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GREEN BAY, Wis. — Let’s say you’re an ardent supporter of <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/donald-trump/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">Donald Trump</a> and you decided to invest $100,000 of your retirement savings into Trump Media because your favorite former president says it’s a “highly successful” company.

Well, if you bought in during <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/03/25/truth-social-trump-media-stock-market-billions/" target=_blank>last week’s initial public offering</a> at the peak of $79.38 a share, your $100,000 nest egg was worth only $57,000 this week when the stock hit a low of $45.26 after an April Fool’s Day crash — a 43 percent loss in just three trading days.

Not for the first time, Trump has played his supporters for suckers.

The skid came after Trump Media reported this week that it <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/04/01/truth-social-trump-media-results/" target=_blank>lost $58.2 million</a> in 2023 on sales of just $4.1 million — which suggests that Trump Media is practically worthless. The shares are bound to collapse further unless some wealthy entity — Saudi Arabia? China? — buys shares to <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2024/04/01/trump-stock-earnout-poses-ethics-concerns-if-hes-president-experts-say.html" target=_blank>gain leverage over Trump</a>, who can’t dump his own stake for six months.

Now comes word that, of course, Trump has <a href="https://news.bloomberglaw.com/litigation/trump-sues-co-founders-of-truth-social-media-company-over-shares" target=_blank>filed a lawsuit</a> against two of the company’s co-founders, both <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/03/21/truth-social-trump-merger-lawsuits/" target=_blank>former contestants on “The Apprentice.”</a> Trump Media’s lawsuit <a href="https://assets.bwbx.io/documents/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/rmc_C6wF3ZDU/v0" target=_blank>accuses them</a> of “mismanagement,” saying they “failed spectacularly at every turn” and “made a series of reckless and wasteful decisions.”

Trump Media is sounding more and more like the Trump presidency.

I thought about the Trump stock bubble while watching the former president and presumptive GOP nominee address adoring supporters on Tuesday here in Green Bay, where he held his first rally in 17 days. In a sense, what he did with Trump Media was just a variation on what he does to his supporters every day, whether persuading them to buy Trump-endorsed Bibles and sneakers or selling them on election lies and white nationalism.

Three thousand die-hard Trump fans had come to the convention center to see him in the teeth of a winter storm that dumped up to a foot of snow on northern Wisconsin. In their rapturous reception for the “real president,” as election-denying pillow magnate Mike Lindell called Trump during a warm-up speech, I saw the kind of unshakable faith in a man that could lead someone to invest hard-earned money in a worthless company.

And Trump was, as always, rewarding their adoration by selling them one self-interested swindle after another.

He announced that he had won his fraud case in New York: “The appellate division said, ‘You won the case, that’s it.’” (The court has not yet heard his appeal of the fraud judgment against him.)

He also announced that “it came out that we won this state” in 2020. (Trump <a href="https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/politics/politifactwisconsin/2024/04/01/ahead-of-rally-trump-repeats-false-claims-he-won-wisconsin-in-2020/73166391007/" target=_blank>lost Wisconsin</a> by 20,682 votes.)

At the heart of the speech was his original swindle, and still his go-to scam: convincing his supporters that their lives were being destroyed by dark-skinned invaders. It was the story of how “Crooked Joe and his migrant armies of dangerous criminals” are producing a “bloodbath” among innocent, native-born Americans.

It’s not the least bit true. Homicide and violent crime, after rising during the pandemic, have <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/01/25/homicides-fell-many-big-us-cities-2023-report-says/" target=_blank>dropped for two straight years</a> and are lower than during <a href="https://counciloncj.org/year-end-2023-crime-trends/" target=_blank>Trump’s final year</a> in office. There is scant evidence that immigrants — legal or undocumented — commit more than their share of crime and a lot of evidence that migrants are more law-abiding, as The Post’s <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/02/29/truth-about-illegal-immigration-crime/" target=_blank>Glenn Kessler has detailed</a>.

But that doesn’t stop Trump from talking about the “massive crime” brought by President “Biden’s flood of illegal aliens” — the theme of his Green Bay rally and an earlier event in Grand Rapids, Mich. “They’re not humans. They’re not humans. They’re animals,” Trump said. “I’ll use the word ‘animal’ because that’s what they are.”

If Trump wasn’t suggesting that <i>all</i> immigrants are animals, the nuance was easily lost. “Trump Calls Migrants ‘Animals’ in Michigan Stop,” was the <a href="https://x.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1775466548989227492?s=20" target=_blank>headline on Trump-friendly Newsmax</a>.

Paul Sancya

<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkUBdJM16LM" target=_blank>He blamed migrants</a> for “coming into our country with contagious diseases.” He warned of “illegal alien criminals crawling through your windows and ransacking your drawers,” where they “loot the jewelry.” When migrants aren’t busy doing that, they’re fixing to “obliterate Medicare and Social Security” and fill schools with “new migrant students who don’t speak a word of English.”

To illustrate the fictitious wave of “migrant crime,” Trump, at his stops in Michigan and Wisconsin, cited violent crimes committed by undocumented immigrants. (“Last week, another illegal alien criminal was arrested in Alabama for raping a mentally incapacitated 14-year-old girl.”)

You could just as easily cherry-pick from police blotters to make it appear as though there’s a crime wave being perpetrated by evangelical Christians or Trump supporters — and it would be just as dubious.

But it suits his purposes to frame migrants because “they’re coming from places that you don’t want them to come from,” as Trump put it. “They’re coming from the Congo, Yemen, Somalia, Syria,” he said at another point. “They’re country-changing, country-threatening and they’re country-wrecking. They’re destroying our country.”

To reverse this “invasion,” he <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYZBejq9Hmc" target=_blank>told the Green Bay crowd</a>, which was almost entirely White, “we’re going to end up with the largest deportation in American history.” It was one of the biggest applause lines of the night.

Even before Trump took the stage, the audience had been primed to fear the invaders.

“In Joe Biden’s America, he has a VIP program, and it’s for illegal aliens,” Rep. Tom Tiffany (R-Wis.) told them. “And you are the second-class citizens in America now, aren’t you?”

Another Wisconsin Republican, Rep. Glenn Grothman, posed this question: “Who is the only man who has the ability to stop the United States from disappearing in November?”

“You’re absolutely right,” the congressman confirmed.

And, so, the fearful masses buy in. Watching Trump sell his swindle about migrants, it occurred to me that those suckered by the Trump Media IPO got a better deal, relatively speaking. Those who bought “DJT” shares lost only their shirts. But those who have been snookered into seeing migrants as diseased animals have lost part of their souls.

Joshua Lott

On Good Friday, Trump posted on social media an image showing Biden with his hands and feet tied in the bed of a pickup truck.

On Easter Sunday, he fired off a <a href="https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/112191452263257064" target=_blank>168-word run-on sentence</a> attacking his perceived enemies, including “‘DERANGED’ JACK SMITH, WHO IS EVIL AND ‘SICK’” and “CROOKED JOE’S DOJ THUGS.”

Also in observance of Easter, Trump spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt issued a statement attacking the White House for blocking “religious egg designs for their Easter Art Event.” But it turned out Trump <a href="https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-biden-easter-egg-transgender-proclamation-667689922248" target=_blank>had done the same thing</a> during his presidency, as had every other president for the last half-century.

Monday, the judge in Trump’s hush-money trial, Juan Merchan, expanded a gag order because of Trump’s repeated false attacks against Merchan’s daughter. Merchan said Trump’s attacks on “family members of presiding jurists and attorneys” were “a direct attack on the rule of law.” Trump responded by posting a Fox News clip of <i>others</i> attacking the judge’s daughter.

So much to be proud of! No wonder Rep. Guy Reschenthaler of Pennsylvania, a member of House GOP leadership, has sponsored H.R. 7845, “to designate the Washington Dulles International Airport in Virginia as the ‘Donald J. Trump International Airport.’” It has <a href="https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7845/cosponsors?s=2&r=1" target=_blank>only six co-sponsors</a> — none of them from Virginia — but there’s a certain logic to it. Now that Trump plans to surrender Ukraine to Russia, it seems inappropriate to have a major airport named after a fierce Cold Warrior such as John Foster Dulles, secretary of state in the Eisenhower administration. But couldn’t Reschenthaler cut out the middleman and just name the airport Putin International?

Someone finally found a way to silence Trump: Tell him that he might have to spend the night in Green Bay.

The snowstorm had already begun when Trump arrived here, and Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), taking the stage before the former president, explained the worry: “The president does have to get up here and speak before he’s snowed in.”

Trump started precisely on time and told his fans he would “finish this thing real quick.”

He spoke for an hour — just a throat-clearing by the standard of most Trump rallies — and he stuck closely to the words fed to him on his teleprompter. He depended so completely on the prompter that he couldn’t seem to tell where one sentence ended and another began: “Together, we’re taking on some of the most menacing forces in conclusion,” he informed them. In another moment of confusion, he told his followers: “If you have illegal aliens invading your home, we will deport you.”

Still, the storm-condensed speech in Green Bay, if rather low-energy, was revealing. Shorn of most of the wandering asides, it was a distillation of Trump’s message as intended. And that message, beyond the central attack on immigrants, was an elaborate act of projection. As though playing a game of “I’m rubber and you’re glue,” Trump took each complaint leveled against him and directed it at Biden.

Trump foments violence? Actually, Biden is the one promoting a “border bloodbath,” Trump said, which “ends the day I take the oath of office.”

Trump, who recently floated raising the Social Security retirement age, would cut entitlements? Trump said Biden, who he said is “destroying your Social Security” and “destroying your Medicare,” is the one who wants to raise the retirement age — “and we’re not doing any of that.”

Trump, author of the “big lie” about the 2020 election, spreads disinformation and conspiracy theories? “The only thing [Biden] is good at is cheating on elections and disinformation,” Trump said.

Trump threatens democracy? “If we don’t win, this may be the last election our country ever has ... because Joe Biden is a threat to democracy,” Trump said.

“Four more years!” the crowd chanted.

A quick glance at the first row of the TV camera risers at the rally showed why millions believe Trump’s nonsense: Along with spots for ABC, CBS and NBC were several spots for the organs of the MAGA right, which uncritically feed Trump’s absurdities to their viewers: Newsmax, Real America’s Voice, Right Side Broadcasting Network, Fox News. Lindell worked this part of the riser, as fans shouted up at him: “I love you, Mike!” “Hundred percent behind ya, buddy!” “I got a lot of pillows!”

Those in the room had to know, on some level, that Trump was making stuff up. When he boasted that “we have a room that’s sold out and people are standing outside in the snow” they could see with their own eyes that the room wasn’t full and people weren’t standing outside.

But I got the sense that most of them were there not to hear Trump’s words but to participate in the performance. Almost all wore variations of Trump hats, sweatshirts or T-shirts. One wore a Trump flag as a cape; another’s shirt showed Trump as a matador; a third hand-painted her shirt to say “Trump, Mt. Rushmore Bound, 2025.” They gleefully joined in the ritual chants: “Build that wall!” and “F--- Joe Biden.” Twice, hecklers tried to shout at Trump; the protesters were hardly audible, but the responding “boos” and chants of “USA!” from the crowd forced Trump to suspend his speech.

A minority identified themselves as extremists: the man in the Confederate-flag baseball cap, the guy flashing a <a href="https://www.adl.org/resources/hate-symbol/white-power-hand-sign" target=_blank>white-power hand gesture</a> at the stage, the woman holding up a wooden cross toward the press pen, as if we were vampires.

Alas, those on the stage appealed to the darker instincts of those in the crowd. Tiffany, the Wisconsin congressman, mocked the idea of civil rights and diversity. Ridiculing the Agriculture Department for having an Office of Civil Rights, Diversity and Inclusion, he said: “Diversity used to mean when we had Jerseys and Guernseys along with our Holsteins.”

Trump attacked Biden because the White House’s recognition of Transgender Visibility Day (it has been on March 31 for the last 15 years) fell on Easter this year. “Such total disrespect to Christians,” he said, promising to proclaim Nov. 5 — Election Day — as “Christian Visibility Day.”

And, of course, there were his attacks on “migrant crime.”

He displayed a chart for the crowd that announced “world-record illegal immigrants, many from prisons and mental institutions, also terrorists.”

“It’s a Border Patrol chart,” Trump told the crowd. (U.S. Customs and Border Protection has produced no such chart.)

In his recitation of violence by migrants, he spoke of the “illegal alien criminal ... charged with savagely murdering 25-year-old Ruby Garcia, a beautiful, perfect, beautiful, wonderful young girl, shooting her repeatedly with an illegally purchased handgun and dumping her body on the side of a highway to die.” At his previous stop in Grand Rapids, he said he had spoken with her family.

Police said it was a domestic-violence incident. And Garcia’s family told WOOD-TV in Grand Rapids that Trump <a href="https://www.woodtv.com/news/target-8/family-of-woman-found-dead-on-highway-angered-by-trumps-speech/" target=_blank>never spoke with them</a>. The victim’s sister, Mavi Garcia, accused Trump of “misinforming people on live TV,” saying “it’s kind of shocking why he would just bring up illegals. What about Americans who do heinous crimes like that?”

Those crimes don’t count — because they don’t fit Trump’s white-nationalist swindle.

White House Correspondent Association's Beckman Award

National Press Club's Gingras Prize

Tears of a Clown: Glenn Beck and the Tea Bagging of America (Doubleday, 2010)

Homo Politicus (Doubleday, 2008)

Smashmouth (Basic Books, 2001)

The Destructionists: The Twenty-Five-Year Crack-Up of the Republican Party (Doubleday, 2022)

Yale University, BA cum laude in political science

Dana Milbank is an opinion columnist for The Washington Post. He sketches the foolish, the fallacious and the felonious in politics. His new book is “The Destructionists: The 25-Year Crackup of the Republican Party” (Doubleday). 

Dana Milbank

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In Wisconsin and Michigan, Trump plays his supporters for suckers

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