Trump Media, the private crypto/social media/streaming network/finance company run by President Donald Trump and his family, just agreed to a new deal with Crypto.com to do a complicated scammy crypto thing.
It’s super cool that the president gets to (not) regulate crypto so he can line his own pockets.
Okay, you want to know how the crypto thing works? Fine. Here’s a decent explanation: “A (poorly operating) social-media company is raising money to go public via a backdoor route, asking investors to give it cash so it can then buy a mid-tier cryptocurrency that those investors could just buy on their own.”
Experts have advised that this whole thing is probably a bubble, but what does that matter when you’re the president? Trump and his family will walk away just fine whenever this crashes out, ready to come up with some other scheme.
Being able to cut multimillion- or multibillion-dollar private deals with the president of the United States is antithetical to democracy. It’s a vector for corruption, one where donors can purchase whatever Trump and his sons are currently pimping and, in doing so, get access to the presidency and favorable treatment.
And it’s certainly paying off. Trump has pardoned not just crypto bros but actual crypto exchanges and has entered into business partnerships with crypto bros who ponied up to buy millions of dollars of Trump’s dumb meme coin $TRUMP.
You’d think Trump would be busy, what with running the country into the ground and all, but instead, he’s got a family business that’s as low-rent as ever. Where it used to be Trump Steaks, Trump University, Trump Vodka, and Trump Airlines—a whole series of failed grifts—these days he’s lending his name to all things crypto.
Enter Trump Media, which seems to exist mostly to do these crypto deals and serve as the parent company to the president’s private social media network, Truth Social.
There’s also Trump Mobile, where you can get yourself a MAGA phone covered in fake gold and an American flag that ties your cellular service to the Trump crime family.
Then there’s Truth+—where you can stream Newsmax all day long—and Truth.Fi—Trump Media’s new financial services division.
Besides being spectacularly corrupt, this also results in the worst suck-ups imaginable. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent gushed about how papers like the Wall Street Journal were not used to someone “as economically sophisticated as President Trump.” And Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, not to be outdone, said his department would start issuing statistics on the blockchain because Trump is the crypto president.
Because no one has stopped Trump from monetizing the presidency, nothing is stopping him from monetizing the presidency. Alas, years of scams await!