Trump 55: The Bronze Baron Of Bedminster Wants Back On Twitter And the Forbes 400

[Alisamer]

I feel like calling it "Truth" should be struck down by a court for some reason. False advertising, maybe? Not everyone is going to understand that it's one of those ironic names like nicknaming a big fat guy "Slim".

[Cartmann99]

 

[Cartmann99]

'Makes me want to throw up': Trump 'Truth' network investor is out now that he knows it's a 'fake news business'

Quote

The launch of Donald Trump's new social media company "TRUTH Social" has hit another bump in the road as some early key investors are pulling out after discovering he is one of the principals behind it which they were unaware of at the time they put money into the start-up.

As the New York Times reported, "The details of Mr. Trump's latest partnership were vague. The statement he issued was reminiscent of the kind of claims he made about his business dealings in New York as a real estate developer. It was replete with high-dollar amounts and superlatives that could not be verified."

According to a report from the Huff Post's Ed Mazza, one hedge fund manager lashed out when he found out about Trump's involvement.

As Mazza reports, "[Boaz] Weinstein's Saba Capital had been a major investor in Digital World, a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) formed for the purpose of acquiring another company. As is common in SPAC arrangements, investors put their cash in before the acquisition target was chosen. When Weinstein learned it would be with Trump's firm, he bailed."

"I knew that for Saba the right thing was to sell our entire stake of unrestricted shares, which we have now done. Many investors are grappling with hard questions about how to incorporate their values into their work. For us, this was not a close call," he explained.

Another unnamed investor, who reportedly held a 10 percent stake in the company, was considerably more graphic when talking about being taken in by Trump's latest venture and he "sold everything as soon as he could," reports Mazza.

"The idea that I would help [Trump] build out a fake news business called Truth makes me want to throw up," they said.

 

[Cartmann99]

Trump’s social network has 30 days to stop breaking the rules of its software license

Quote

The Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) says former President Donald Trump’s new social network violated a free and open-source software licensing agreement by ripping off decentralized social network Mastodon. The Trump Media and Technology Group (TMTG) has 30 days to comply with the terms of the license before its access is terminated — forcing it to rebuild the platform or face legal action.

TMTG launched a special purpose acquisition company fundraising effort yesterday with promises to build a sweeping media empire. Its only product so far is a social network called Truth Social that appears strongly to be forked from Mastodon. While anyone can freely reuse Mastodon’s code (and groups like right-wing social network Gab have already done so), they still have to comply with the Affero General Public License (or AGPLv3) that governs that code, and its conditions include offering their own source code to all users.

Truth Social doesn’t comply with that license and, in fact, refers to its service as “proprietary.” Its developers apparently attempted to scrub references that would make the Mastodon connection clear — at one point listing a “sighting” of the Mastodon logo as a bug — but included direct references to Mastodon in the site’s underlying HTML alongside obvious visual similarities.

Did Trump steal some of Mike Lindell's "cyber guys" for this project?

[Howl]

Heather Cox Richardson's facebook post on Friday, Oct. 22 gives an excellent explanation of how Trump's social media foray is basically a device to hoover up more funds from his credulous supporters.

Quote

Meanwhile, business journalists are suggesting that the new Trump media company is not a failure at all, because it was never actually meant to be a media company so much as a way to siphon money out of investors.

The key element is a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC).  Heather Cox Richardson: "Someone explained this to me by saying it’s like a sea slug taking over a shell so it can do business as the shell organism quickly and without oversight."

Full post here, quick read. 

Spoiler

Matt Levine in Bloomberg outlines how a vehicle called a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC), which is a publicly traded investment company, is designed to merge with a new company that is not yet public, to allow investment in that SPAC based on expectations of future income thanks to the new company. (Someone explained this to me by saying it’s like a sea slug taking over a shell so it can do business as the shell organism quickly and without oversight.)

In this case, the announcement that the new Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG) would merge with a SPAC called Digital World Acquisition Corporation (DWAC) sent DWAC’s stock soaring by as much as 160%. It was the most traded stock on the New York Stock Exchange, with more than 260 million shares traded by midday.

The company never has to produce anything. Investors can make money just based on how people think the company might perform—or not—in the future.

 

[fraurosena]

Is anyone even surprised at this? 

 

[Howl]

@Cartmann99 posted @RonFilipkowski's tweet

Quote

Judge sets the hearing on Trump’s executive privilege claim for Nov. 4.

I can't even with CNN anymore, who are attempting to wind everyone up by framing it as titanic conflagration between Trump and Biden and a pivotal moment in the Biden presidency:   Biden's refusal of executive privilege claim ignites new firestorm with Trump  The article includes this...

Quote

Many presidents have expressed private frustration with the antics of their predecessors. But nothing in the modern era matches the confrontation between the 45th and 46th Presidents.

Trump is mostly responsible for that. He has convinced tens of millions of his voters that Biden is an illegitimate president through lies about voter fraud. 

SRSLY? This is totally on brand for Trump and he is 100% responsible for all of it. Suing and threatening to sue is what he does and it's all he knows how to do. 

More accurate:

Trump melts down over Biden's refusal to recognize fake executive privilege claims! 

or 

Another Trump attempt to obstruct justice by directing ex-staffers to ignore subpoenas! 

or

Desperate Trump attempts to block release of incriminating documents! 

 

 

[Cartmann99]

Spoiler

It's 3K for a picture with Lake, but it's 30K if you want a picture with her and Trump.

[Cartmann99]

Trump accuses Bill Barr and Mark Zuckerberg of stealing Pennsylvania election in angry letter to WSJ

Quote

Specifically, Trump took issue with a WSJ editorial published on Monday that accurately claimed Biden defeated Trump by more than 80,000 votes in Pennsylvania.

"Well actually, the election was rigged, which you, unfortunately, still haven't figured out," Trump claimed. "Here are just a few examples of how determinative the voter fraud in Pennsylvania was."

The former president then went through a series of previously debunked claims about "fraud" in Pennsylvania's election, which also included two claims about Barr and Zuckerberg.

"Attorney General Bill Barr ordered U.S. Attorney Bill McSwain to stand down and not investigate election irregularities," Trump complained in one part of the letter. "Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook poured over $17 million to interfere in the Pennsylvania election, including $5.5 million on "ballot processing equipment" in Philadelphia and $552,000 for drop boxes where the voting pattern was not possible."

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Apparently the Wall Street Journal published a letter from TFG. Here's what the Washington Post wrote about it:

"The 14 things you need to know about Trump’s letter in the Wall Street Journal"

Quote

On Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal published a letter written by former president Donald Trump in which he makes a number of claims about the results of the 2020 election in Pennsylvania. Below, the 14 things you need to know about the letter.

1. The Wall Street Journal should not have published it without assessing the claims and demonstrating where they were wrong, misleading or unimportant.
2. The Journal would have been better served had it explained why it chose to run the letter without contextualizing since that might have at least offered some clarity on the otherwise inexplicable decision, but it didn’t.
3. Even if those who decided to publish the letter lacked the resources to fact-check each of the claims, they might have pushed back on obviously false claims, as when Trump falsely claims that Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg spent millions of dollars to “interfere in the Pennsylvania election.”
4. They might also have noted that the organization that Trump repeatedly cites as an authority for his claims, the “highly respected” group “Audit the Vote PA,” has no actual experience in evaluating elections.
5. Or, perhaps, that the organization’s website includes allegations of fraud that are themselves obviously false. This includes a reference to former Trump administration official Peter Navarro’s collection of fraud claims and a presentation by Douglas Frank, a close ally of MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell.
6. They could have pointed out that the first claim in Trump’s letter, about late-arriving mail ballots, had already been adjudicated by the courts and wouldn’t have changed the outcome of the race. That’s even if the numbers he cited (which came from Audit the Vote) were credible, which they aren’t.
7. They could have contextualized Trump’s argument that changes made by the state legislature should have nullified votes by pointing out that a court had already considered this question and determined that the votes should stand.
8. They could have noted that Trump’s lead on election night was meaningless given the number of absentee ballots that remained to be counted. It was obvious by the morning of Nov. 4 that there were enough absentee votes outstanding to probably hand Joe Biden a victory in the state. Yet, nearly a year later, the Journal allows Trump’s claim that something suspicious happened to stand without comment.
9. They could have taken out obviously unimportant arguments like his trip back to the “we have signed affidavits!!!” well.
10. They might have done more to elevate the fact that Trump’s loyal-until-the-election attorney general William P. Barr dismissed Trump’s claims of fraud, instead of letting him malign Barr’s refusal to chase Trump’s imaginary rabbits.
11. If they really wanted to spread their wings, they could have pointed out that a canvass of one county that claims to have identified 78,000 “phantom voters” is simply not credible. If you think contacting hundreds of people at home is trivial, you are encouraged to speak with someone who has spent even one day running a door-to-door political or marketing campaign.
12. The Journal could also have come back to Trump before publishing his letter, setting a higher bar for publication than, say, a guy from Ramapo who took issue with the paper’s coverage of dogecoin. The paper could, for example, have asked that Trump offer some baseline number of examples of proven, demonstrated fraud, not simply various numbers dependent on amateur analyses of voter data. It could have insisted that the former president of the United States, a billionaire, present whatever concrete evidence of fraud he should have ascertained nearly a year after the election and with all of the power of his political party and his pocketbook at his disposal.
13. The paper could have come back to Trump and asked him why he didn’t include various other claims of fraud in the state that he has in the past embraced. He once claimed that the state had 205,000 more votes than voters, a claim debunked in December, given that it was based on flawed analysis of voter data (including from the same system on which many of his Audit the Vote claims are based). Why was that debunked claim excluded when others weren’t?
14. The main thing you need to know about the letter, of course, is that Donald Trump is still railing against his election loss 358 days after it occurred. And that prominent institutions are still enabling his dangerous misinformation more than 358 days after they should have known better.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

I'm sure this went over well at Mar-a-Loco: "Florida judge rules Trump can’t skirt Twitter’s terms just because he was president, in latest legal setback"

Quote

A Florida federal judge ruled Tuesday that Donald Trump’s status as a former president does not exclude him from following Twitter’s terms of service, the latest setback in his quest to get back on the social media platform after being banned this year.

U.S. District Judge Robert N. Scola Jr. granted Twitter’s motion to transfer the case from the Southern District of Florida to the Northern District of California, which is required by a clause in the company’s user agreement that all Twitter users sign. The case stems from Twitter permanently suspending Trump shortly after the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol that led to five deaths and injuries to hundreds of people.

While Trump’s attorneys have argued that his status as former president exempts him from Twitter’s clause, and that it was in the public interest for the case to stay in Florida, Scola was unconvinced. In his 13-page ruling, the Miami judge noted that Trump, who lives in Florida, “has not advanced any legal authority to support his contention.”

“The Court finds that Trump’s status as President of the United States does not exclude him from the requirements of the forum selection clause in Twitter’s Terms of Service,” wrote Scola, an appointee of President Barack Obama. “The Plaintiffs have failed to satisfy their heavy burden to show that this case should not be transferred.”

The move followed a ruling from another Florida federal judge earlier this month who granted a similar request to move Trump’s lawsuit against Google-owned YouTube to a California court. Trump, who has asked a court to mandate that Twitter restore his account, has also filed a class-action lawsuit against Facebook, arguing, with little substantiation, that social media giants are “silencing” him and other conservatives. Trump has also argued, without evidence, that Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey “succumbed to the coercion efforts of Democratic lawmakers.”

Taylor Budowich, a spokesman for Trump, did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday. Neither Linda Cuadros nor a spokesperson for the American Conservative Union, who are listed as co-plaintiffs in Trump’s lawsuit, immediately responded to requests for comment. A spokesperson for Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The ruling comes as Trump is fighting social media companies in the courts over alleged censorship issues, while simultaneously attempting to launch his own social media platform to, as he wrote, “stand up to the tyranny of Big Tech.” The former president announced last week that he would be starting a new platform called Truth Social, even as pranksters were able to post a picture of a defecating pig to the “donaldjtrump” account on an unreleased test version of the site.

“We live in a world where the Taliban has a huge presence on Twitter, yet your favorite American President has been silenced,” Trump said. “This is unacceptable.”

Twitter banned Trump after the Jan. 6 uprising, saying it had made the decision “due to the risk of further incitement of violence.” The company noted two tweets in which the then-president said that he would not be going to the inauguration and that his supporters would have “a GIANT VOICE long into the future.”

Months after Trump was banned from Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, he filed class-action lawsuits against the companies in July. The lawsuits, which legal experts and business associations say have little chance of succeeding in court, allege the companies violated Trump’s First Amendment rights by suspending his accounts. The First Amendment protects against censorship by the government, not by private companies.

“We’re demanding an end to the shadow-banning, a stop to the silencing, and a stop to the blacklisting, banishing and canceling that you know so well,” Trump said in July.

On Sept. 1, Twitter filed a motion in the Florida court to transfer the case to California, as required by the company’s terms of service. As Scola mentioned in his ruling, Twitter’s terms of service, which say that all disputes in federal court must be brought in San Francisco, have been in effect since 2009 — the same year Trump started tweeting.

Trump asked earlier this month for a preliminary injunction that would restore his Twitter account while his lawsuit against the social media giant plays out.

Before Tuesday’s ruling on the Twitter case, another Miami judge ruled that Trump’s censorship lawsuit against YouTube would be headed to California, per the company’s terms of service. Trump accused YouTube of violating his constitutional rights by terminating an account he started as a private citizen and maintained during his presidency.

U.S. District Judge K. Michael Moore, an appointee of President George H.W. Bush, said in his Oct. 6 ruling that Trump and his attorneys had no legal authority in saying that a “former federal official is exempt from a forum-selection clause to which he agreed to in his individual capacity.”

John P. Coale, one of Trump’s attorneys, told Bloomberg News this month that the change in logistics in the YouTube case was a “pain in the butt,” but that he believed the case “is ultimately going to be decided in the Supreme Court.”

Scola echoed Moore’s earlier ruling, saying the Trump team’s argument that the case needed to stay in Florida, the former president’s home state, in the public interest fell flat.

“These arguments do not share a nexus with Florida and instead raise general national issues related to social media platforms,” Scola wrote.

 

[Cartmann99]

Watching Trump get trolled into campaigning for a man trying to pull off a political mullet (moderate Republican in the front, nutjob Trumper in the back) is fun.

Spoiler

 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

17 minutes ago, Cartmann99 said:

Watching Trump get trolled into campaigning for a man trying to pull off a political mullet (moderate Republican in the front, nutjob Trumper in the back) is fun.

  Reveal hidden contents

 

 

 

[Cartmann99]

Place your bets.

 

[Ozlsn]

On 10/28/2021 at 9:28 AM, GreyhoundFan said:

Even if those who decided to publish the letter lacked the resources to fact-check each of the claims, they might have pushed back on obviously false claims, as when Trump falsely claims that Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg spent millions of dollars to “interfere in the Pennsylvania election.”

So... wouldn't that be grounds for suing for libel? I have very little love for Zuckerberg, but I would watch that.

[Cartmann99]

Why MAGA Social Media Is a Hacker’s Wet Dream

Quote

When a photo of a pig in an obscene position smothered in poop was posted to an account that appeared to belong to former President Donald Trump on his newest social media platform, it was clear that his so-called “Truth Social” had already fallen into a familiar trap.

[...]

Trump’s Truth Social app won’t formally launch until 2022, so it’s still too early to gauge how well the site will handle the security, trust and safety issues that have plagued its predecessors. But even aside from the incident with the barnyard bowel movement, the early signs aren’t encouraging.

Truth Social’s terms of service agreement shows few indications of forethought about how the company will handle these kinds of thorny issues. The platform’s agreement is mostly copied from widely used language found in the terms of service sections of hundreds of smaller websites like PatriotCoolers.com, who face a different threat environment than a social media app run by a controversial former president.

“It does not sound like [Truth Social has] a compliance team. It does not sound like there are lawyers on staff, or anybody even doing the basic due diligence in the same way it doesn’t sound like they have anybody doing the most basic security engineering,” Galerpin said, adding that its source code appears to have been taken directly from Mastodon, an open source social media network, but without jumping through all the appropriate hoops.

Mastodon put the pedal to the metal and sent a letter to Truth Social’s legal team last week in an attempt to get them to fess up to their slip-up.

For now, for the newest social media venture in MAGA-land, Truth Social, the future does not look bright, Galperin said.

”I imagine a series of embarrassing security and policy failures followed by a very boring fizzle. I don’t imagine any of these sites are going to replace any of the tech giants anytime soon.”

 

[CTRLZero]

Our neighborhood Trump humper has a new full-size flag up on his flagpole - “Trump 2024.”  Nooooooo!  Tell me it’s not true and is only there as a Halloween fright.

I’m about halfway through Hillary Rodham Clinton/Louise Penny’s “State of Terror.”  It’s not the best political thriller I’ve read, but contains lots of references to a certain disastrous prior administration.  The previous president is named Eric “The Dumb” Dunn, and he lives in Florida in a gilded faux palace.  Hmmmm. 

[church_of_dog]

44 minutes ago, CTRLZero said:

Our neighborhood Trump humper has a new full-size flag up on his flagpole - “Trump 2024.”  Nooooooo!  Tell me it’s not true and is only there as a Halloween fright.

I’m about halfway through Hillary Rodham Clinton/Louise Penny’s “State of Terror.”  It’s not the best political thriller I’ve read, but contains lots of references to a certain disastrous prior administration.  The previous president is named Eric “The Dumb” Dunn, and he lives in Florida in a gilded faux palace.  Hmmmm. 

I spent way too much time, while listening to the audiobook of State of Terror, imagining Louise Penny and HRC coming up with names for their characters:

"Ok, what last name should we use for TFG?  It can't be too obvious, but we can at least make it one syllable with the vowel a "u".  

[AnywhereButHere]

2 hours ago, church_of_dog said:

I spent way too much time, while listening to the audiobook of State of Terror, imagining Louise Penny and HRC coming up with names for their characters:

"Ok, what last name should we use for TFG?  It can't be too obvious, but we can at least make it one syllable with the vowel a "u".  

I'm on hold for this at my local library. I was wondering how many "ripped from the headlines" events are going to pop up. 😂 I'm currently #11 in the queue, so I've got a little bit of time to anticipate. How did you like it?

[church_of_dog]

16 minutes ago, AnywhereButHere said:

I'm on hold for this at my local library. I was wondering how many "ripped from the headlines" events are going to pop up. 😂 I'm currently #11 in the queue, so I've got a little bit of time to anticipate. How did you like it?

I liked it a lot.  To be fair though, I don't usually read political thrillers (political non-fiction has more than enough emotion for me) so I don't have much to compare it to.

There were a few things I didn't like/think were plausible or realistic, but they were minor in the grand scheme of things, and there were many aspects of it I did like.

There's a bit "ripped from headlines", including some stuff I'm pretty sure hadn't actually happened yet at the time they were writing.     But it really didn't focus too much on TFG's time, other than establishing that the new administration was having to pick up the pieces from a really poorly-run previous administration.

 

There's also some fun "easter eggs" relating to Louise Penny's Three Pines series, as well as some characters (human and canine) named after actual people/dogs LP and HRC have lost in their own lives.

[fraurosena]

 

[church_of_dog]

🙄

[smittykins]

6 hours ago, fraurosena said:

 

Hopefully this will shut up the GQPers who say that “the Dems have the Presidency and both houses of Congress, but can’t get the deal done(while conveniently forgetting that TFG didn’t get his precious wall when the Rs had them).

[Dandruff]

3 hours ago, church_of_dog said:

🙄

More pillow infomercials around Thanksgiving.

[church_of_dog]

13 minutes ago, Dandruff said:

More pillow infomercials around Thanksgiving.

My thoughts were mainly:

1.  Since when is an "interview" between two partisan players compelling to SCOTUS in any way, shape or form?

and

2.  Since when does the Supreme Court convene to hear a case (even a valid one) on Thanksgiving Day?