I think before the convict took it over, it was a legit stock.

Not really. The current publicly-traded company began as a SPAC (Special Purpose Acquisition Company) called Digital World Acquisitions Co. (DWAC). Basically, SPACs are just empty placeholder companies that exist solely to bring some other company public via merger. A SPAC has no business or operations - it's just a public corporation with nothing but cash, so that a private company can merge with it and thus become a public company without doing an IPO or listing.

Within a month after DWAC was formed in 2021, it announced that it was going to merge with Trump's newly-announced Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG) - which Trump created as the parent company of Truth Social.

As is common, the SPAC traded at par value (the value of the cash) until the deal was announced. That's when it skyrocketed.

So there was never really a time when this was anything but a Trump company. TMTG (which is actually the name of DJT) has always been controlled by Trump, and DWAC was always nothing more than a "wrapper" for TMTG from the time the merger was announced.