Russia and China Join Turkey in Call for UN Arms Embargo on Israel

By ZeroHedge - Nov 16, 2024,

Turkey's President Erdogan is leading a diplomatic push for a United Nations arms embargo on Israel, citing its actions in Gaza.

Russia and China have joined Turkey in supporting the proposed arms embargo, signaling a growing international concern.

Turkey has officially severed ties with Israel, marking a historic low in their relationship.


Earlier this month Turkey submitted a letter to the United Nations calling for a complete arms embargo on Israel, charging that its military is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has presented a full blockade on weapons as an 'effective solution' for ending the war in Gaza and achieving peace. Notably, among at least 52 countries to cosign that letter are Russia and China.

Erdogan on Wednesday highlighted the importance of the UN letter, warning that Israel "will become more and more aggressive if arms and ammunition supplies continue."

He is lobbying the international community to sign onto the ban, and touting that powerful BRICS countries like Russia and China are leading the way.

In fresh comments made after visiting Saudi Arabia and Azerbaijan, Erdogan described, "China and Russia have both said that Israel's attacks are unjust and illegal. They also talk about the need to stop the attacks and settle the issue diplomatically."

"Russia and China have signed our joint initiative calling on the UN to take measures to stop the supply of arms and ammunition to Israel. This is an important step," he continued, as cited in Anadolu news agency.

"The humanitarian situation in Palestine and Lebanon will continue to deteriorate daily if Israel is not stopped. As long as humanitarian aid is not freely delivered, people will die there every day due to lack of medicine, hunger, thirst and merciless attacks," Erdogan added.

Turkey-Israel relations have fallen to their lowest point in modern history, and an extensive ban on Turkish exports to Israel has remained in place; however, some analysts have highlighted that some materials are getting through and that top Erdogan officials are looking the other way. Several Wednesday reports have said Turkey has officially cut ties with Israel altogether...

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced that Turkey has officially severed relations with Israel, according to reports in Turkish media.

News outlet Medya Ege reported Erdogan to have said, "We, as the State and Government of the Republic of Turkey, have cut off relations with Israel. We do not have any relationship with Israel at this point. Period." —Newsweek


Given that in the US, President-elect Trump is stacking his foreign policy apparatus with pro-Israel officials, Turkey is set to possibly have rocky relations with the US moving forward as well.

However, Erdogan has expressed hope that Trump will will take a significantly different approach to the Middle East during his second term. One key issue remains US support to the Kurds of northern Syria, and another is America's policy on Gaza.

"Our hope is that Trump takes very different steps towards the region this term because the messages being given from time to time concern us," Erdogan told reporters after leaving Baku.

But one area where Trump could work closely with Turkey in the near future and moving forward is Ukraine. Turkey has been key to the only successful negotiated deal of the war - the grain export deal allowing for Ukrainian products and Black Sea ships to safely reach global markets.

By Zerohedge.com

It's time for Democrats to declare class warfare

Thom Hartmann
November 18, 2024

ALTERNET

If my hypothesis from yesterday — that Democrats best way to win elections and regain political power is to engage in class warfare against the GOP and the billionaires that fund it — the immediate question is, “How?”

The last century has seen two presidents engage in class warfare in a big and direct way that not only won them multiple elections but also altered the electoral map of America: Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. There are multiple lessons to learn from both.

When FDR came into power in March of 1933, the nation was in shambles because of a decade of Republican mishandling of the economy. In the early 1920s, Republican President Warren Harding dropped the top income tax rate from 91% down to 25% and loosened oversight of Wall Street.

The short-term result was an explosion of riches at the top, referred to as “The Roaring 20s,” and violent actions against attempts to form labor unions. The longer-term result was the infamous Black Tuesday of October 29, 1929 which kicked off the Republican Great Depression.

President Roosevelt correctly identified America’s morbidly rich, who’d seized control of the GOP after the end of the Taft presidency in 1913, as the cause of the financial disaster and proclaimed that they and their captive Republicans had declared class war against average working class Americans.

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“For out of this modern civilization,” Roosevelt told America, “economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things. … It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself.”

He used the language of class warfare; as with all wars, the first step is to identify the enemy. For FDR it was the morbidly rich of his era who weren’t content to just run their businesses and make money but also lusted for the political power they’d been given during the 1920s by Republican presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover.
“These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America,” Roosevelt proclaimed. “What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power.”
He paused for a moment, then thundered, “Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power!”

The crowd at Madison Square Garden roared when he said that. They knew that Republican politicians had worked hand-in-glove with wealthy industrialists to suppress unions, evade taxes, and accumulate fortunes beyond anything ever seen in America. That the GOP had been running an often-violent class war against them for at least the past decade.

And they were over it. Over the greed, over the theft, and over the self-righteous proclamations that the Constitution protected their avarice. Average working people knew these “economic royalists” weren’t patriots; they were looters, vandals, and political arsonists. FDR gave voice to their anger, disillusionment, and disgust.

“In vain,” Roosevelt said, “they seek to hide behind the Flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the Flag and the Constitution stand for. Now, as always, they stand for democracy, not tyranny; for freedom, not subjection; and against a dictatorship by mob rule and the over-privileged alike.”

Republicans had declared class warfare; FDR, like he would later do with the Japanese and Germans, led the charge to fight back and defeat them.

And defeat them he did (even in the face of an assassination attempt); by the end of his presidency, American oligarchs had gone back to doing business and getting rich, largely avoiding politics and keeping their noses clean.

Until, that is, President Nixon put Lewis Powell on the Supreme Court and Powell began the process — from the bench — of turning America back into a full-blown oligarchy like Hoover had done in the 1920s.


The Powell Memo and the Court’s Bellotti decision (written by Powell) set the stage and outline the battle plan for the Reagan Revolution, an all-out declaration of class war against average Americans and the Democrats who’d historically defended them.

In the 1980s, Reagan cut the top income tax rate from 74 percent down to 27 percent (while repeatedly raising taxes on working-class people’s wages, tips, and Social Security), kicking off an explosion of billionaires. He and other Republican presidents and members of the Supreme Court followed up by:

— Ending enforcement of our anti-trust laws and gutting our environmental regulations.

— Killing off our media guardrails like the Fairness Doctrine and Equal Time Rule, along with ending ownership limits on newspapers, radio stations, and TV stations and networks.
— Fighting every effort to reduce or end student debt.
— Opposing every program proposed to broaden access to healthcare coverage.

— Attacking our right to vote.
— Privatizing Medicare with the Medicare Advantage scam (Social Security is next).
— Assailing environmental regulations that protect us and our children from cancer and other diseases.

— Going to the mat to defend hundreds of billions in annual subsidies for the fossil fuel industry and its oligarchs.
— Deregulating social media (Section 230), now taken over by rightwing billionaires.
— Packing our courts with reliable toadies for giant corporations and the wealthy.
— Stripping over $50 trillion from the working class since 1981, handing that money to the morbidly rich to stash in their offshore money bins.

— Rejecting every effort to raise the national minimum wage.
— Most recently, Trump congratulated Musk on his union-busting success.



Through this entire period, Democrats have refrained from employing FDR’s class war rhetoric to fight back. Instead, they’ve worked hard to make life better for working class people when in power and tried to limit the damage from Republican proposals and policies when they’re out of power.

This is why Vice President Harris’ claims that Democrats are here for the average person while Republicans want more tax cuts and deregulation failed to catch fire during this past election; there was no rhetoric of warfare. Instead, astonishingly, Harris campaigned with Liz Cheney and kept saying that she’d give Republicans “a seat at the table.”


As billionaire Warren Buffett famously confessed:
“There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

It’s far past time to take the gloves off and start punching.

Democrats have become so rusty, so wary of class warfare, that they haven’t even identified a term or metaphor to describe the rightwing billionaires for whom the GOP fronts.


From Democratic President Grover Cleveland in the 1880s saying the rich had working people under their “Iron heel” to the early 20th century when they were called Robber Barons, Democrats have had names for Republicans and the billionaires who own them.

FDR called them economic royalists. Teddy Roosevelt called them fat cats, malefactors of great wealth, parasites, and plutocrats. I’ve been calling them the morbidly rich, but there’s almost certainly a more evocative phrase out there that could be applied to greedy billionaires by this generation of progressives.

After all, elite conservatives and billionaires haven’t hesitated to use “othering” language in their war against Democrats.

Reagan and Republicans since have called us pointy-headed intellectuals, ivory tower elites, eggheads, limousine liberals, champagne socialists, latte liberals, the wine and cheese crowd, coastal elites, tax and spend liberals, bleeding hearts, do-gooders, tree huggers, environmental wackos, libtards, communists, and even feminazis.

And how do Democrats describe Republicans? “Our friends on the other side of the aisle.”

Screw that. It’s time to declare war.

And war requires a clear delineation between our side and their side, between the good guys and the enemy. Nobody is going to rush to the ramparts against somebody we’re “happy to work with on a bipartisan basis”: as Newt Gingrich taught Republicans in the 1990s and they’ve held to with a religious fervor, there can be no quarter against the other side if you want to take and hold power.

Class war sounds ugly, but it’s exactly what Republicans and their billionaire backers have been waging against working class Americans for 43 years now. It’s damn well time to fight back by declaring a class war of our own.

In an authoritarian regime it’s important to control the news — and here we go

Thom Hartmann
November 17, 2024 

ALTERNET

Kash Patel (Photo via AFP)


— Is changing the Democratic Party the way to remake our Democracy?

Donald Trump only got about a million more votes than he did in 2020, but Kamala Harris appears to have received somewhere between 6 and 10 million fewer votes than Joe Biden did that year. For the over two decades that I’ve been writing and on the radio and TV, I’ve argued that when Bill Clinton embraced Reagan’s neoliberalism in 1992 (and Obama maintained that position) the Democratic Party had taken a fatal turn to the right. I’ve written two books that cover it, in part, as well: The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America
and The Hidden History of the American Dream. It appears that millions of voters essentially said, “I’m not going to vote for that nutcase Trump, but Harris isn’t speaking to the explosion in my cost-of-living expenses so to hell with her, too.” Joe Biden campaigned with Bernie Sanders and won; Kamala Harris campaigned with Liz Cheney and repeatedly said she wanted to give Republicans “a seat at the table,” which may well have been a fatal error. She thought she could pick up moderate Republicans, but there’s apparently not such a thing anymore since Fox “News” and the massive rightwing media ecosystem has come to dominate the American news and opinion landscape.

Bernie Sanders, Robert Reich, Sherrod Brown, and many other longtime Democrats have been pointing to this pre-1992 truth: if the Democratic Party is to win, it has to go back to its FDR/LBJ roots and become the party of the bottom 90 percent, instead of embracing those with a college education, movie and rock stars, and progressive billionaires like Mark Cuban. God bless them all, but Dems really need to reinvent themselves as the blue-collar party and repudiate much of the Clinton/Obama agenda of low taxes, free trade, and private/public partnerships (like Obamacare).

Amazingly, even The New York Times’ conservative columnist David Brooks agrees, writing: “The Democratic Party has one job: to combat inequality. Here was a great chasm of inequality right before their noses and somehow many Democrats didn’t see it. Many on the left focused on racial inequality, gender inequality and L.G.B.T.Q. inequality. [This is actually an untrue GOP talking point.] … As the left veered toward identitarian performance art, Donald Trump jumped into the class war with both feet. His Queens-born resentment of the Manhattan elites dovetailed magically with the class animosity being felt by rural people across the country. His message was simple: These people have betrayed you, and they are morons to boot.” Amen. Finally, check out this troubling article from data scientist Stephen Spoonamore raising questions about manipulation of vote totals in the swing states in a way that doesn’t appear in the non-swing states. I’m agnostic on this for the moment, but it’s worth reading; he’ll be on my program Monday.


— In an authoritarian regime it’s important to cow and control the news, and here we go. Kash Patel, widely rumored to be Trump’s main pick for FBI director, has a message for reporters and opinion writers who insist on continuing to call Trump a fascist or otherwise slander/defame him and his followers: “We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media. Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections – we’re going to come after you... Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out. But yeah, we’re putting you all on notice.”

According to The Columbia Journalism Review, Trump has already sued The New York Times (naming reporters Peter Baker, Michael S. Schmidt, Susanne Craig, and Russ Buettner) and Penguin Random House (one of my publishers) and CBS’s 60 Minutes show for $10 billion each.

As I predicted, he appears to be following the Putin/Orbán strategy of bankrupting media outlets and reporters (rather than using cops and billy-clubs), presumably both to cow others into submission and to make the media properties available to be purchased by his allies (sort of like what just happened with The Onion buying Infowars out of bankruptcy).


Steve Bannon added his thoughts, essentially threatening or warning the journalists at MSNBC: “Weissman, you were on TV with MSNBC and all the producers, MSNBC. Preserve your documents. Ari Melber and all you hosts. Preserve your documents. All of it. You better be worried. You better lawyer up. Some of you young producers, you better call mom and dad tonight. Mom and dad, ‘You know a good lawyer?’ Lawyer up. Lawyer up.”

This is a dangerous time for anybody writing about politics. Orbán and Putin even go after random citizens who criticize them on social media; will Trump go that far? And will progressives shut up in the face of this kind of intimidation? Stay tuned…

— Speaking of authoritarianism, Texas Republicans want to outlaw websites that discuss how to get an abortion. Jessica Valenti tells the story at Abortion, Every Dayon Substack about the Republican lawmakers in Texas (and around the country) who are trying to pass legislation that would imprison people who put up websites that can be viewed in Texas (including hers) with information on abortion. They argue that abortion information is not free speech protected by the Constitution. I’d add that if the Comstock Act is enforced by the new Attorney General (as JD Vance has demanded) next year, all sorts of information about abortion will become criminalized, in addition to the devices and drugs that can be used for both abortion and birth control.


— Sarah Hurst’s Russia Report on Tulsi Gabbard will make your toes curl. I’ll let you click on it and read it yourself; it’s all about her repeated embraces of Russia and Putin. Which makes some people wonder out loud why Trump would push such objectionable candidates; surely the Senate will protect us from such people, right?

But if Trump really wants to pull a Hitler and seize absolute control of the nation within a matter of a few months, his first move would be to either negotiate or force a recess of the Senate and simply “recess appoint” all of his cabinet nominees. No hearings, no tough questions, no FBI or other background checks, no Democratic politicians’ input. He has this authority under Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution: if there’s a disagreement between John Thune and Mike Johnson about when to adjourn, “...and in Case of Disagreement between them, with Respect to the Time of Adjournment, he [the president] may adjourn them to such Time as he shall think proper.”

They could agree to disagree; that way they could both evade responsibility. On the other hand, if Thune simply gives in to Trump’s recent demand for recess appointments (as he told reporters yesterday he was considering), Thune can simply adjourn the Senate, something that hasn’t happened in decades; Trump can then simply do his own recess appointments (it could be done in a single hour) under the Constitution’s provision: “The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session.” or he could just appoint them as “acting“ officials.


He did that during the last year of his presidency, and went way beyond the legal time limit for several; he flagrantly broke the law last time with over 15 cabinet members and Republicans were unwilling to call him on it, although he never started that way. This will be our first clue that the nation is no longer a constitutional republic with anything resembling checks and balances, but has become an oligarchic dictatorship like Hungary.

— Blueprint of destruction: Is Trump following Orbán’s and Putin’s road to power? M. Gessen, an expert on authoritarianism, writes in The New York Times: “When Orban was re-elected, he carried out what Magyar calls an ‘autocratic breakthrough,’ changing laws and practices so that he could not be dislodged again. It helped that he had a supermajority in parliament. Trump, similarly, spent four years attacking the Biden administration, and the vote that brought it to the White House, as fraudulent, and positioning himself as the only true voice of the people. He is also returning with a power trifecta — the presidency and both houses of Congress. He too can quickly reshape American government in his image. … Kamala Harris’s campaign, of course, tried to warn Americans about this and a lot more, labeling Trump a fascist. … It’s not just what the autocrats do to stage their breakthrough, it’s how they do it: passing legislation (or signing executive orders) fast, without any discussion, sometimes late at night, in batches, all the while denigrating and delegitimizing any opposition.”

The article is definitely worth a read, chilling as it is. Gessen even gets into the role of Project 2025 in facilitating the transformation of our American form of government into one with a single strongman president at its pinnacle. This does not bode well for America.


— Former Trump administration officials who turned on him are preparing to flee the country. The Washington Post is reporting: “A retired U.S. Army officer who clashed with senior officials in Donald Trump’s first White House looked into acquiring Italian citizenship in the run-up to this month’s election but wasn’t eligible and instead packeda ‘go bag’ with cash and a list of emergency numbers in case he needs to flee. A member of Trump’s first administration who publicly denounced him is applying for foreign citizenship and weighing whether to watch and wait or leave the country before the Jan. 20 inauguration. And a former U.S. official who signed a notorious October 2020 letter suggesting that emails purportedly taken from a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden could be part of a ‘Russian information operation’is seeking a passport from a European country, uncertain about whether the getaway will prove necessary but concluding, ‘You don’t want to have to scramble.’”

Reports (like this one from the Post) suggest that Trump has an “enemies list” of at least 600 people, much like Nixon’s, and he intends to go after everybody on the list on day one. Will he, like Nixon, just harass people with IRS audits? It seems more likely based on his own words that he’ll launch criminal and civil actions to jail or bankrupt his perceived enemies and those who have written or said things that have offended him.

Along those same lines, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene wants “justice” against health officials: “Dr. [Anthony] Fauci lied to the American people, abusing his power and position and role, a very powerful role paid for by the American tax people. He lied, and many, many people died. … People that perpetuated and continue to perpetuate these crimes need to be prosecuted, and that needs to be starting in the next administration, and I’m pretty sure our next attorney general will do that, and I look forward to seeing that happen.”

Washington, DC is very, very much on edge right now; I got a call Friday morning at 5:30 in the morning from the CEO of a major DC-based progressive media outlet who’d just gotten off the phone with a Clinton colleague; both are considering leaving the country. This is getting real very, very fast.


— Are Republicans coming for healthcare for both retired and working people?Millions of people signed up for Affordable Care Act insurance policies over the past three years because of hefty subsidies contained in Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.

Those subsidies expire at the end of this year, and Republicans are signaling that they won’t be renewed, meaning that premiums could go from $200 a month to as much as $2400 a month. Meanwhile, Project 2025 has called for private corporate Medicare Advantage plans to become the default option for people turning 65 and signing up for Medicare. Once a critical threshold is hit (currently more than half of seniors are on the Advantage plans) it’ll be fairly easy for a Republican congress and president to end legacy Medicare; once that happens, Advantage plans, no longer having competition from real Medicare, will almost certainly become more expensive and offer less coverage.

Meanwhile, Raw Story is reporting: “Rep. Jodey Arrington (R-Texas), chairman of the House Budget Committee, told reporters earlier this week that the GOP is looking to use the filibuster-evading reconciliation process to pursue cuts to ‘mandatory programs’—a category that includes Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.” Republicans have been talking about this since the ReaganRevolution, but never actually tried (other than Reagan raising the retirement age from 65 to 67). Get ready.

— State-level authoritarians fall in line with Trump. Oklahoma’s Channel 4 (KFOR) TV News reports: “Oklahoma State Superintendent Ryan Walters emailed leaders in Oklahoma school districts on Thursday telling them they would be required to play their students and parents a video showing Walters blaming the ‘radical left’ and ‘woke teachers unions’ for ‘attacking’ religious liberty, then inviting students to join him as he prays for President-elect Donald Trump.” Walters also reportedly purchased five hundred Trump Bibles for Oklahoma schools. Welcome to the Brave New World. Compounding a religious grift with a financial one; breathtaking.

The Trump White House Money Laundry

Matthew Stevenson

 November 15, 2024

Finally the Democrats are getting the word. Before the presidential election, I didn’t hear a dicky-bird from anyone about how Kamala Harris would lose for not addressing inflation, planting mines along the southern border, reaching out to young men or soccer moms, or making her case (without a lot of abortion bumper stickers) to Latinos who are already in the country.

Now I cannot walk past a phone, laptop, or television without hearing from a Democratic poobah—usually it’s James Carville riffing in his Cajun accent, although sometimes it’s Jen Psaki on MSNBC—listing all the reasons why Harris lost.

“She didn’t go on Rogan…she failed to come to Jesus on Gaza…too many kids skipped off happily to grade school only to come home the opposite sex…” I am sure you have heard it all.

Prior to the election, all that mattered was that she wasn’t either Donald Trump or Joe Biden. Now all that matters is how you can buy a piece of Donald Trump.

* * *

The same day that Trump won back the presidency—November 5—his own Hole-in-the-Wall gang running Trump Media and Technology Group (TMG or just Trump Media) released its third quarter results and other SEC filings, proving yet again that the presidency only matters to Trump as a get-rich-quick scheme.

Trump didn’t run again for the White House to deal with Ukraine “with one phone call” or so that he could attend endless meetings on Social Security funding reforms. He ran, as he did in 2016, to stay one step ahead of the bailiffs and to rob trains.

In theory, Trump Media should be winding up its business, which, according to its filings, has this stated goal:

The mission of TMTG is to end Big Tech’s assault on free speech by opening up the Internet and giving people their voices back. TMTG operates Truth Social, a social media platform established as a safe harbor for free expression amid increasingly harsh censorship by Big Tech corporations.

Given that Trump has won the presidency and given that he has now appointed Elon Musk, the proprietor of X (emblematic of “Big Tech”), to head up what Trump is calling the Department of Government Efficiency, the reasons to hang on to Trump Media have gone away.

But Trump Media only ever truly had one “mission,” which was to set up a public company under Trump’s control that could act as a drain on his supporters’ cash and allow Trump bag men to use a stock market listing to collect direct “investments” in the new president.

* * *

Don’t kid yourself for a minute thinking that Trump Media is an operating social media business or a going concern.

As of September 30, 2024, Trump Media posted nine-month revenue of $2.6 million, which was down from $3.3 million the year before, but stunning when you consider that the market capitalization of TMTG on that date was about $6 billion and that the company’s accumulated losses for the nine-month period were $363 million.

Plus the SEC filings indicate that the company hasn’t even been paid for the few ads that have run on its social media pages. The report notes: “Unearned revenue of $2,453.5 was recognized as revenue for the nine months ended September 30, 2024…”

So pretty much all of its revenue is fictitious, and the SEC states proudly that TMTG will not divulge traditional measurements (numbers of clients, etc.) of a  social media concern.

Putting the above in layman’s language, the figures means that Trump Media has no paying customers, millions of dollars in start-up losses, no business plan that makes any sense, and a terrible management team consisting of Trump remittance men.

I doubt in the history of Nasdaq if there has ever been a company with a $6 billion market capitalization—and no revenue.

TMTG isn’t even a meme stock; it’s a cryptocurrency issued on the assumption that the likes of Tulsi Gabbard, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Matt Gaetz can bring down the American government.

* * *

Trump Media does, however, now have a mountain of cash—close to $700 million, raised by flogging the dubious stock on both the gullible Trump base and directly to heavy hitters who are looking to corner the market of Trump’s presidency.

In exchange for not one dollar of investment capital, Trump was given close to 60% of the company’s outstanding shares.

In other words, Trump’s stake in Trump Media (a company with no earnings and accumulated loses ofclose to half a billion) is worth in today’s market about $3.5 billion. (As Trump’s cultural hero, Al Capone, liked to say: “You can go further with a smile and a gun, than with a smile alone.”)

Even if Trump Media’s stock price were to drop from $29 today to $3.5 (closer to its book or liquidation value), Trump would still have a claim on 60% of the balance sheet cash, about $420 million, again without having invested one dollar of seed capital.

All Trump has ever done for Trump Media is promise to post his social media messages there for six hours. After that, he’s free to post wherever he pleases, including on the site of his Department of Government Efficiency tsar’s social media company, X.

* * *

During the third quarter of 2024, Trump Media raised an additional $339 million through the issuance of its common stock, which is why the company’s management can now boast that it has a “clean balance sheet” with no debt and almost $700 million in cash.

In theory, even a terrible management should be able to invest some of that money in operating businesses that could throw off earnings that pay better than money-market time deposits.

That could be promising if, say, Donald Trump had the investment chops of a Warren Buffett or Charlie Munger and if he was drawn to operating businesses that have good management and are selling at low multiples.

Buffett took the railroad Burlington Northern Santa Fe private for about $44 billion, and since the transaction he has realized more than $50 billion in dividends, while still retaining 100% of the business.

By contrast, in the third quarter Trump Media spent $132 million to acquire an entity called WorldConnect Technologies, LLC (WCT), so that the Trump social media mouthpiece can stream its own television and video content.

I cannot say whether the company paid too much for WCT, but I can say that WCT only has value if Trump Media remains a going concern. If it fails, in any resulting bankruptcy (something Trump does often and well) WCT will be valued at nothing.

* * *

Given that Trump is heading back to the White House and given that Elon Musk (the Dr. Evil of Big Tech when Trump Media was formed), does Trump Media have a role or future other than as Donald Trump’s piggy bank and black bag, through which sketchy oligarchs can buy influence with the incoming American president?

I think not. Where Trump Media shines is as a funnel into the money-hungry soul of Donald Trump.

Until mid-September, Trump’s shares in the company were “locked up” for six months, but since that deadline has passed, Trump has been free to sell his TMTG shares to anyone, including Vladimir Putin, the Saudi royal family, or Kim Jong Un, all of whom might well like, for example, to own 20% of Trump Media for $1.2 billion. In buying his shares, they can pay the money directly to President Donald Trump, and it’s all perfectly legal.

It’s the first time in American history that a president-elect or president has been listed on a major stock exchange.

Of course, another option is for Trump to sell his controlling 58% stake of TMTG to his new government efficiency expert, Elon Musk.

What could be more “efficient” for both Trump and Musk than for Trump to invoice his new best friend $1.2 billion for bringing him into the government in a cabinet-level position? As Bertolt Brecht liked to ask: “What is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a bank?”

* * *

The real problem with Kamala Harris wasn’t that she was soft on transgenderism or that she could not control the border. Her problem was that she failed to conceive of the presidency as an initial public offering or leveraged buyout.

Trump ran on the platform that anyone who pays him can find a voice in his administration, and Musk, for example, showed the proper democratic spirit by passing out million–dollar checks on Trump’s behalf in the swing districts of western Pennsylvania. (Only for “little people” is the presidential contribution limit $3,300.)

When Trump talks about bringing back “market efficiency” to government, what he means is that the Trump presidency will be accessible to the highest bidders, and for the moment the most efficient way to settle your accounts with the incoming president is to buy shares in Trump Media (ticker symbol DJT).

After the polls closed, it was clear that Harris never could have won. By about 3 a.m. on November 6, it was evident that the country had its heart set on electing to the presidency a man with 34 felony convictions, adjudications as a sexual offender, pending cases under the sedition and espionage acts, and court judgments for fraud and defamation totaling almost half a billion dollars.

Unless Harris managed to come up with a similarly impressive rap sheet, she was never going to win the presidency. She was running as Sergeant Preston when what the country wanted was Butch Cassidy.

Matthew Stevenson is the author of many books, including Reading the Rails, Appalachia Spring, andThe Revolution as a Dinner Party, about China throughout its turbulent twentieth century. His most recent books are Biking with Bismarck and Our Man in Iran. Out now: Donald Trump’s Circus Maximus and Joe Biden’s Excellent Adventure, about the 2016 and 2020 elections.