Welcome back. One note: you all know Intern Julia, who will remain your correspondent in the flourishing TGIF inbox. We now bring on Just the Facts Coby, a young man who joined us to work on podcasts but whom I see in the office, and he’s very nice, so I’ve stolen him on Thursdays. See, occasionally, we get something wrong in TGIF—I did just last week. We put a correction on the column, and I don’t sleep well for days. Coby is here as our researcher so that your inbox remains pristine and your news reliable. Before joining The Free Press, Coby worked in the comedy world, so we might even authorize him to write an item one day, several years from now, no byline.
To the news:
→ It remains a very, very tight race: Trump is beating Biden by one point, according to a new Emerson College survey, with 8 percent undecided. I love this new chart from Gallup, which shows that, yes, people are losing faith in Biden. But it also shows that folks simply never saw Trump as all that likable or honest, which holds steady.
→ Trump vs. Truth Social: Trump is suing two co-founders of Trump Media & Technology Group and trying to claw back their stock since the company went public (stock ticker: DJT). This is in response to those two co-founders, winners of The Apprentice 2004, suing Trump to stop him from diluting their ownership.
Has Trump ever been in business with someone without getting into litigation with them? Depositions are his way of saying “Nice to meet you.” I don’t even think it registers for him as an event at this point; a lawsuit is just something you do after a work lunch. There was a rocky start to the trading and a drop in stock price—which everyone covered excitedly, as the stock is losing billions and plummeting—but the price is still weirdly high. I say weird because this is a meme stock. The fundamentals are. . . well, Trump Media lost $58 million and brought in $4 million in revenue last year. Yet, the market is valuing DJT at $6.4 billion. That there’s a meme stock. BuzzFeed, meanwhile, is worth $58 million.
→ TikTok strong-arming Republicans through Club for Growth: China does not want to let go of its access to America’s teens. TikTok is just about the most valuable war weapon you could ever build—a tool to sway another nation’s children. Sway them to dance, to develop Tourette syndrome, to kill their parents—it’s all in good fun. Now TikTok is using the “conservative” lobbying group Club for Growth to pressure Republican lawmakers, and it just might work, so easily bought are our leaders. The Club, whose largest donor is TikTok investor Jeff Yass, is threatening to dock Republican politicians’ business-friendly score if they agree to the new TikTok rule, Politico reports. Reminder: this isn’t even a ban. China had to sell Grindr for similar security reasons, and Grindr gays are fine—it’s just that now all that filthy data is collected by Americans. No need to air that stiff laundry on the world stage. But the party of ’Merica and Freedom and Eagles gets weak in the knees when a random billionaire says he’ll give them a bad score on a made-up chart.
