The proverb ”keep your friends close but your enemies closer” comes from the Italian Renaissance diplomat Niccolò Machiavelli but is also attributed to Sun Tzu. As Don Trump begins his second term, I can’t believe how chummy he is with his former enemies. His new frenemies include Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Don even had a 3 hour dinner with Bill Gates. I don’t know if these guys are all trying to keep their enemy close and are opening up their pocketbook to Don for the privilege or not. What I do know is these are some strange bedfellows.
Beginning Saturday night, TikTok began going off the air. I am not on nor watch TikTok so I don’t have a horse in the race here. However, hysterical millennials and influencers began crying, literally, on other platforms like Instagram. Before he even took office, it looked like the wee orange man came and saved the day.
By Sunday things had changed. Here is the Tik Tok policy statement as they came back on after a 12 hour shutdown. “In agreement with our service providers, TikTok is in the process of restoring service. We thank President Trump for providing the necessary clarity and assurance to our service providers that they will face no penalties providing TikTok to over 170 million Americans and allowing over 7 million small businesses to thrive. It’s a strong stand for the First Amendment and against arbitrary censorship. We will work with President Trump on a long-term solution that keeps TikTok in the United States.”
Well, this is a popular decision, but unfortunately an illegal one. Is Don going to deport illegals for breaking the law while he is allowing TikTok to continue. Barbara McQuade is a professor at the University of Michigan Law and a former US attorney, and she writes for Bloomberg, “President-elect Donald Trump will be tested early when he takes his oath of office on Monday.
On Friday, the Supreme Court upheld a federal law requiring the popular social media app TikTok to divest from its China-based parent company, ByteDance, by Sunday or be banned. The court rejected the social media company’s argument that the law violated the First Amendment rights of TikTok and its content creators. According to ByteDance’s lawyers, on Sunday, the app will “go dark.”
Trump had urged the court to delay the deadline until he took office, giving him time to negotiate a deal. As president, it will be his duty to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” That means enforcing the statute. The ban, passed with large bipartisan support and signed into law by President Joe Biden in April, was designed to protect the private data of US users from a hostile foreign adversary.”
Trump followed up on Tuesday by announcing that he was ok if Larry Ellison from Oracle or Elon Musk bought TikTok. I don’t like our president deciding who can or can’t buy companies. I don’t want Joe Biden doing it and I don’t want Don Trump doing it.
I don’t understand what is happening. There is a law. The Supreme Court has upheld the law as constitutional. Don doesn’t have a say. He is in the executive branch. They divest or go dark. This is the problem with these executive orders. Trump wants to do away with regulatory interference from the alphabet agencies, but he is doing the same thing. We have checks and balances for a reason in this country. If you want to change the law Don, I’d suggest having your Congress with a mandate change the law. I don’t want to live in a world where the President can just change the law anytime he wants to do so. Let’s see what actually happens, but this is an awful precedent. He is literally breaking his oath before he takes the oath.
Speaking of things that happened before he took the oath. Friday night saw a dramatic unveiling. This from ZeroHedge, “Just hours after Gary Gensler left the SEC headquarter for the last time in his life… … Trump showed the world what an outsized role crypto, and certainly memecoins, will have in his administration.
After nearly a year of frenzied speculation which of the dozens of Trump-linked memecoins the 47th president will pick as his own, just before 10pm ET on Friday night – and just two days before his inauguration as the 47th president of the United States – Trump stunned the world when he unveiled on his Truth Social and X accounts, his “official” meme coin, TRUMP… … which in the 12 hours since its unveiling has surged to a $30 billion market capitalization…The token started trading at an opening price of $0.1824, but within 12 hours had jumped over 15,000%, trading at roughly $30 as of 10:00am ET, 12 hours after its launch. Its market cap stood at ~$30 billion at the time.”
Well that is good work if you can get it. There are rumors that Trump is going to put Bitcoin into a US strategic reserve. What if Trump coin, I can’t believe I have to type these words, is a competitor? I don’t want to hear a single thing about the Federal Reserve needs to cut rates if monetary conditions are so easy and liquid that Trump coin can achieve a $30 billion market cap over the weekend. I can assure you that the Trump tirade toward Jerome Powell to cut rates is coming and it might be coming before he does any executive orders.
The craziness behind this coin business continues though. Like the presidency we have out with the old and in with the new. In crypto’s case it is out with the Fart coin and in with the Trump coin. That is a real thing America. This from Felix Salmon at MSN, “The $TRUMP memecoin — a financial asset that didn’t exist on Friday afternoon — now accounts for about 89% of Donald Trump’s net worth. The coin (technically a token that’s issued on the Solana blockchain) has massively enriched Trump personally, enabled a mechanism for the crypto industry to funnel cash to him, and created a volatile financial asset that allows anyone in the world to financially speculate on Trump’s political fortunes.
After another massive overnight rally, as of Sunday morning Trump’s crypto holdings were worth as much as $58 billion on paper, enough — with his other assets — to make him one of the world’s 25 richest people…The emoluments clause of the Constitution, written in 1787, hardly envisaged a world where a president could conjure billions of dollars of wealth out of nowhere just by endorsing a meme…Trump has just delivered a masterclass in the ability of a president to turn power into wealth.” I am truly stunned. The coin is now worth $30 billion they say or roughly about the total market capitalization of eBay. Of course, eBay has been around 3 decades not 3 days. This is truly 1929 levels of speculation if we are Yolo-ing political meme coins. Look out soon for the new C Thomas Printer Cooperative meme coin. It will be shaped like a seashell so if you hold it up to your ear you can hear the sound of the federal government burning through money while no one cares… At least privately they are all getting rich…
The odds of all of this happening are as small as it snowing half a foot on Bourbon Street. Wait that happened too?
Sincerely Yours,
C Thomas Printer
Also born on this date… . the English thinker and statesman Francis Bacon.
Thank you for listening today and you can find all of our articles and more on our website cthomasprinter.com.