than $39 million.
The filing includes a note from an independent accounting firm, Colorado-based BF Borgers CPA PC, warning that Trump Media’s “operating losses raise substantial doubt about its ability to continue as a going concern.” In a separate filing Monday, Trump Media cited the auditor’s analysis in describing the risks facing the business. Borgers has worked with Trump Media since 2022.
The note is dated March 25, the day before Trump’s company started trading on the Nasdaq stock exchange under the symbol DJT, surging at first and earning comparisons to so-called meme stocks.
Shares of the company fell more than 21% to $48.66 on Monday. Its market value stood at more than $6.5 billion.
A spokesperson for Trump Media referred a request for comment to a Monday news release that quotes Trump Media CEO and former U.S. Rep. Devin Nunes.
“Closing out the 2023 financials related to the merger, Truth Social today has no debt and over $200 million in the bank, opening numerous possibilities for expanding and enhancing our platform,” Nunes said in the release. “We intend to take full advantage of these opportunities to make Truth Social the quintessential free-speech platform for the American people.”
Devin Nunes! Now there’s a name many of us haven’t heard in a long while. The NBC News piece continues:
In the filing, the company acknowledged that it expects to operate at a loss for the “foreseeable future” as it works to expand Truth Social’s user base and attract more advertisers. It said it would be “premature” to predict when it will attain profitability and positive cash flows from its operations.
As of the end of 2023, Trump Media had about $2.6 million in cash on hand and total liabilities of $70.1 million, according to the filing. The company received an infusion of about $300 million from its merger a week ago with shell company Digital World Acquisition Corp.
Most social-media companies make money through advertising, and all the revenue for Truth Social so far has come from advertising sales. But the reach of Truth Social is considerably smaller than that of the bigger-name social-media platforms. As of January, Facebook had 3 billion users worldwide, YouTube reached 2.4 billion, Instagram had 2 billion, and Twitter advertisers reached 372 million.
The new financial statement didn’t say how many users Truth Social has — an ominous sign — but the online-analytics firm SimilarWeb estimated on the first day of public trading that Truth Social had roughly 277,000 U.S. visitors.
This makes the user base of Truth Social a particularly niche audience, and unsurprisingly, the advertisers who are willing to pay to reach this audience are . . . smaller: “Ads from major brands are nonexistent on the site. Instead, the ads on Truth Social are for alternative medicine, diet pills, gun accessories and Trump-themed trinkets, according to an analysis of hundreds of ads on the social network by The New York Times.”
I can hear the comments section groaning about my citing a Times analysis already, but go check out Truth Social for yourself. If you see advertising on Truth Social from a major car company, bank, pharmaceutical company, consumer electronics, electronics, telecom, household products or a cute little gecko telling you he can save you 15 percent or more on car insurance, it will probably be the first.
Business Insider argues, “People bought the stock because they like Donald Trump, or they like the idea of investing in a meme stock propped up by people who like Donald Trump.”
Back in the late 1990s, the comic strip Doonesbury depicted a Silicon Valley dot-com “with only one product — its own stock.”
That’s not Truth Social . . . but Truth Social isn’t as far from that as it would like to be. At this point, buying shares of stock in Trump Media & Technology Group is just another way of supporting Donald Trump, just like donating to his campaign.
‘We Could Afford to Take, In a Heartbeat, another Four Million People’
Today, former president Trump will be in Grand Rapids, Mich., discussing what he calls “Biden’s Border Bloodbath.”
The following section involves a lot of discussion of fiscal years, so before we get started, remember that in the U.S. government, fiscal years begin on October 1 of the preceding calendar year. So fiscal year 2021 began on October 1, 2020, and ended September 30, 2021.
The U.S. Customs and Border Patrol apprehended 1,956,519 individuals attempting to cross the U.S.–Mexico border in fiscal year 2021; 2,766,582 in fiscal year 2022; and 3,201,144 in fiscal year 2023. So far this fiscal year, CBP has apprehended 901,549.
That comes out to 8,825,794 in about three and a half years.
Keep in mind, those are the ones who were apprehended, not those who escaped.
Last month, Axios offered an eye-popping statistic that received far less attention than it should have:
More than 8 million asylum seekers and other migrants will be living inside the U.S. in legal limbo by the end of September — a roughly 167 percent increase in five years, according to internal government projections obtained by Axios.
Why it matters: That’s up from about 3 million in 2019 — a sign of how the underfunded and outdated U.S. immigration system can’t keep up with the rapidly growing migrant population driven by new border surges.
In other words, in a span of about four years, the U.S. has added roughly 5 million new residents in the form of those seeking asylum — those who are not in the country illegally, but who are also not legal immigrants, green-card holders, or citizens yet, either.
These people will not be leaving the country anytime soon. “In New York, ICE told asylum-seekers this month to return in March 2033, U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, a Texas Democrat, said at a recent hearing. In nine other cities — San Antonio; Miramar, Florida; Los Angeles; Jacksonville, Florida; Milwaukee; Chicago; Washington; Denver; and Mount Laurel, New Jersey — the wait is until March 2027.”
This is, de facto, open borders. You get to the U.S. border, you claim asylum, and it takes the U.S. government nearly a decade to determine whether you qualify for asylum or not.
You can see how many people are awaiting a decision in each state here.
Back on the campaign trail of 2020 cycle, Joe Biden indeed touted this kind of approach, but envisioned a slightly smaller number of asylum seekers. “We could afford to take, in a heartbeat, another 4 million,” Biden said at one event in August 2019. “The idea that a country of 330 million people cannot absorb people who are in desperate need and who are justifiably fleeing oppression is absolutely bizarre”:
We should be uniting families, we should be uniting families. We should also be looking at the whole idea of what’s going on in terms of diaspora that’s occurring all across the world. Here we are. Look what’s happening in, in, you know, there it is called, you know, temp temporary status in the United States. What’s happening in Venezuela, 4 million people or fleeing Venezuela? What are we doing? We’re not allowing temporary status at all. Num number one, like we did in Haiti, you did when the volcano, all these things, we, we, look, lemme put it another way and I’ll stop. We could afford to take in a heartbeat, another 4 million people. The idea that a country of 330 million people cannot absorb people who are in desperate need and who are justifiably fleeing oppression is absolutely bizarre, absolutely bizarre. I would also move to increase the total number of immigrants able to come to the United States. [Emphasis added.]
Over the weekend, Judson Berger wrote a bit about the squatting surge. “Squatting does appear to be gaining newfound popularity in cities across the country, afflicting property owners who too often discover that tossing unlawful occupiers is counterintuitively complicated. The National Rental Home Council (NRHC), a trade group representing the single-family-home rental industry, told NR that members have reported a sizeable increase, especially in certain markets, over the past few years.”
Did the Biden administration think that it could de facto admit 5 million people into the country and not exacerbate existing shortages of housing? Where did the Biden team think the housing for all of these people was going to come from? Who did it think was going to pay for it? Who did it think was going to pay for the feeding, clothing, medical care, and other expenses associated with taking in someone who arrives with little more than the shirt on their back?
Perhaps the single most revealing moment in the past four years came in September 2022, when D.C. mayor Muriel E. Bowser, lamenting the strain that illegal immigrants were putting on her city’s services, declared, “We’re not a border town. We don’t have an infrastructure to handle this type of and level of immigration to our city. . . . We don’t have the ability. We’re not Texas.” As if communities in the Lone Star State were just brimming with excess infrastructure and just waiting to host thousands of migrants at a time.
ADDENDUM: Expanding a bit on yesterday’s Jolt, I am skeptical that North Carolina will turn into a swing state this year, or more specifically, I have a tough time seeing Joe Biden winning any state in 2024 that he lost in 2020. He’s four years older and a weaker candidate, with a track record that most Americans don’t approve of, and he can’t excusably run a “basement campaign” this time around.