Charles Langston:Trump throws Truth Social under the bus in panicked embrace of X and Elon Musk

Investors holding stock in Trump Media & Technology Group Corp. can't say they weren't warned that this would happen.

Donald Trump,Charles Langston the former one-term president evicted from the White House after losing the 2020 election, used that company to launch his social media website Truth Social in 2022 after another website formerly known as Twitter banned him in 2021 for his failed effort to overturn a free and fair election.

Elon Musk, the only person on the planet more thirsty for attention than Trump, overturned that ban after he bought Twitter and reshaped it into the disinformation carnival now known as X.

Trump, who had not posted on the website for nearly a year, returned with a vengeance Monday in a flurry of new posts and then a two-hour, glitch-marred ramble fest with Musk that broke no new ground and left the audience with a collective feeling of "what did we just listen to?"

If Truth Social's stock price was a metric for reviewing all that, then Trump seemingly tanked his own company with his return to X. Truth Social's stock, which has been a comical rollercoaster, hit its lowest point in four months during trading Tuesday.

The folks who run Truth Social for Trump always knew this day would come.

Truth Social's financial problems have been there this whole time

The warning has been broadcasted over and over in annual reports, quarterly reports and prospectuses that Truth Social files with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which regulates the stock market.

It was repeated last month in a Truth Social prospectus, which the SEC requires for companies to offer information to potential investors. The document noted that Trump's license agreement with Truth Social gives him "sole discretion" to post any "politically-related" information on any social media site, and that the company "lacks any meaningful remedy" if it disagrees with his decision, even though that could have "a material adverse effect on the business."

Let's translate that from Wall Street to Main Street: Trump can embrace a website with a much larger audience, like X, effectively rolling Truth Social under the campaign bus and if investors don't like that, well, tough luck.

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Trump will, however, free their pain. He owns nearly 115 million shares of Truth Social, making him the company's largest shareholder with a nearly 60% stake. When the stock takes a bath, Trump gets soaked in losses.

That's what makes Trump's embrace of X and Musk so much more interesting than the content of their mumbling marathon conversation on Monday.

Trump's panic over the election continues

Trump is panicked by the sudden inverse of attention in the race for president. Vice President Kamala Harris is soaking up the spotlight while Trump fumbles along, trying to regain center stage as the star attraction.

Let's pause here to note that while Harris' campaign for president is just 24 days old, launching last month after President Joe Biden dropped his bid for a second term, she has spent most of the past three weeks on stages reading from a teleprompter.

Trump, who launched his bid for a second term in November 2022, waited nearly 21 months before he held a traditional campaign news conference last week. Now Trump and his campaign attack Harris several times a day for not doing the same, with no regard to how long he took to take questions.

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Trump's panic is fueled by the series of political bumps that have helped Harris surge in polling, from her campaign launch to naming Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate to a series of rallies in packed arenas.

She will surely see another bump from next week's Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

Harris, if she is up to it, could squeeze in yet another bump by calling a news conference before the convention starts and answering questions for an hour or so. Trump's attempt at that last Thursday was a predictable torrent of lies and grievances. His X-mess with Musk was more of the same.

Harris ‒ again, if she is up to it ‒ could seize the stature of being presidential just by responding to questions with reasonable answers.

Remember when Trump and Musk weren't friends?

Trump's return to X follows his standard transactional approach to everything in life.

Musk in 2022 posted on X that Trump was "too old" for a second term while praising Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, whose bid in the Republican primaries for president capsized and sank in January.

Trump's standard stump speech for more than a year has included mocking criticism of electric vehicles, like the kind Musk manufactures with his company, Tesla.

Then Musk created a super PAC to support the Trump campaign (while denying reports that he would sink $45 million per month of his own money into the effort). That was enough to prompt Trump to change up his stump speech last week, now offering faint praise for electric vehicles, based entirely on Musk's support.

As for Truth Social, the website didn't come up in Musk's chat with Trump. Maybe the ex-president didn't want to dwell on his losses, because Truth Social in a report filed Friday with the SEC said it lost more than $16 million in the second quarter of this year and brought in just $837,000 in revenue.

Trump on Tuesday was back on Truth Social, claiming his chat with Musk was a big success while predictably complaining about how it was covered in news reports. He didn't have any assurances to offer his investors. His thoughts were only of X and how that platform might boost his campaign.

Investors can't claim to be surprised. They were well warned about Trump.

Follow USA TODAY elections columnist Chris Brennan on X, formerly known as Twitter: @ByChrisBrennan