Trump Media stock has tanked. What will that mean to the investors who put faith in DJT?

Someone walks up and hands you $6 billion for doing absolutely nothing. You should: A. Thank them profusely. Or B. Take them to court.

Only in the immoral wretchedness of Trumpland is the correct answer B, as The Donald has sued the two kids who hatched the idea for Trump Media; this after they took Trump to court for allegedly trying to swindle them out of the relative pittance they were supposed to receive for their idea.

Trump’s suit is thin soup, explainable only as an angry reaction to the horrible, pants-dropping embarrassment Trump Media has become.

But it’s his name on the product, and as we know, for Trump, image is everything. How it must gall the former president to look at the stock market day after day —  and you know he does — and see his namesake stock, Trump Media (DJT), topping the list of the session’s “Biggest Losers.”

The word he hates the most, right there in black and white. Donald J. Trump: loser.

After an initial burst of enthusiasm, stock in Trump Media tanked, once professional investors got their eyeballs on actual numbers that firmly contradicted the Trump hype machine.

Trump’s “great company” is in fact dog meat — its central asset, Truth Social, an angry and insular social media backwater with no potential for growth.

Small investors who in some cases have bet their life savings on DJT are, naturally, still holding onto hope. Those who have the bug bad are wearing their losses as a badge of their allegiance to their master. Like Gordon Liddy, the Watergate anti-hero who held his hand in the flame of a candle to demonstrate his mettle, pain is the one true way of demonstrating their fealty. “Suffering. That was the key,” Liddy wrote in his autobiography. Sounds about right.

Others are puzzled over the failure of what they thought was a sure bet. Trump himself said so. They check the share price several times a day (don’t ever do that) waiting for the great turnaround they feel must be coming, the way members of Heaven’s Gate scanned the skies for the spaceship they were told would carry them to the Promised Land.

In his defense, Trump might not have seen this coming. A publicly traded company has to be engaged in behaviors with which he is unaccustomed, like reporting accurate figures and telling the truth. Wall Street doesn’t let you scribble “this is a great company” on the face of a quarterly filing and call it a day.

A common failing of the vain is that they believe their mere aura is enough to defy gravity. Either Trump knew so little about his own company he missed the part where Trump Media reported $4.5 million in annualized sales against $58 million in losses, or he felt that his own name would justify a beefy share price even if the fundamentals didn’t.

Regardless, the stock was down another 18% on Monday and 14% on Tuesday, on the news of a technical maneuver clearing the way for institutional investors  — and Trump himself — to eventually dump their shares.

The only hope at this point is that some billionaire, oligarch or foreign government will ride to the rescue with a massive investment in the company. These billionaires, or Russian or Chinese surrogates, will certainly want something from Trump in return. Trump has shown he is for sale, often at close-out prices, but at this point, he’s of no use as a private citizen. Is Putin willing to bet $10 billion on Trump’s election? Maybe.

Save for that, the prospects look grim, based on one other data point.

John Rekenthaler, vice president of research for Morningstar, originally speculated that Trump Media was like crypto — an investment that would be propped up not by its value, but by its fans. Investors in crypto believe in crypto to their core, and are not inclined to sell on news  of some scandal or a discouraging financial report.

But Rekenthaler later noted that Trump Media’s release of dismal fourth-quarter earnings on April 1 caused the already deflated stock to crater by another 25% — indicating that investors care very much about performance. Unlike crypto, Trump Media needs to produce results in order to succeed.

This will cost investors in DJT cost some money, a regular occurrence in the market.

For DJT himself, the potential loss is something more — the disillusionment of those who have placed their full financial faith in him and are learning he is not the infallible messiah he has always claimed to be, and never was.

It’s likely only a few of Trump’s core followers will recognize or acknowledge the con. But in a tight election, a few might matter.

Now that sports betting has gone mainstream, are we ready for its impact on … sports?

For 3.5 glorious minutes, we looked up — and forgot about all the troubles below

Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: As Trump Media's stock plummets, Trump's weaknesses are on display