In recent weeks, the news cycle has been flush with stories about how Donald Trump allegedly “overvalued” his real estate assets to the tune of hundreds of millions more than their actual worth to fraudulently secure loans from major financial institutions like Deutsche Bank. This, even though Donald Trump and The Trump Organization secured those loans, without controversy, and had a lucrative partnership with the various lenders implicated in the lawsuit – where both parties made a fortune over decades, and where not a single party lost money or suffered any damages as a result of the relationship. In short, there was no fraud.
The fraud is found in the courtrooms – and it is a fraud on the American public, as well as the rule of law – not just in New York, where the dangerous precedent is being set by radical and illegitimate operatives like Letitia James and Judge Arthur Engoron – but throughout the country writ large, now that New York’s justice system has effectively greenlit political prosecutions with impunity.
The devastating ramifications of the case go beyond the “mere political” – America’s free enterprise system now hangs in the balance, with the prospect that any borrower or entrepreneur who seeks a loan but who may have at one point voiced dissident views or held a position deemed nebulously “problematic” by a petulant Attorney General like Letitia James, could now be held liable for fraud – and be on the hook for hundreds of billions of dollars, simply for establishing a productive business.
The people who increasingly hold the levers of power, like James and Engoron – and by extension, Joe Biden and Merrick Garland – are those who hold radical views that, brought to their logical conclusions, would make free enterprise impossible and communism inevitable. They evidently do not believe in private property rights and are outwardly antagonistic of those who have the creative visions to see beyond the increasingly limited horizons of the American mind, and dare tread new ground – or traverse unexplored territory that the majority of people would never even dream to do – because it is beyond their narrow reach.
But simply because our leaders are increasingly limited in their worldviews does not mean those with broader visions, like Donald Trump, equipped with the gung-ho to execute their visions, should be actively penalized for carrying out their projects. That is why the news of last week’s merger of Trump Media and special purpose acquisition company Digital World Acquisition Corporation (or “DWAC”) – resulting in Tuesday’s listing of the ticker symbol DJT on the Nasdaq, the first time one of Donald Trump’s companies has gone public in three decades – which yielded a reported $3 billion-plus windfall for the presidential frontrunner, was most welcome.
That news, coupled with the appellate court’s decision on Monday to slash the price tag on the bond President Trump owed to New York State (for a supposed fraud in which, again, there were no victims), from nearly half a billion dollars to a more modest $175 million, suggests that no matter how otherwise communistic our institutions may become, fortune, nature, (and God) invariably favors bold, original thinkers – especially in our age that suffers a pandemic of unoriginality and laziness.
Which goes to a broader point about appraising value. Obviously, with the public listing of President Trump’s media company, his net worth is higher than ever before, placing him on Bloomberg’s list of the world’s top 500 billionaires, for the first time – reportedly – ever (although President Trump has been outspoken about how Forbes and Bloomberg have long undervalued their appraisals of his real estate empire – thus wrongly denying him placement on previous lists).
Many public commentators were quick to take jabs at Donald Trump and Truth Social, as soon as the public listing ballooned on the stock exchange, dismissing the amplified market capitalization as a “meme stock,” that grossly distorted its “fundamental value.” The assumption on which those hostile evaluations were based was that the purported “true value” of Truth Social was much lower, and that it is only being artificially heightened by President Trump’s own brand – as both successful politician and businessman – riding off the momentum of his formidable poll numbers this election cycle.
While it is true that President Trump’s political brand is only indirectly bearing on his personal businesses, which are valued by their own independent set of metrics – including revenues, userbase, and quality of product – the idea that Trump’s brand should have no bearing on the price of the public listing is preposterous.
The Trump Brand is one of if not the world’s most recognizable brands. Whether pertaining to real estate, or politics, or media and entertainment, the Trump namesake is ubiquitous the world over, and is demarcated for its luxury and quality of content, which has been a constant part of the brand for decades.
Trump’s brand, in a way, is akin to Elon Musk’s brand – the products are no doubt world renowned, and supersede the competition on the basis of their quality alone. However, one would be remiss to say that Elon’s own brand as a charismatic entrepreneur is not a factor, if not the primary factor, in driving the value of Tesla, X, and his other companies.
In short, the quality of the man at the top calling the shots will reflect fundamentally on the market value of the brand itself. Donald Trump has arguably done more than Elon Musk – his brands are arguably more well-known across the world, and his success in both business and politics is without rival in the business or political worlds, full stop.
Accordingly, Donald Trump offers something that no other individual on earth can bring – in this regard, his reported $3 billion windfall, and the prospects of his newly public company only going up higher, is indicative not of an overinflated asset divorced from reality. But rather, a set of objective facts that have true bearing on its fundamental value.
If anything, the Trump brand should be worth tens of billions of dollars more than what it is currently being traded at on the Nasdaq, given its uniqueness as combining the best of politics and business. As a business, The Trump Organization is diversified in a way that few, if any, other billion-dollar companies now match: its properties are among the best in the world, and now, with the addition of the media company, it has added that greatest driver of the American economy of the past three decades into its arsenal: technology startups.
In short, to borrow a favorite Silicon Valley phrase, the Trump brand incorporates both the world of bits and the world of atoms – no easy feat by any stretch of the imagination. This especially true for an age where quality brick-and-mortar developments are increasingly hard to come by: the casualty of globalization, outsourcing, mass migration, and DEI.
Donald Trump is a concrete thinker; he always has been. This concreteness is even the defining feature of his politics, which are practical and, as he puts it, steeped in “common sense.” But being a concrete thinker is not a slight on one’s ability to be an original thinker or visionary – quite the contrary: it is proof positive of one’s proficiency to discern value in the world, and capitalize on it, in ways that few others can replicate.
President Trump’s eye for discernment is why he has been able to build some of the most stunning golf courses seen anywhere in the United States – and increasingly, with courses spanning Scotland to Dubai, the world. It is also why he swooped in and purchased Mar-a-Lago back in the 1980s with a phenomenal deal, the most luxurious private home in the United States, when nobody else was considering it. He is a natural magnet for luxury and high value commodities; his eye is arguably his most valuable asset — and the world’s most valuable asset.
In the same vein in which DaVinci’s paintings and Michelangelo’s sculptures would be valued in the billions if ever sold on the open market today, Donald Trump’s creative visions equate to exceptional valuations – because of the rarity of his skillset and gifts. That is why everything he touches literally turns to gold – he is a rarefied example of originality in an irremediably confused age, an age that routinely attempts to swindle the population to convince them everything history considered bad is now good, and good, bad.
But those mainstays which made America, and the West, great in the past – beauty, visionaries, hard work – and which sprang out of those classical virtues that brought forth some of the greatest civilizations the world has ever known – from ancient Greece, to Rome, to Florence during the Renaissance, to America – remain as true as ever.
Arguably, with the downfall of civilization, those who harbor even just a few morsels of those original virtues will stand out to a greater degree from the rest of the pack than ever before, because we live in such a debased and distracted age.
As the saying goes, in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king: good discernment is a scarce commodity, which is the reason why Donald Trump is so good at identifying things of real value – because he stands testimony to that one observer, who keeps watch as the rest of the world remains asleep.
