Trump's Crypto Corruption, Explained
Is crypto always bad?
Not necessarily. There’s Krypto the Superdog. Such a good boy!
And then there’s crypto-zoology. I’m sure searching for Bigfoot has its charms.
What about crypto-currency?
Some argue that it has value, but crypto has yet to find significant uses that don’t involve some sort of criminal activity. The crypto industry itself has been racked by theft and scams. Worse yet, crypto poses real dangers to our democracy and the economy.
Here are three things you must know.
#1 Trump’s crypto corruption is off the charts
In his first term, Trump profited off the presidency in ways that would have shocked even his most corrupt predecessors. But crypto makes it even easier for individuals and foreign nations to bribe him. Crypto’s murky anonymity makes following the money almost as hard as tracking down the Loch Ness Monster.
Just four days before early voting started in 2024, Trump and his sons launched the crypto firm, World Liberty Financial. The New York Times said: “It’s highly unusual for a presidential candidate to embark on a new business just weeks before Election Day.”
Ya think?
But as soon as Trump won, money started pouring in.
And then just days before returning to office, Trump launched a separate crypto scheme, selling TRUMP and MELANIA memecoins. Memecoins are a type of cryptocurrency based on an image or online joke.
But this is no joke: The Trump family has made about $3 billion from crypto so far — with many purchases by foreign buyers. Forbes now estimates that over half of Trump’s entire net worth is crypto-based.
And with Trump acting as both the President of the United States and as his own crypto brand ambassador, it’s hard to tell which job he’s doing at any given moment.
Around the time that Trump made a state visit to the United Arab Emirates, a UAE firm announced it would buy $2 billion of Trump’s World Liberty Financial currency.
Do Trump crypto buyers get presidential favors in return? Well, one US company said it explicitly purchased $2 million of Trump’s memecoins to influence trade policy.
And then there’s Chinese billionaire Justin Sun. You might have heard of him because he spent $6.2 million buying an avant garde art installation that was a banana duct taped to a wall — which he then ate.
What you might not have not heard was that Sun was charged with crypto-related fraud. But after Trump was elected, Sun invested more than $115 million into various Trump crypto products.
Guess what happened next? Trump’s SEC suddenly stopped prosecuting Sun. How curious and bizarre!
Trump’s SEC also abandoned a lawsuit against Binance, a crypto exchange that had previously pled guilty to money laundering.
When did this happen? Just days after Binance started listing a Trump cryptocurrency on its marketplace.
Why do you suppose they dropped these cases? I guess like the Jersey Devil or the chupa-cabra, those are just mysteries we’ll never unravel.
But there’s more.
The second thing you must know is that Crypto is trying to buy our government
The crypto lobby spent more than $195 million on the 2024 election. And they seem to be getting their money’s worth. Within his first six weeks in office, Trump called for a “Crypto Strategic Reserve”— a government backed stockpile of crypto assets, sort of like our oil reserve, but completely pointless. That announcement made crypto prices shoot up higher than the supposed flying mothman.
Trump’s pro-crypto SEC chair, Paul Atkins is heavily invested in crypto himself. He’s lifting financial guardrails in ways that will make it easier for crypto firms (like the Trumps’) to spread into new markets.
Trump’s Justice Department even scrapped the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team, giving a greenlight to all kinds of crypto crime, even though Americans lost $9.3 billion in crypto scams in 2024.
Crypto also spent big on House and Senate races, on both Republicans and Democrats. And guess what?
The Senate passed the so-called GENIUS Act — a regulatory bill that the crypto industry lobbied for. Eighteen Democrats joined with nearly all Republicans to vote yes.
The bill gives a stamp of legitimacy to so-called “stablecoins,” a type of currency that Trump’s World Liberty Financial makes and sells. Stablecoins claim to be more stable because they’re supposedly tied to the value of other assets that are held as collateral — like the dollar or Treasury securities. But we already saw one collapse just a couple years ago, wiping out some investors’ life savings.
And here’s a fun detail. While the bill appropriately bans members of Congress and their families from profiting off stablecoins, it places no such restrictions on the president.
But the most dangerous part of the GENIUS Act is how it allows crypto to reach its kraken-like tentacles into mainstream financial systems. That brings us to:
And lastly… Crypto could tank the economy
The GENIUS Act opens the door to institutions investing more heavily in crypto. It would even let banks and big corporations, like Walmart, Amazon, or Facebook, launch their own digital currencies — potentially thousands of them — all with little oversight.
Trump has also opened the door to letting retirement plan administrators invest 401(k) funds in crypto. That could put your savings at risk even if you never buy any cryptocurrencies.
As we saw during the 2008 financial meltdown, the more the economy becomes entwined with volatile and speculative investments, like crypto, the greater the risk to all of us. The failure of risky bets can have a domino effect.
If a single cryptocurrency began to tank (as they have done in the past), investors would likely rush to sell off crypto to get their real money back. This could lead to massive bank runs.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has predicted that under the GENIUS Act, crypto firms could end up holding more than $2 trillion in U.S. treasury bills as collateral. If they had to suddenly liquidate those assets to cover a bank run, the value of U.S. securities could plummet, triggering a global financial crisis.
But at least the Trumps are getting rich, right?
To summarize, crypto has shown no redeeming social value, and it poses huge dangers to our democracy and our economy.
I don’t believe that Bigfoot, Nessie, or the Dover Demon are real (sorry), but the dangers of crypto definitely are.
And we will need a lot more than a dog with superpowers to protect us from them.
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