The stock price for former President Donald Trump’s media company shot up Friday following a presidential debate that was widely viewed as a total disaster for his opponent, current President Joe Biden.
The Trump Media & Technology Group (the parent company behind Trump’s social media site, Truth Social) saw a nice bump of 5 percent when the market opened Friday morning, Quartz reports. The company’s stock, DJT, had also seen a rise of 15 percent during premarket trading Friday, the outlet notes.
TMTG went public earlier this year in a much-publicized deal, and has garnered a reputation as an especially volatile stock, prone to wild jumps in value. It has sometimes been compared to a meme stock. True to form, the stock’s gains Friday did not last long. Later in the day, it slipped back down again, dropping by as much as 6 percent. But the blip does further indicate that the success of his media company is firmly intertwined with his political fortunes.
That blip of market success has largely been attributed to the results of Thursday’s presidential debate, the first of the election season. According to CNN polls, Trump was viewed as the winner of the debate by 67 percent of respondents. Though, per CNN, he is also said to have made dozens of false claims, Trump’s presentation was markedly stronger than Biden’s. He didn’t trip over his words, and, while many of the things he said sounded unprecedented and unhinged (at one point, he said that Biden could be “a convicted felon as soon as he gets out of office,” that he was “a criminal,” and that he had allowed the U.S. to “be destroyed”), they were said in a strong, declarative way, unlike Biden.
There’s no way to sugarcoat it: Biden did terribly Thursday. His answers were incoherent, barely audible, and rambling, and he looked very old and very tired. At one point, the 81-year-old President stammered painfully about god knows what for several seconds before proclaiming the non-sequitur: “We finally beat Medicare!” At another point, whilst trying to discuss abortion, Biden rambled about rape and immigration for an uncomfortable amount of time. During many periods of the debate, the President stared around the room with a blank look on his face and his mouth slightly agape, looking vaguely like a dying fish.
Democratic Party operatives are now said to be actively freaking out over just how badly their candidate did. “Biden is toast — calling it now,” one Democratic party activist told Politico after the debate ended last night. “Biden needs to drop out. No question about it,” another political insider told the outlet. Even more grimly, a party donor advisor quipped: “Our only hope is that he bows out, we have a brokered convention, or [he] dies. Otherwise, we are fucking dead.”
The question remains why anyone thought a debate was a good idea in the first place. Any person who is even marginally aware of politics has known for years that Biden has trouble stringing a coherent sentence together when a camera is nearby. That said, following the debate Thursday night, Biden seemed to rebound, giving a stump speech in North Carolina on Friday that was surprisingly cogent, energetic, and, quite good. “Where was this guy last night?” a Washington Post columnist who attended the event asked.
Democratic Party insiders are now said to be discussing the possibility of replacing Biden on the ticket, but that would only be possible if Biden himself signs off on the idea. It doesn’t seem like he’s going to do that. “Of course, he’s not dropping out,” Biden spokesperson Seth Schuster told The Hill Friday.
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