Good news for anyone who hasn’t yet had the opportunity to shower money on President Donald Trump’s private companies: Trump Media & Technology Group is going to raise $2.5 billion to invest in bitcoin, giving big-money investors another chance to buy influence.
Announcing the investment, TMTG, the parent company of Truth Social, filed a report with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, stating that it already has subscription agreements from about 50 institutional investors.
But don’t expect the SEC, which Trump says is only subject to his authority and is not an independent regulator, to step in anytime soon.
Why is TMTG, which is ostensibly a media company, spending $2.5 billion on crypto? According to Devin Nunes, chair of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board, it’s because bitcoin is “an apex instrument of financial freedom” and will protect TMTG from “harassment and discrimination by financial institutions.”
TMTG isn’t the same as Trump’s other private crypto company, World Liberty Financial. That’s the one behind the spectacularly corrupt dinner, where people spent millions on Trump’s dumb memecoin to get access to the president. The dinner included crypto bro Justin Sun, who spent $40 million to attend because he owed Trump for dropping an SEC lawsuit against him.
When the Financial Times first reported on TMTG’s crypto deal, the company derided it as “fake news,” but then officially announced the deal the very next day. Though the Financial Times initially got the amount of the investment wrong, its reporting was otherwise spot on.
Meanwhile, Trump said that the United States will establish a bitcoin reserve, meaning that Trump’s private company is making major moves in the same bitcoin market in which the administration wants to spend taxpayer dollars.
Trump is already deep into crypto corruption. Besides dropping the SEC suit against Sun, he also pardoned the crypto bros who ran BitMEX, a cryptocurrency exchange that served as a great way to launder money. For good measure, he also pardoned the company of BitMEX, which wasn’t really a thing anyone thought a president could do.
But for anyone who might feel squeamish about getting into crypto, there are other ways to bribe the president.
Trevor Milton, founder of Nikola, a company that was supposed to make electric semitrucks but instead just took people’s money, got a pardon after donating about $920,000 to a Trump-affiliated political action committee during the 2024 election.
And when Paul Walczak’s mother attended the $1 million-per-head dinner at Mar-a-Lago in April, Walczak got a pardon a few weeks later. He had pleaded guilty to tax crimes after spending years withholding employment taxes from his employees, which he then used to live a lavish lifestyle, including buying a $2 million yacht.
Trump is openly selling access to the presidency, and he’s not going to stop anytime soon. His private companies function not just as a way to get money in his pocket, but also as a vehicle to influence presidential policy, just by writing the biggest check.
All of this is deeply corrupt, but since Congress has abandoned oversight of Trump, it’s unstoppable.