Having long-since moved on to other scams in the crypto, prediction betting, and wireless industries, Donald Trump Jr may or may not even be aware that PublicSquare – the revolutionary “anti-woke” marketplace he helped launch in 2023 and pitched as competitor to Amazon – has seen its stock price crash by 99 percent, lost $160 million, and per the Wall Street Journal is “struggling.”
Per the Journal, PublicSquare execs themselves admit that such a proposition of being the one-stop shop for products with patriotic branding and fulfilled by companies led by racists and far right freaks only really had a chance as long as the Orange God Emperor himself was in a mutually-hostile relationship with the real tech companies. Look no further than Amazon’s incineration of $75 million for the Melania “documentary” as a milestone on PublicSquare’s road to ruin. But that nod at the dependence on their Lord and Savior’s whims still reads as an excuse given the paucity of MAGA “alternatives” to mainstream consumer brands that were launched over the last decade under the explicit imprimatur of that appeal and then became legitimately successful in their own right.
There’s Jeremy’s Razors, launched in 2022 by DailyWire cofounder Jeremy Boering as competitor to Harry’s and EveryLife, an anti-abortion diaper brand founded as a subsidiary marque of PublicSquare and is about to be sold off. That’s the list of post-2016 launches of unquestionably successful MAGA-linked consumer brands. Patriot Mobile and Black Rifle Coffee Company, founded in 2012 and 2014, respectively, later saw major growth during the Trump era by tying themselves to the whole right wing media grifter ecosystem. MyPillow, founded in 2009, saw its fortunes go the other way for precisely the same reason. A number of smaller niche post-2016 brands like Ultra Right Beer and American Beauty cosmetics plod along with their actual viability unclear. The same can’t be said of overhyped and either nearly-dead or already-failed Freedom Phone, GETTR, Parler, GloriFi, Bentkey/the Daily Wire’s other entertainment content, and – of course – PublicSquare.
This list of course excludes the World Liberty Financial crypto rug pull and Trump Mobile because those are still viable money laundering channels if not actual businesses. Not sure if MyPillow should even have been included because had Mike Lindell just gone only half as fucking crazy as he did in 2020 you could probably keep it more firmly on the list with Patriot Mobile and Black Rifle.
The through-line being that it is absolutely possible to build and maintain a solid following in MAGAmerica for your products but services and platforms are tougher – look no further than the fact that the two most unqualified successes are yoked to other failures – and rather than at least try to build confidently and quietly, the biggest failures splashed in with a shit ton of hype, much to the joy of the libs anticipating the inevitable failures from day one. PublicSquare was a stupid idea well before Don Jr’s corrupt slob of a dad helped seal its fate with his mutually parasitic partnerships with the real tech industry. The Wall Street Journal simply reminded readers it used to kind of exist.