Drew Harrell of The Washington Post published a sad article about the Trump devotees who have put their life savings into his DJT stock offering and have no concerns about its value or its future. They are so certain that he is a financial genius that they expect the stock to soar, once the “liberals” stop depressing its market price.

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 about 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 $32 on Friday. 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.”

For shareholders like McLain, investing in Truth Social is less a business calculation than a statement of faith in the former president and the business traded under his initials, DJT.


Even the company’s plunging stock price — and the chance their investments could get mostly wiped out — doesn’t seem to have shaken that faith. The company has lost $3.5 billion in value since its public debut last month.

As a business, Trump Media has largely underwhelmed: The company lost $58 million last year on $4 million in revenue, less than the average Chick-fil-A franchise, even as it paid out millions in executive salaries, bonuses and stock.

And in two years, Truth Social has attracted a tiny fraction of the traffic other platforms see, according to estimates from the analytics firm Similarweb — one of the only ways to measure its performance, given that the company says it “does not currently, and may never, collect, monitor or report certain key operating metrics used by companies in similar industries.”

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 Sunday that the company had added over 200,000 new ones in the past 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 $3.7 million…

One investor said “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…”

After the billionaire media mogul Barry Diller called Trump Media a “scam” stock bought by “dopes,” one account, @Handbag72, claimed to have bought more shares, arguing Diller didn’t “get it” or was “at risk of [losing] $$$$.” The next day, the account shared a 2021 blog post from the investing forum Seeking Alpha saying Truth Social could be worth $1 trillion in the next 10 years.

Soon after it was launched March 26 on NASDAQ, the stock reached $79. By last Monday, it had fallen to $26.61, after news broke that DJT intends to issue millions of additional shares, which would dilute the value of the original shares.

Bibles, sneakers, perfume, wine, steaks, now stocks. Trump will keep selling, and his cult will keep buying.