Cashed the Check. What’s Wrong?
Trump made some money from crypto. Someone has to.
Obviously I am going to start this piece with this - Six years ago, Donald Trump called Bitcoin a scam. His word, not mine. He said he didn’t like it because it was one more currency competing with the dollar.
Last year, crypto paid him north of a billion dollars. That’s okay, people are allowed to change, opinions are allowed to change, I would be so thrilled if Trump changed all of his opinion about everything under the sun in one day. So, that’s not the worry here.
More than $1.2 billion in crypto income in a single year, and by some counts closer to $1.4 billion. Break it apart. Around $635 million from his memecoin. Roughly $588 million from selling World Liberty Financial tokens. Another $50 million or so parked in Bitcoin. Sixty years of casinos, towers, a steak line, and a game show, and none of it ever paid like twelve months of tokens.
But credit where it’s due. He found the profitable end of the scam. He’ll tell you he earned it. Asked whether the windfall sent a bad message to regular Americans, he shrugged that he made plenty of money before politics, that he’s had a great career, that “you saw the cash.” Then he thanked himself out loud without surprising a single life in the room. The career line is even true.
His net worth roughly doubled to $7.6 billion during his first term, and the reason was a coin he launched weeks before the election, attributed to a late conversion he says his 20-year-old son talked him into.
I feel like this should bother crypto people more than partisans.
For a memecoin, it is probably the first time anyone has run it at this scale. A good channel for anyone on earth to buy the token and send value straight to the president. There’s no name attached to it. Every rule ever built to stop foreign money from buying influence, disclosure law, foreign-agent registration, the old emoluments worry, rests on one assumption. You can trace the money back to a person. A crypto breaks that assumption at the root.
I mean, can we blame Trump? We created this to revolt against the central authority, then asked for regulation, clarity and acceptance from the central authority; the central authority gave it all, but also Trump did what he did. He just took the last logical step and made a pile of money out of nothing. In crypto, making money from nothing is adoption, or a fair launch. So when the president does the same thing, the industry doesn’t really get to clutch its pearls. He didn’t break crypto’s rules.
But crazy the second you step outside the crypto frame. Every modern president before him kept personal money and public power in separate rooms. Carter put his peanut business in a blind trust so nobody could say his decisions were for sale. The norm since the 1970s was plain. Divest, or hand it to a trustee you can’t direct, and keep your hands clean. Trump ignored that in his first term, kept his companies, and let foreign delegations book rooms in his Washington hotel while he ran the country. The memecoin is that same instinct.
Then what is the Constitution for? I checked, and it did try to stop this. The emoluments clauses were written to bar a president from taking payments from foreign states or pocketing extra money off the office, and a coin any government on earth can buy anonymously is close to the thing they were aimed at. The problem was that they were never given teeth.
The lawsuits from his first term got tossed on standing and mootness the moment he left office.
The federal conflict-of-interest statute, the law that we were counting on, the one which stops any other official from profiting off their own decisions, carves out one person. The president. He is exempt from the rule that binds every civil servant beneath him. Bribery law could still reach him, but only with a provable quid pro quo, and a token nobody can trace is designed to never leave that receipt. Now, disclosure law is how we know the number at all. It only asks him to report the money, not to stop taking it.
So if you look at it with a 4k glass like mine, we handed him the rail, and only started counting the cost once the big fair launch had a president’s name on it.
A state-linked Emirati vehicle put $500 million into World Liberty Financial, and a ban on advanced chip exports to the UAE came off soon after. Legal, and leaves no fingerprints… We asked for it.
The knock on crypto was that it had no use case. Nobody could name the thing normal people needed it for. Well, here’s one. Don’t complain. The “bullish” president you elected (because make crypto great again) is making the best use of where he is.
While he cashed out, outside investors in the family’s crypto reportedly sat on around ~$3 billion in real and paper losses. His media company is down 42 per cent this year and 75 percent across two. The faithful bought the story. He sold them the top.
SCAM. Every founder, every earnest thread arguing that this was infrastructure and not a con, was pushing against that single accusation. Then the most powerful person(after TSwift) in the country turned crypto into the highest-profile grift in America and did it in the open. Every critic who ever called this a corruption machine now has proof, a perfect exhibit.
Forget that; every politician now has the playbook sitting in front of them. Build attention, mint a token, let strangers pay you directly, and treat the holders as the marks.
We got the GENIUS Act. The bill for all of it was becoming the president’s personal ATM, with the reputational hit attached.
Presidents have monetised the office before, through speaking circuits and book advances and family firms that did suspiciously well. His claim that he was rich before politics is fair, and half the country finds the outrage selective. The same permissionless rail that lets a president collect anonymous money lets a dissident receive funds a hostile government can’t freeze. The rail itself is neutral. What bends it is the office standing behind the money, and how little of that money can ever be traced.
Still. Set the excuses next to the numbers, numbers win. A sitting president made more from a coin in one year than from a lifetime of building things, sold it to buyers who lost billions, and pocketed the difference.
6 years ago he called it all a scam, trying to replace dollar. He got one thing right. He found the winning side and asked you if you were tired of winning. Are we?
As one guy once said, please, please, please, Mr President, we are winning too much, we can’t take it anymore!!!
