Indecision 2024

[IvanV]

Apparently Letitia James is really querying the bond that Trump got from the insurance company run by the second hand car dealer sup prime guy as it doesn’t look like they don’t have the money any more than Donald does

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/worl ... 23810.html

Reading around that a bit, it seems that the bond provider does not have the registration that would enable it to get a financial regulator's certificate stating how much it is good for. It is not required to have that registration or certificate, but in such a case the court has the right to ask for justification of being good for the bond. So that is what the court is now doing, and a hearing is scheduled on 22 April.

The documentation of the bond was insufficient, including the laughable failure of not actually saying that the bond provider would pay out when the bond was called. That would have resulted in rejection on the spot, so those shortcomings were quickly rectified.

It's an easy snipe that Trump is up to his usual tricks, providing a cargo cult bond, just to get time that comes from exposing it as such. Clearly there is Trumpery going on, probably because he couldn't get such a bond from somewhere more reputable. So they will go through the theatre of exhibiting the collateral and the ability of the bond provider to pay up. The bond providing company is worth a lot of money to someone, and I doubt they want to become poor overnight, so my suspicion is that the collateral will prove adequate on examination. It might be, or a material proportion of it might be, near-cash rather than actual cash, and not quite as near-cash as you might ideally like, and maybe they'll be dodging around for some top-ups, maybe facilitated by the 2 weeks they've got before the hearing.

[Stranger Mouse]

Apparently Letitia James is really querying the bond that Trump got from the insurance company run by the second hand car dealer sup prime guy as it doesn’t look like they don’t have the money any more than Donald does

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/worl ... 23810.html

Reading around that a bit, it seems that the bond provider does not have the registration that would enable it to get a financial regulator's certificate stating how much it is good for. It is not required to have that registration or certificate, but in such a case the court has the right to ask for justification of being good for the bond. So that is what the court is now doing, and a hearing is scheduled on 22 April.

The documentation of the bond was insufficient, including the laughable failure of not actually saying that the bond provider would pay out when the bond was called. That would have resulted in rejection on the spot, so those shortcomings were quickly rectified.

It's an easy snipe that Trump is up to his usual tricks, providing a cargo cult bond, just to get time that comes from exposing it as such. Clearly there is Trumpery going on, probably because he couldn't get such a bond from somewhere more reputable. So they will go through the theatre of exhibiting the collateral and the ability of the bond provider to pay up. The bond providing company is worth a lot of money to someone, and I doubt they want to become poor overnight, so my suspicion is that the collateral will prove adequate on examination. It might be, or a material proportion of it might be, near-cash rather than actual cash, and not quite as near-cash as you might ideally like, and maybe they'll be dodging around for some top-ups, maybe facilitated by the 2 weeks they've got before the hearing.

New info on the bond seems to show

1) it is a really strange decision for the insurance company as this would wipe them out if they had to pay BUT

2) There’s weird legalese in the contract which actually says that Trump would pay the money not them which isn’t how these things work

3) More legalese to try and limit it to $175 million without including extra fees and interest which it should

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trumps-do ... n-it-looks

[Stranger Mouse]

Trump releases abortion statement which includes a repeat of his claim that babies are executed after birth

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/worl ... 25114.html

[Stranger Mouse]

Trump Media lost 32% last week from Monday to Friday.

Today it has lost 10% since opening 34 minutes ago

ETA Article on who they are paying all the money

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technolo ... al-payout/

[IvanV]

New info on the bond seems to show

1) it is a really strange decision for the insurance company as this would wipe them out if they had to pay BUT

2) There’s weird legalese in the contract which actually says that Trump would pay the money not them which isn’t how these things work

3) More legalese to try and limit it to $175 million without including extra fees and interest which it should

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trumps-do ... n-it-looks

James explicitly rejected the bond last Weds, and new documents were submitted. I assumed that was to fix your points 2 and 3. But I can't find a clear statement of what was fixed in the refiling. So maybe those remain outstanding issues, which seems pretty astonishing to me as they seem to be utterly basic points of whether the bond is correct or not.

The current position is that the hearing is about whether Knight can cover the bond (Reuters). But apparently the current status of the bond is rather delicious, in that the bond is rejected as adequate for the legal purpose, but Knight is still on the hook for the $175m guarantee (Newsweek). Because apparently Knight has given a $175m guarantee to the court. Or so it is asserted.

[Stranger Mouse]

New Trump ad. It’s pretty weird. Scratch that - it’s incredibly weird.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/worl ... 24956.html

New Biden ad based on care following miscarriage because of the Roe v Wade debacle.

Harrowing

https://x.com/joebiden/status/1777379338574352399?s=61

[Stranger Mouse]

Arizona Supreme Court upholds 1864 law banning almost all abortion

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... n-decision

[IvanV]

Arizona Supreme Court upholds 1864 law banning almost all abortion

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... n-decision

That's the inevitable consequence of the fact that abortion was not legal in Arizona before Roe vs Wade. Arizona will likely make abortion explicitly legal following a ballot initiative in November, which the same court has also enabled. It is difficult making controversial things legal in the US, even when you have a majority, at state as well as federal level. A least at state level ballot initiatives enable stalemates to be overcome. The governor says the old law will not be enforced.

It all seems silly and probably very worrying for those at risk of needing an abortion in that interval of time. But perhaps some useful theatre for Biden.

In the mean time Trump, assuming the hard conservatives are in his pocket, has tried to appeal to the median voter by saying abortion law should be determined at state level. Which is what is happening anyway. But the Democrats are reminding people you can't trust him.

[Stranger Mouse]

Weisselberg gets 5 months

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... raud-trial

[Stranger Mouse]

Gift link to reporting on Trump’s attempts to boost third party candidates

https://x.com/jonathanvswan/status/1778 ... 38649?s=61

[dyqik]

Today's appeal against starting Trump's trial on Monday is denied.

Took about 25 minutes from arguments to written order.

[Stranger Mouse]

Trump Media lost 32% last week from Monday to Friday.

Today it has lost 10% since opening 34 minutes ago

ETA Article on who they are paying all the money

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technolo ... al-payout/

So it appears to have lost 32% last week and 21% since Monday this week. Currently 32.65 (down around 5% since the exchange opened 2 and a half hours ago) compared to the float price of around 66.

[Stranger Mouse]

All about the guy behind the 1864 Arizona abortion ban. He sounds like a real twunt.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/po ... ude-jones/

[dyqik]

Today's yesterday's appeal against starting Trump's trial on Monday is denied.

Funnily enough you can't generate a large amount of publicity about your upcoming trial, and then claim that the trial should be delayed because of the publicity.

[Stranger Mouse]

Trump Media lost 32% last week from Monday to Friday.

Today it has lost 10% since opening 34 minutes ago

ETA Article on who they are paying all the money

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technolo ... al-payout/

Now 27.43 - down 15.98% since the market opened around 90 minutes ago.

f.cking Hell

ETA A lot of this is due to announcement that they will be releasing millions more shares

https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/15/investin ... index.html

[IvanV]

Trump Media lost 32% last week from Monday to Friday.

Today it has lost 10% since opening 34 minutes ago

ETA Article on who they are paying all the money

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technolo ... al-payout/

Now 27.43 - down 15.98% since the market opened around 90 minutes ago.

f.cking Hell

ETA A lot of this is due to announcement that they will be releasing millions more shares

https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/15/investin ... index.html

Untruth Social is losing about $1m a week. It apparently needs funding to cover those losses. So new MAGA suckers are needed to put up new money. Apparently there should be no shortage of them. But unsurprisingly the dilution means that the stock price falls.

The whole point of the recent DWAC - Untruth deal was, I thought, to put cash from believers in to Untruth. And the advantage of a high stock price is that you can raise cash from new investors without diluting the existing investors very much. On the one hand, it is a bit odd that they immediately need more cash. But in some senses the whole point was to have a high share price so that The Donald could laugh all the way to the bank as he found this sneaky way to enrich himself, by having lots of shares in a company that was worthless, but, like crypto, would have a value because the Believers in Untruth would be willing to pay for it. So a dilution reducing the stock price isnt' exactly ideal for The Donald, even if it is great for the company when it needs to raise more cash.

So an interesting question is how much cash did the merger with DWAC bring? Truth Social is losing about $1m a week, so it eats cash. For all that the apparent market value of Untruth Social was momentarily north of $7bn, that's nothing to do with how much assets or cash were in either partner to the merger. The cash in DWAC is much more to do with the $293m that was raised when DWAC went public, now back in 2021. I found some statement that on 31 March 2023 DWAC had $152m free cash sitting "outside the trust account". I don't know entirely what that means, but at least a year ago they were sitting on $152m in cash to do what they liked with, and maybe some more too. Now they have had a lot of legal troubles due to not doing things quite right, which is part of why it took 3 years to get from the public offering to merging with Untruth Social, which was always the idea. So some might have gone in legal and admin costs, and the cost of merger. And then there's the trust account, whatever that is.

The only thing I can think is that a lot of the cash from DWAC went into paying off the past losses of Untruth Social. I wonder who has been funding those in the interim? Perhaps they were being funded on the promise that DWAC would come along to pay them off.

The other funny thing about this is that the cofounders of Untruth Social - Andy Litinski and Wes Moss - the very people who had this idea to make Trump a lot of money this way - are currently suing Trump because they reckon he has diluted them out of their fair share of it, there's gratitude for you. And so he has sued them back in return for mismanagement, saying their mismanagement resulted in reducing the returns from the project by delaying the merger. Trump says they should have no shares at all, and all they were doing was hanging on their coat-tails. When of course it was their idea in the first place. And there have been legal troubles, because for some weird reason under US law you aren't allowed to take a SPAC public having had talks with a specific target in mind. But that was always the idea in the first place...

[Stranger Mouse]

Well the share price dropped around 17% yesterday and has dropped over 10% today when the markets have only been open for under two hours. Currently at 23.72. Ouch.

Trump apparently fell asleep in court again today. The sleep of the just no doubt.

[Stranger Mouse]

It’s now down 14% today

Trump and his lawyer get admonished when Trump audibly talks at a juror around 12 feet away

https://x.com/katiephang/status/1780304 ... 74495?s=61

In general they appear to be having a problem finding jurors who don’t have social media posts implying that Trump is a c.nt.(the one in the above thread is far from the only one)

[Stranger Mouse]

Share price back up to 35.13. This is a massive surge but I don’t expect it to derail the eventual journey to sh.t implosion that everyone expects.

Someone has sadly set themselves on fire near the court although nobody knows why

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald ... rcna145937

[dyqik]

He seems to have be distributing pamphlets with a bizarre set of conspiracy theories. And to have driven to New York from Florida to do this.

[Stranger Mouse]

In a highly unusual step transcripts of the Trump case are going to be released daily. Thread here:

https://x.com/frankrunyeon/status/17824 ... 67970?s=61

Transcripts will be released by end of next working day. Direct link here https://ww2.nycourts.gov/press/index.shtml

[Grumble]

Nice burn from Mitt Romney, “you don’t have to pay someone $130,000 not to have sex with you.”

Which is only common sense, but cuts nicely through all the b.llsh.t Trump spouts.

[FlammableFlower]

Nice burn from Mitt Romney, “you don’t have to pay someone $130,000 not to have sex with you.”

Which is only common sense, but cuts nicely through all the b.llsh.t Trump spouts.

Very common sense, but Trump's lawyers arguments will be that it was all a big lie that she was threatening to release that would harm Trump's election, so they then paid to kill the story rather than let it get out (basically blackmail that he decided to pay).

They have already tried it in their opening statements. I think the judge sustained the prosecution's objections to the comments regarding Clifford/Daniels, but their plan was just to get the idea out there in the minds of the jury.

[Stranger Mouse]

Nice burn from Mitt Romney, “you don’t have to pay someone $130,000 not to have sex with you.”

Which is only common sense, but cuts nicely through all the b.llsh.t Trump spouts.

Well they did catch and kill the story from the doorman about the illegitimate even though they knew it was false which raises a number of possibilities

1) They thought it might be actually true because Trump can’t stop lying
2) For some reason Trump can’t even remember all his illicit shags
3) if someone else had published it would still have done damage to his rep even though it couldn’t be proven to be true.

[Stranger Mouse]

Good episode of the Rachel Maddow podcast today (episode broadcast yesterday) in which they have a round robin of journalists (including the excellent Chris Hayes) and lawyers discussing the insanity in the Supreme Court yesterday.

https://open.spotify.com/show/7yfYvyKNKAuuqSX3PVyRYi