Art/illustration via CryptoSlate. Combined content may be partially AI-generated.
Art/illustration via CryptoSlate. Combined content may be partially AI-generated.
Trump's crypto scam is so complicated that you can barely wrap your mind around it, and yet it’s so simple, not even Trump and his two dullard sons could fuck it up.
Republished with permission from Lucian K. Truscott IV
Let’s say you and I and every bank robber serving time in federal prison and every con artist behind bars for fleecing suckers out of their life savings and every Bernie Madoff-style-Ponzi schemer and every Mafia don who ever blackmailed a bodega owner or ran a crooked dice game—let’s say we all got together in a room and tried to come up with a brand new scam to rip people off and separate people from their money…and get away with it free and clear.
I’m here to tell you that even with all that criminal talent, we couldn’t come up with a masterpiece of thievery that compares to what Donald Trump and his family are running right now, today, out of the White House. Our President, the one 77 million of our fellow citizens voted for and put in the Oval Office for another four years, the one who told the Atlantic earlier this week that “I run the world,” has decided that he will spend his time in office fleecing that world of every dollar and nickel and dime he can get, and he’s doing it with crypto.
It’s so complicated that you can barely wrap your mind around it, and yet it’s so simple, not even Trump and his two dullard sons could fuck it up.
The New York Times published a story on Tuesday that makes a brave attempt at explaining how they’re doing it: Secret Deals, Foreign Investments, Presidential Policy Changes: The Rise of Trump’s Crypto Firm. It’s written by three of the Times’ top investigative reporters, and it’s thick with details of shady foreign investors from dark corners of the money-world like Abu Dubai and the Cayman Islands and Hong Kong, and the reporters do their best to describe the whacko-crypto-Rube-Goldbergo thing called “World Liberty Financial” the Trump family has established to run their scam, and it’s so impenetrable, I guarantee your eyes will cross and then roll back into your head as you try to make sense of it.
This is what the New York Times is so good at: they get out there and make a record of who’s involved and how many times they’ve been indicted and how much time they’ve done in prison. Then they make the connections between the three card monte pasts of the crypto scammers and the Trump family in the White House, with Eric and Don Jr. flying around the world to Pakistan and the Emirates and taking meetings with Silicon Valley zillionaires and coming up with new scams like the pay-to-play crypto dinner Trump is planning to put on at one of his golf clubs for anyone…and I mean anyone…who spends some of their millions on a fucking meme coin called “$TRUMP” in order to be on the guest list.
The Times reports that World Liberty Financial—in reality, behind a very, very thin corporate veil, Donald Trump himself—made $550 million selling its first digital token, “$WLFI,” to a bunch of crypto scammers who recently settled cases brought against them by the Securities and Exchange Commission. At least one scammer, Justin Sun, the guy who bought the banana stuck to a wall with duct tape for $6 million, had his SEC case dropped, right after—you guessed it—he spent $75 million buying $WLFI “coins.”
And here’s the beauty part. I’m going to do my best to describe the scam the Times calls “partnerships” between the Trump company, World Liberty Financial, and other crypto firms. Here it is, in all its glory, and you tell me if this doesn’t sound like a crypto protection racket.
The smaller crypto outfits agree to buy, say, $20 million to $30 million of World Liberty’s “coins” like $WLFI. The Trump company then agrees to buy a smaller amount of their crypto currency. This “investment” of World Liberty in the smaller crypto firms is supposed to give them credibility in the world of crypto, and for this generous endorsement, the Trump company gets to keep the difference between what the little guys spent on $WLFI, and what the Trumps spent on the little guys’ coins, amounting, according to the Times, to as much as a 20 percent premium. All of the specific details like names of the crypto firms and amounts they “invested” is kept confidential, so nobody in the greater world of crypto can discover how badly they’ve been taken to the cleaners.
Got that? You give me a quarter, all your lunch money, and not only do I promise not to beat the shit out of you with the SEC and DOJ and FTC and all the other regulatory and prosecutorial departments I control, I’ll even give you two dimes back and not tell anybody how I held you up.
And oh, by the way, buy a few million of my worthless crypto “coins”—of which I already own 80 percent of the world’s entire stock—and I’ll feed you some rubber chicken at my New Jersey golf club and give you a tour of the White House after hours.
Wow, what a deal.
There are other scams, because of course there are. Trump pardoned one guy who got convicted of violating banking laws with his crypto business. In return, he permitted the Trump company to buy some of his crypto currency at bargain basement prices. And then Trump turned around and announced the U.S. government will put its power and prestige behind a so-called “crypto reserve” that will store up a bunch of crypto currency just like it stores oil in “oil reserves” against a future shortage of that precious resource, and you’ll never guess whose crypto currency the U.S. government has chosen as one of the currencies it will store in its reserves, along with the grandfather of all crypto, Bitcoin. Yep. The crypto currency that Trump bought from the guy he pardoned, the value of which has now shot straight up like a rocket.
Remember how corrupt we thought Spiro Agnew was when it was revealed that after being elected Vice President, he continued to take cash from contractors he had extorted when he was governor of Maryland? Just the image of the Vice President reaching across his desk and physically accepting a paper bag full of twenty-dollar bills was enough to get him to resign in return for a plea bargain on a tax evasion charge that gave him no jail time.
How much do you figure Donald Trump will scam in crypto by the time he leaves office? The Times didn’t attempt an estimate of the amount he has made so far, but just running through the hundreds of millions and tens of millions mentioned in their story, along with the tens of millions in the stories that have been written about the pay-to-play golf club crypto dinner, he’s approaching a billion dollar take…after just 100 days.
It’s no wonder he doesn’t give a shit about the damage to the world’s economy his tariffs have done. The only economy he cares about is the blue-smoke-and-mirrors illusion of crypto. Like his hair, nobody but him knows how much of it is real, or how the elaborate scam is held together, but it got him elected, and it’s going to make him richer than he ever dreamed.
Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist and screenwriter. He has covered stories such as Watergate, the Stonewall riots and wars in Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels and several unsuccessful motion pictures. He has three children, lives in rural Pennsylvania and spends his time Worrying About the State of Our Nation and madly scribbling in a so-far fruitless attempt to Make Things Better.
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