Will Trump's New Media Channel Work?

Want to know why Donald Trump ran for President? Because he saw an opportunity to make a buck or two. And if the valuation of his new company, the Trump Media and Technology Group stays above water, he’ll not only make a couple of bucks, he’ll make even more.

The new company is allegedly getting ready at some point to launch its first product, which will be something called Truth Social, and will look like Twitter or Facebook or a combination of both.

To get the whole thing off the ground, investors have been buying shares in what is called a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC), a pile of cash to be used if and when the Trump Media and Technology Group actually produces some digital products that bring in revenue through ads, subscriptions, all the usual ways in which social media venues generate dough.

I’ll save you the trouble of going through various predictions for whether or not this deal will work out. Right now the estimates for the valuation of this new venture range from between $5 billion to $10 billion, maybe a little less, maybe a little more.

The predictions for how much Trump will pull earn from this deal are based on the traffic he generated on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter until he was banned on both sites last year. Frankly, I’m not so sure that assuming Trump’s traffic on his own social media platform will be as great or greater than what he achieved on sites like Facebook and Twitter is such a smart idea.

First of all, there’s no question that Trump attracted all kinds of social media interest because he was the President, and no matter what the President says, he’s always got the largest and noisiest megaphone in town. But right now, the daily visits to his website, Home | Donald J. Trump (donaldjtrump.com), are one-tenth of what they were earlier this year, even though he pushes out endless statements on that website every day.

Beyond the issue of comparing the digital presence of a sitting President to someone who sits in his home in Florida not just on weekends but also during the week, is the fact that you don’t build a network on computers or droids or TV or anywhere else unless you have a lineup of contributors who can attract fans, as well as some degree of original and diverse programming because otherwise viewers quickly get bored.

Here’s the bigger problem facing Trump. It’s one thing to have a presence on a social media network like Twitter or Facebook where you’re only really competing against yourself. But now Trump will be competing against the entire lineup on Facebook and Twitter as well as against alt-right venues like Breitbart and Newsmax which will stop featuring him on their shows.

Finally, and this is the biggest deal of all, nobody has the slightest ability to predict Trump’s social media impact if he doesn’t run for President again in 2024. The only thing that’s keeping him around as a media presence these days are his teases about maybe he will and maybe he won’t.

Personally, what I would like to see is a launch of this effort next year and if the network is successful, an announcement by Trump that he is going to use this platform to promote another Presidential campaign in 2024.

Then he can run again, and again get kicked in the ass. This would give him a place in the history books because the last Presidential candidate to run and lose twice was Adlai Stevenson, and I can just imagine how Trump will feel being compared to him.

Talking about social media, I notice that a BLM ‘militant’ said yesterday that the guy who plowed into a Christmas parade in Waukesha and killed six people represents the ”beginning of the revolution.” And you think that alt-right, digital hucksters like Alex Jones, Steve Bannon and Roger Stone are the only ones who are full of sh*t?

The so-called BLM ‘militant’ got some space on the Fox News website which has evidently decided that anyone who says anything on Twitter can be considered as a legitimate source for ‘news.’

Here’s hoping that everyone has a safe, healthy, and blessed holiday which was first celebrated in 1621 when a group of Wampanoag Indians showed up at Plymouth and spent three days feasting with the Pilgrims who had arrived the previous year.

The Wampanoag Tribe has been trying to get approval to build a casino for the last ten years.