Donald Trump on Friday broke his post-election silence on his failing Truth Social platform, issuing threats against unnamed people who he said were trash talking his company.
"There are fake, untrue, and probably illegal rumors and/or statements made by, perhaps, market manipulators or short sellers, that I am interested in selling shares of Truth. THOSE RUMORS OR STATEMENTS ARE FALSE. I HAVE NO INTENTION OF SELLING!” Trump wrote in the TruthSocial post. “I hereby request that the people who have set off these fake rumors or statements, and who may have done so in the past, be immediately investigated by the appropriate authorities. Truth is an important part of our historic win, and I deeply believe in it. Thank you for your attention to this matter. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!"
It was the first real comment he's made on his Truth Social feed since his victory on Tuesday. The few other posts he sent were merely images of newspapers announcing his win.
Trump's Truth Social stock price has fallen precipitously since the company went public in March.
Initially, the stock was trading around $60 when the company first went public. It's now trading at around $30, up from the nose-dive it took in September amid reports that Trump was eligible to start trading his own shares and possibly cash out on the failing platform.
The fact that Truth Social is trading at anything of value is confounding, as the site has barely any users and lost $19 million in the third quarter alone, Axios reported.
Now that Trump will take office again, it’s unclear whether he’ll put his shares in a blind trust to avoid flouting ethics rules. Of course, Trump has no ethics and did not put his companies in a blind trust the first time around, so it’s unlikely he’ll do so now.
Also absurd is that Trump said in his post the "truth is an important part" of his win.
Trump is a notorious liar.
CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale wrote an article ahead of Trump’s win titled “Donald Trump’s campaign of relentless lying,” in which he implored media organizations to cover Trump’s lies more often.
“For the third consecutive presidential election, the Republican presidential nominee is running a relentlessly dishonest campaign for the world’s most powerful office,” he wrote. “Wildly exaggerating statistics, grossly distorting his opponent’s record and his own, regularly just plain making stuff up, Trump is lying to American voters with a frequency and variety whose only precedent is his own previous campaigns.”
In fact, during Trump’s first round, the Washington Post tracked over 30,000 misleading statements.
“If you met someone at a bar who told you 25 things that weren’t true, that would be one of the first things you told other people about this encounter,” Dale wrote. “Trump telling the American people 25 things that aren’t true in a rally speech should be one of the first things media outlets tell their readers and viewers about the speech. Maybe then Trump would care a bit more about being corrected.”
Here’s hoping the media takes Dale’s warnings seriously.
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