Dem
51
GOP
49
Please sit down. This is going to shock you, and we don't want any of our readers to fall down and get hurt. An examination by The New York Times of the ads running on Donald Trump's Truth Social shows that there are no national brands advertising there. No car ads from Toyota. No hamburger ads from McDonalds. No shampoo ads from Procter & Gamble. Nothing from Amazon, Disney, or Walmart. All the ads are scummy, scuzzy, and/or scammy. Here is a small sample:
None of them are from companies anyone has ever heard of. Maybe the companies don't even exist. Just give us your credit card number and we'll take it from there. The top row ads are designed to appeal to culture warriors (socialism, vaccine exemptions, and disaster preparation). The middle row ads are money scams (gold bars, fake $1,000 bills, and non-woke insurance). The bottom row ads are health scams (cures for macular degeneration, obesity, and gum disease). The ads run one at a time, not in a block as shown above.
Unfortunately, we haven't tried any of the products, so we can't give any recommendations. Some of the them are probably legitimate in the sense you will get what is advertised. We guess that the products in the top row are probably what they claim to be. if you order them, you will probably get a kids book on why socialism is terrible, a small card claiming to be a vaccination exemption, and a box with a flashlight, some batteries, and maybe some K-rations, respectively. We don't know the prices, but if the vaccination exemption card is simply the card pictured and they are charging, say, $9.95 for it, it would be much easier for the seller to in fact deliver a small piece of printed cardboard as shown than risk lawsuits.
The second row are probably out and out scams. $100 gold bars and $1,000 bills? If they are charging $200 for $100 worth of gold, then it could be legitimate, but we have our doubts. $1,000 bills with Trump's picture on them? Maybe Monopoly money, but not U.S. currency. The non-woke insurance could technically be some kind of insurance, but we doubt any normal insurance company would want to be associated with this. It could either be an out-and-out scam (you send your money and never hear from them again) or the fine print in the policy says it has a $50,000 deductible and then pays 10% of the claim up to a maximum of $100, but only if you can prove that it wasn't your fault that the bear bit you.
The bottom row prey on people's health fears. Very likely they will actually send you a jar of (sugar) pills. When you complain to them that your macular degeneration is getting worse, you are not losing weight, or your teeth are falling out, there is a decent chance they will say you need the EXTRA-STRENGTH product, which fortunately they also sell. If the customer bites, he gets larger (sugar) pills.
You weren't really expecting ads for iPhones, now were you? Truth Social is an incredible filter. It makes sure the entire audience consists of dumb marks just waiting to be ripped off. Even with all their sophisticated demographic categories, Google and Facebook certainly can't offer an audience as pure as this.
It is possible that one of the reasons Donald Trump is hesitant to leave Truth Social and rejoin Twitter is that fleecing the rubes is very lucrative. The companies running these ads are no doubt paying through the nose to run the ads because there is nowhere else where they could find such a perfect (i.e., gullible) audience, and Trump knows this. It's always about the grift. (V)