Over a year ago, when I used to vent a lot about Elon Musk’s heavy involvement in the Trump administration, shutting down many government oversight agencies that had active investigations against him or his companies (estimated at around 70% of all the affected agencies), a good friend of mine made a comment that I should get rid of my car (I am guilty of owning a Tesla, although I bought it in 2016, long before Musk lost his marbles), and as they say, put my money where my mouth is. I did not disagree. In fact, I had already listed my car, several thousand dollars below it’s typical market value. But at that particular period, you either didn’t want an electric car (the right), or you hated Musk and Teslas (the left). The intersection was so small that I didn’t get even a single call from anyone. So I ended up keeping the car.

I was recently thinking about that expression, and reviewed, in my mind, several right-leaning friends of mine, some of whom were at least at some point staunch supporters of Trump. Some even used to say that Trump was the best thing that had happened to the United States. But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t remember anyone of them owning a Trump watch, or having signed up for a Trump phone, or having purchased $TRUMP or $MELANIA meme coins, or wearing Trump sneakers. Some don’t even own a Trump hat!

I was just checking some stats on the subscribers or daily active users of different social media sites, and not too surprisingly found out that Truth Social comfortably sits at the bottom. Globally, looks like it has between 5 and 6.3 million daily active users, which is dwarfed by Meta’s Threads numbers at 400 to 500 million (I wonder who those Threads users are!). In the US, only 3% of adults have indicated that they use the platform, compared to Threads at 8% and YouTube at 84%.

So, I was thinking how that could be the case. If you ask Trump himself or Fox News, they will tell you Trump’s approval rating is at all times high. Yet only 3% of Americans care enough to subscribe for a free service that provides first-hand access to the president’s thoughts, ideas, and even actions or major announcements. To me, this sounds like the exact opposite of putting one’s money where their mouth is. Not only are they not willing to spend money on his merchandise, they don’t even want to subscribe to something that he is offering for free! That is some trust! And indeed a very strange relationship between the most popular president in the history of the universe and all of his supporters!