'Massive potential conflict of interest': Reporter says Trump's app vessel to curry favor
Former President Donald Trump proclaimed Friday that he has "no intention of selling" his shares in Truth Social, the online platform he created as a Twitter clone, and any rumors to the contrary are "false." Much like his former hotel in Washington, D.C. that he owned going into his first presidential term, this poses enormous corruption issues for his second, New York Times reporter Russ Buettner told CNN's Jake Tapper.
The problem, Buettner said, is Trump once again has a private backchannel through which anyone wanting to curry favor with him can spend money — and it's even more blatant this time, he added, because the entire business as it exists doesn't seem to have any legitimate purpose.
"Is that a potential conflict of interest for him to not divest from that company?" asked Tapper.
"That's a massive potential conflict of interest," Buettner confirmed.
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Truth Social, he explained, is "a business that doesn't really have a clear reason for existing. What [CEO and former Congressman] Devin Nunes says is that they exist as a place where — social media site where people who want to express conservative views don't have to worry about having their accounts canceled. That very much is like Twitter, the former Twitter, under Elon Musk's ownership, now called X. Truth Social has basically become a baby X. So what is its reason for existing? It's not very clear."
Furthermore, he continued, "it has revenue of about $4 million a year, roughly the same as a standalone Chick-fil-A restaurant, not a remarkable thing, yet it has a valuation in the billions of dollars."
What all that means, he said, is "it would be easy for someone to make an offering for all the outstanding stock, something larger than what it's trading at, and put literally billions of dollars in Donald Trump's pockets, and very difficult to untangle whether that was just a straight business decision or whether they were trying to curry favor with him. You could also just buy ads on Truth Social — they don't sell many ads, obviously from their revenue — and you could greatly enhance the stock if you just bought $10 million in ads. That would almost triple their revenue for the year."
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