A really liberal friend messaged me on Friday. She’d just heard the news about the $350 million–plus civil fraud judgment against Donald Trump in Recent York.

That’s on top of the tens of hundreds of thousands he has to pay former magazine columnist E. Jean Carroll, whom he was adjudged to have sexually assaulted after which defamed.

Also: Jury says Donald Trump must pay a further $83.3 million to E. Jean Carroll in defamation case

My friend figured that — financially, at the very least — Trump was down for the count. 

She’s not alone. Much of media appears to be taking the identical view.

They might not be more fallacious.

Away from the headlines, Donald Trump has just made a staggering sum of cash, all of it driven by the publicity from his campaign for the White House. (A very, terribly cynical person might even suggest that is an element of the purpose.)

How much? Forget these fines, which add as much as lower than $500 million. Trump is suddenly on target for a windfall of nearly $4 billion. And he has made most of it just within the five weeks since his big win within the Iowa caucuses put him in pole position for the Republican presidential nomination.

The windfall is from the forthcoming IPO of his social-media platform, called Truth Social, which he launched — amid massive derision from the mainstream media, I would add — in 2021 after he was kicked off Twitter following the events of Jan. 6, 2021. 

Truth Social secured approval for its IPO from the Securities and Exchange Commission this week. 

Opinion: The stock linked to Donald Trump’s Truth Social platform is flying high. Read this before you invest.

Also read: DWAC up over 15% because it moves to purchase Trump Media & Technology Group — but here’s a possible snag

It should come to the stock market through a merger with a so-called blank-check, or “shell,” company often called Digital World Acquisition Corp.
DWAC,
-4.00%.
(Blank-check corporations are paper corporations that list on the stock market first after which have a prescribed time period to search out a business to amass or merge with.)

Under terms of the deal, which has been within the pipeline since 2021, Trump personally is ready to find yourself with 79 million shares in the corporate when the deal is complete, possibly as soon as this quarter.

Or so reports a recent SEC filing by the corporate, on Page 309.

The worth of those shares today: $48. They dropped $2 on Friday, but only after an outstanding run that has taken them from just $17 in early January, just before the Iowa caucuses.

(Let or not it’s added that Devin Nunes, the Trump acolyte and former Republican congressman from rural California who’s the CEO of the Truth Social holding company, will make out more modestly. At current prices, his stock shall be value, er, $5 million.)

That values Trump’s personal stake in the corporate at $3.8 billion — up $2.5 billion just since winning in Iowa over Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley, et al. Who says it costs money to run for president?

The stock boom is doubly welcome to Trump. Not only does it mean that the worth of his shares go up, nevertheless it means he gets much more shares. Under the terms of the deal, Trump and his Truth Social partners get an additional 40 million shares — current value: $1.9 billion — if the stock stays above $17.50.

What the stock is de facto “value” is anyone’s guess. It’s a speculative investment, to say the least, even a meme stock. It could easily plunge to Earth. But so long as it stays above $17.50, Trump is within the pink.

There’s no mystery as to why the stock is booming. Some traders are riding the brand new Trump hype train as he marches toward the Republican Party’s presidential nomination — and, quite possibly, back into the White House.

And lots of are betting that if Trump becomes president again he’ll do for Truth Social in his second term what he did for Twitter in his first.

In case you could have forgotten, Trump effectively used his Twitter account as a semiofficial presidential communication tool. You couldn’t follow politics without following him on Twitter. Actually, you couldn’t really follow the news. His tweets permeated the culture — as when Andy Serkis, the actor who played Gollum in “Lord of the Rings,” read numerous them in character on late-night TV.

In total Trump tweeted greater than 25,000 times during his 4 years in office — a mean of greater than 18 times a day.

Twitter’s value trebled during Trump’s 4 years in office. It was value $40 billion when he left. (There have been many aspects involved, but all this free publicity, courtesy of the P.T. Barnum within the White House, hardly hurt.)

Trump’s recent windfall from Truth Social comes at a useful time for him. He faces not only huge fines but additionally mounting legal costs. He currently faces 4 criminal trials, involving 91 felony counts.

Two are for allegedly attempting to overturn the 2020 election result, through which he lost to Democrat Joe Biden by greater than 7 million votes and a 306-232 count within the Electoral College. One is for allegedly mishandling classified documents after leaving the White House. The fourth, for allegedly paying hush money to porn star Stormy Daniels throughout the 2016 presidential campaign, is scheduled to start next month.

See: The checks that led to Trump’s first criminal trial within the ‘hush money’ scandal

As I’ve identified before, Trump wouldn’t be facing this trial in any respect if he’d paid off Stormy Daniels with gold coins as a substitute of checks.

Having access to his recent Truth Social billions to assist pay his legal fees shall be a challenge, though. Presumably, if need be, Trump can borrow against his shares. Lawyers involved within the deal refused to comment. The phone number listed for Digital World Acquisition Corp. in the corporate’s filings has been disconnected. Emails sent to the media-relations address bounced back. 

Trump, recall, was trailing Florida governor DeSantis within the presidential race until the primary of his legal indictments landed.

See: Trump’s indictment boosts odds he’ll be the GOP presidential nominee in 2024. You possibly can bet on it.

You see how this whole thing suits together? The establishment indicts Trump. The publicity gives him an unassailable edge within the Republican presidential race. That lands him a $4 billion windfall. And he can funnel a few of that cash — through fines, and legal fees — back to the establishment. The price of doing business.

A very cynical person might wonder in the event that they’re all in on it. And the remainder of us are getting played.