So, time for another quick blog post. Since I cannot look at a news site and not see the name Trump, I thought I’d toss out a few thoughts I have. Nothing too major here, but it’s too interesting to ignore.
I’ve made no secret that I am not a supporter of Trump (though I’m also not a supporter of Biden), so these thoughts clearly have a bias to them. But hopefully not too much of one.
TRUMP PARDONING HIMSELF
Trump has made history for being the first former president to be charged with either state or federal crimes.
There has been some discussion about what could happen when and if Trump were reelected president with respect to those crimes, and one possibility is that he could issue a pardon for himself.
I am not sure to what extent that is possible or to what extent it is likely that he could (or would) do it. This thought comes solely because the possibility of such an action has been mentioned.
A president is already largely immune to charges for actions that he commits while in office, so he will not be charged (and cannot be sued) for actions that they perform while in that office, so it is pretty clear that there is a good deal of immunity for actions committed while in office, but most of the current litigations are for actions committed outside of the office. The one exception being for actions during the Jan 6 protest which I will mention below.
I am going to say right now that it should absolutely be forbidden in the constitution for a president to pardon himself (or herself) or anyone closely related to them (including donors).
This country is a country of laws. Nobody should be exempt from the law. The statement that ‘All men are created equal’ has primary reference to how people should be treated by the law. All are equally free, because of the laws. All are equally accountable to the laws. The president of the United States should not be an exception to this. Instead, he or she should exemplify this characteristic.
I would like to see a constitutional amendment passed within the next four months (which I know is not going to happen) forbidding the president from abusing the power of presidential pardon in this way. The presidential pardon should be reserved for very special cases where justice was not served or the punishment far exceeded the crime or new evidence has come to light. It should NEVER be used to avoid justice.
TRUTH SOCIAL STOCK
So ‘Truth Social’ went public with Trump owning 58% of the stock. The opening price was $78 per share making Trump’s stock worth nearly $6 billion and the total company valuation be around $10 billion.
Truth Social had about $5 million in revenue in 2023. By comparison, Facebook had about $134 billion revenue in 2023. X (twitter) had about $3.4 billion revenue in 2023. Facebook’s valuation is around $560 billion and X has a valuation of about $41 billion. In other words, Facebook’s valuation is about 4x annual revenue, and twitter is around 12x annual revenue. Even being generous and valuating Truth Social at 15x annual revenue, it’s value should be around $75 million (with Trump’s share being around $44 million). It should also be noted that Facebook’s active membership is around 3 billion active members monthly and X has around 370 million. Truth Social has fewer than 500,000 members.
All this supports the fact that stock in Truth Social should be trading at less than a dollar a share, rather than $78.
It is fortunate that there are rules in place which do not allow Trump to sell his shares at this point, or use them as collateral for a loan. The lockout period is 6 months from the IPO date which was March 26, which means that he won’t be able to sell stock until September 26th. Unfortunately, this is a month and a half before the Nov 6 presidential election.
What I hope will happen is that all of the legal issues with Trump will put so much doubt on his performance in November that the stock will continue to decrease in price to a point where, even if he is able to sell a significant chunk of his stock in September, it will not provide sufficient funds to extend all the legal fights.
A side effect of this is that the collapse of Truth Social stock will serve to eliminate a lot of money from Trump’s supporters who are the primary owners of Truth Social stock. This could have a significant impact on their loyalty to Trump, but that remains to be seen.
JAN 6 CHARGES
As I mentioned above, a president is largely immune to prosecution and lawsuits for actions during their time as president. Personally, I have a great deal of difficulty accepting that the government should be performing actions for which they could be sued or charged with a crime. Actions by our government should conform with the constitution and the laws based on that constitution to an extent that criminal and civil prosecutions should have no weight; no possibility of prevailing in a fair court.
However, in the name of “internal security”, many actions enter a gray area (and IMO, some go all the way into the black). I’m definitely in favor of enforcing constitutional limits on government agencies, but I don’t necessarily believe the way to go about that is to sue or prosecute some of the individuals in the government who were involved in actions which skirt those checks and balances. So, to some extent, immunity for the president (and other government officials) is something we are not in a position to get rid of. And considering how easy it is to sue someone, and how litigious our nation is, immunity from civil lawsuit is probably a permanent fixture in our government.
With that being said, one class of action MUST be excluded from that immunity, and that is the class of crimes related to treason and insurrection (such as obstructing the peaceful transfer of power from the sitting president to the president elect). Given the events that occurred on Jan 6, granting immunity to Trump for those actions would be a tragedy. These charges must be tried in a court of law, and only there should the charges be overturned through a finding of “Not Guilty”. If Trump is granted immunity, it is, in effect, saying that the president can refuse to give up the presidency at the end of their term without consequence. That would be a catastrophically bad precedent to set, and would, without the help of any of his other questionable actions, elevate Trump to the position of worst president in the history of the United States.
Please note that I am not calling for Trump to be found guilty for the charges… merely that the charges go to trial for resolution.
There are lots of other things I could comment on, but that’s enough for now.
