A reader asks: Should I be buying what Trump & Co. is selling?
A reader asks: Should I be buying what the Trump & Co. is selling?
Archer replies: W.C. Fields famously said, “You can’t cheat an honest man, but never give a sucker an even break or wisen up a chump.” (Not investment advice.) But the question is, as always, who’s the chump?
Our current president and his family are nothing if not prolific when it comes to finding ways to cash in on their improved circumstances since the last election. What emerges (at least from the NY Times reporting) is kind of a make believe real estate empire held aloft by a host of unrelated side hustles, including the sale of memecoins ($TRUMP), crypto tokens ($WLFI, now trading on a crypto exchange near you), and shares in Trump Media. From the Times:
“The Trumps’ sale of memecoins, otherwise worthless collectible digital trinkets, has been particularly lucrative. The fees collected by Mr. Trump and his associates on those sales have so far totaled $320 million, according to Chainanalysis, a crypto analytics firm. The memecoins have proved to be a multimillion-dollar leap from the Trump-branded Bibles, guitars and watches that the Trumps sold during last year’s campaign.”
It’s hard to make sense of all this. The Bible might be worth something at some point in the future, at least as a curiosity. But the memecoins have no apparent value, per the Times. Trump Media is doing about $1 million a quarter in sales, roughly “the average of a single McDonald’s restaurant,” and lost $400 million last year (question: where did it get $400 million to lose?). Its market capitalization stood at just under $5 billion at the end of August. Sounds a little like the infamous New Jersey deli.
As with the digital coins, much of this wealth seems vaporous, untethered (pun intended) to any actual economic activity. It appears to have a large political dimension. You probably don’t want to be the last person out of the door when (if?) Trump leaves office (again, not investment advice). What is unclear is how liquid all these things are. If Trump tries to sell, who’s on the other side of the trade?
Something that is not selling in Trump land are his tariffs. Or at least the courts so far are not buying. That now includes the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which on Friday ruled against Trump 7-4. The case will no doubt head to the Supremes next where a consistent application of the court’s own “major questions doctrine” should bring an end to Trump’s power grab. But who knows.
Treasury Secretary Bessent, generally considered to be a voice of reason in the current administration, offered a dubious non-legal justification for continuing the levies: to end them now would be “embarrassing.”
With our president draping a giant banner of himself from the Labor Department facade, blinging up the White House, and generally turning the whole country into a location set for a remake of the 1971 film, Bananas, an observer might reasonably ask who is embarrassing whom?
Speaking of which, Don Jr. has apparently launched a new private club, the Executive Branch, with a limited number of members and a $500,000 entry fee, according to a story in The New Yorker. In the piece, the author describes the club’s prospective premises as “a reported nine-thousand-square-foot subterranean space beneath an unexceptional condominium on a busy avenue in Georgetown, next to a TJ Maxx and an office of the Department of Motor Vehicles.”
Sounds pretty lux.
In the event, the Trump family circus rolls on, giving a bad name to ringmasters everywhere. To be fair, the Trump clan is not the first First Family to run afoul of an irate carney barker. That distinction, I think, belongs to Hillary Clinton’s brother who was once sued by a circus operator for failing to come through on a promised pardon.
But Trump is in his own league and, with any luck, sui generis. It is certainly the case that not everyone can mount the level of shamelessness needed to keep so many cons working at once.
American is back, he says, promising to reduce drug prices by “1,500%.” Once again, something doesn’t quite add up.
Woof!