Three Coin Monte

This article appears in the June 2025 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.

When Javier Selgas, the CEO of Freight Technologies, Inc., or Fr8Tech, a publicly traded trucking logistics firm, was thinking about how he might influence policy in President Donald Trump’s second administration, he landed on a novel mechanism: buying $20 million worth of $TRUMP tokens, the cryptocurrency meme coin (colloquially known as a “shitcoin”) Trump had released the day before inauguration weekend.

“We believe that the addition of the Official Trump tokens are an excellent way to diversify our crypto treasury, and also an effective way to advocate for fair, balanced, and free trade between Mexico and the US,” said Selgas in a press release. The company also disclosed the purchase in Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings, noting that it took out $20 million in debt to buy the tokens, whose value can fluctuate wildly. (In a stricter economic sense, meme coins like $TRUMP are considered to have no inherent value, their price propped up by hype, the hopeful delusions of speculators, and market manipulation. So in that sense, Fr8Tech was borrowing $20 million for the financial equivalent of air.)

But the motives of using corporate treasuries and borrowing capacity for a shitcoin were perfectly clear. Twenty million dollars may be enough to vault Selgas to the top of the leaderboard of owners of $TRUMP, which would land him an audience with the president, who recently announced that the top 220 on the leaderboard would be invited to a presidential dinner.

Even some Democrats have begun calling it for what it is: the biggest financial scandal to ever hit the presidency.

If the president, with the backing of the Supreme Court, hadn’t claimed broad immunity for himself, the $TRUMP dinner might be considered an unparalleled form of potentially illegal influence peddling. Instead, it’s another lucrative way the president has found to monetize his office. And even if it were still illegal—which it may well be—the president’s team of regulators and law enforcers are highly unlikely to see it that way.

With a pro-crypto regulatory regime being constructed and the old financial guardrails mostly dismantled, everyone has adjusted to the new reality. Corporations and even some unions have started adding crypto tokens to their balance sheets, with ostensibly sober-minded CFOs treating it as a reasonable financial diversification strategy. The pacesetter for this trend is MicroStrategy, once a reasonably successful enterprise software company that now owns about 1 in every 40 Bitcoins in existence, whose CEO has become a Bitcoin celebrity, constantly hosting events for executives to learn about adding Bitcoin to their company portfolios. (Selling to one’s peers is a core strategy of any multilevel marketing scheme, which Bitcoin in some ways resembles.)

These are the increasingly hallucinatory economics of crypto-laden corporate balance sheets, which ring out with risk and contradictions. But buying tokens from the president of the United States is another innovation entirely, a form of corruption so obvious that even some frontline Democrats have begun calling it for what it is: the biggest financial scandal to ever hit the presidency.

What Freight Technologies did was perhaps a sensible act of self-interest. Since Trump introduced his meme coin, many observers (including me) have warned that it is an unprecedented vehicle for personal enrichment and potentially for bribery. It doesn’t even require Trump’s explicit agreement. The immediate effect of buying $20 million in crypto tokens issued by the president is to boost their value, directly boosting the fortunes of Team Trump, since Trump-connected wallets control 80 percent of the $TRUMP token supply. A CEO or leader of an autocratic state can simply buy up millions in $TRUMP tokens from an exchange and then alert someone on Trump’s side, or even just announce publicly with the expectation that someone in Trump’s orbit will hear it, that they’ve put money in his pocket.

Trump and his investors could even pump the token together. If I tell Trump’s crypto company that I intend to buy $50 million of $TRUMP, they could take advantage of the brief rise in token price that’s sure to follow. Indeed, this is the intention anytime Trump posts on social media about his token, and it was the intention anytime Elon Musk posted about DOGE (back when it was just a meme coin, rather than a vehicle for an administrative coup). It’s a standard part of the pump-and-dump mechanics underlying all meme coins, being done here on a larger, Trumpian scale.

A beneficiary of at least three separate crypto businesses, Trump has an uncanny knack for remembering everything that anyone has ever done for him or to him, with an eye toward meting out reward or punishment in exchange. The $TRUMP token, and crypto in general, has become the perfect medium for that exchange. And the casual brazenness by which powerful people are playing this game has become the defining characteristic of the second Trump term.

THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION has dismantled crypto crime task forces at the SEC, Department of Justice, and across the government. The administration moved quickly to end numerous regulatory investigations of crypto companies and tycoons, including top campaign donors like Coinbase and Ripple. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche issued crypto-related legal guidance calling for an end to “regulation by prosecution,” echoing language used by the crypto industry when it complained about the Biden administration’s “regulation by enforcement.” The Blanche memo also seemed designed to end two prominent criminal prosecutions into developers of “crypto mixers” that obfuscate the trail of crypto, facilitating billions of dollars in money laundering by North Korean hackers and other criminals.

The White House has said that it will not enforce the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the law that bans bribery of foreign officials. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and Federal Reserve revoked several pieces of guidance on banks’ crypto activities, breaking down the firewall between the crypto sector and the banking sector, precisely what protected the broader economy during the series of crypto meltdowns in 2022, culminating in Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX collapse. Now, the crypto industry is likely to have access to all the mainstream financing it wants—with the attendant potential for contagion to spread to mainstream markets when crypto crashes again.

Taken together, these measures open the door for almost limitless corruption, just as President Trump’s crypto ventures prepare to take in billions of dollars from foreign investors.

After receiving more than $200 million in support from the crypto industry in the 2024 election cycle, Trump isn’t just clearing the regulatory runway for industry takeoff. Trump and his family have jumped into the deep end of the crypto business, becoming one of the country’s leading purveyors of meme coins, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and other digital tchotchkes while partnering with some of the industry’s sketchiest players. Even Trump’s cult-of-personality Truth Social microblogging website is gearing up to release something called Truth.Fi, a fintech investment platform that is partnering with Crypto.com, an exchange that just so happened to have a pending SEC investigation dropped just three days after the announcement of the partnership.

As the writer Molly White has chronicled, the Trump family’s crypto interests extend from tokens to Bitcoin mining to lending products and even a crypto game in the mold of Monopoly. The normally staid Wall Street Journal aptly summarized the harrowing state of play: “The crypto tycoons that previous administrations pursued for helping the U.S. government’s foes move their funds—Russian sanctions evaders, Islamic terrorist groups, Mexican drug cartels, global fraud rings—are now doing business with the president and members of his inner circle.”

These ventures are divided between a number of companies, including some semi-obscure LLCs: Trump Media, World Liberty Financial, CIC Digital, Fight Fight Fight LLC, DT Marks DEFI LLC, and so on. While The New York Times and other prominent outlets have begun devoting more resources to chronicling Trump’s crypto operation, there is no comprehensive account of how many companies he has, where they’re located, who the investors are, what deals he’s making, or who’s purchasing his tokens. No blockchain analytics firm—which tend to cater to a conflicted mix of corporate, government, and gray-market clients—has issued a substantive report on the full scope of Trump’s crypto dealings. It should have been an automatic investigation for Congress and for multiple inspectors general, but Democrats have wallowed in their minority status while Trump illegally fired 18 IGs during his first week in office.

While Trump builds out this lucrative operation, he and his crypto and tech industry advisers have been sweeping aside consumer protection regulations and legal barriers that limited crypto’s access to mainstream banking. “This [crypto] empire is set to profit precisely because Trump is gutting the regulations that would normally constrain it—brazen self-dealing that dwarfs even the unchecked emoluments violations of his first term,” wrote White.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, for instance, has more than 8,000 registered consumer complaints about Coinbase, America’s leading crypto exchange and a popular market for speculators to gamble on the $TRUMP token. In February, when Elon Musk and DOGE began gutting the CFPB, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong celebrated on X, writing: “The CFPB is unconstitutional on the face of it. And even if it wasn’t, it should be deleted as we already have DOJ to prosecute fraud, and (many) other financial services regulators. It’s an activist organization that has done enormous harm to the country.”

As the CFPB and other institutions designed to contain finance’s worst excesses and prosecute fraudsters are battered into submission, there is nothing stopping Trump from merging his personal business with foreign policy. For example, according to some reports, Trump is already pushing his tokens on foreign governments via Steve Witkoff, the president’s diplomatic envoy to the Middle East. Witkoff and his son Zach are co-founders of World Liberty Financial, a platform that Trump has a controlling 60 percent stake in and the title of chief crypto advocate. World Liberty Financial offers a digital token called $WLFI; the elder Witkoff has publicly promoted the venture, and apparently he is doing the same in private. “Steve Witkoff is calling every sovereign government and saying, ‘You need to support this coin if you want to be in good standing with Trump,’” a venture capitalist who advises the Trump administration told Business Insider.

We have already seen the kind of quid pro quo that can result from a prominent person doing business with Trump’s crypto companies. After Trump was elected in November 2024, Chinese businessman Justin Sun bought $75 million worth of $WLFI tokens from World Liberty Financial. After Sun made his purchases, the company publicly celebrated his involvement as an investor, and the SEC froze its fraud investigation into Sun.

In all, World Liberty Financial has sold at least $550 million worth of its tokens, which can’t yet be traded or moved off its platform. According to WLF’s website, the Trump family receives 75 percent of all proceeds from token sales, after certain expenses are covered.

Trump has created a permission structure for crypto businesses to push whatever limits might remain.

After the SEC quashed its fraud investigation into Sun, The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg soon reported that Changpeng Zhao, or CZ, the co-founder of Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, who spent four months in federal prison for his company’s money-laundering violations, wanted to strike a similar agreement as Sun did. Steve Witkoff led some of the negotiations between the two sides, according to the Journal. The alleged pardon was reportedly going to be accompanied by a Trump investment in Binance’s U.S. operations, which had also been subject to regulatory investigation. Just a year earlier, Binance had agreed to pay a $4.3 billion fine for allowing money laundering on its platform, the largest corporate fine in U.S. history.

Zhao denied the substance of the reports but later said that he did in fact request a pardon. “I was like, well, if they’re writing this article, I might as well just officially apply, right?” Zhao told an interviewer. (After going to prison, Zhao stepped down as CEO while retaining his ownership share. Since his release and return to his home in Dubai, he has appeared to still be involved with Binance in a major capacity, representing it at public events.)

Trump and Binance show every sign of diving into business together. As Congress works toward codifying stablecoins into law—and giving non-bank corporations and Big Tech firms the ability to issue their own digital currencies—Donald Trump has already gone ahead and created his own as part of a project that involves Binance. Called USD1, the token is issued by World Liberty Financial, and like all stablecoins, it’s supposed to remain at a constant value, pegged to the U.S. dollar. (Stablecoins sometimes lose their peg, which is when calamity can strike.)

USD1 is a digital dollar—a counterfeit dollar, perhaps, depending on one’s legal interpretation. Certainly, the identification of an essentially fictitious dollar-like digital currency with the U.S. president must be good for business. According to a State Democracy Defenders Fund report, “By designating its stablecoin ‘USD1,’ WLFI has largely appropriated the internationally recognized code used for trading U.S. dollars in the foreign currency market—that is ‘USD’. As a result, the USD1 designation may lead potential investors to mistakenly believe they are purchasing a digital asset that is backed by the full faith and credit of the United States.”

USD1 is already off to a running start. MGX, an Abu Dhabi investment fund, is purchasing $2 billion worth of USD1 tokens to use for an investment in Binance, whose unofficial headquarters is in the United Arab Emirates. The deal was announced by Zach Witkoff at the TOKEN2049 conference in Dubai, where Eric Trump appeared alongside Justin Sun.

“It’s one of the more successful things we’ve ever done,” Eric Trump told The New York Times, speaking about World Liberty Financial.

IN BOTH A LEGAL SENSE and by his own example, Trump has created a permission structure for crypto businesses to push whatever limits might remain. Crypto partisans oversee the SEC and the Justice Department. Paul Atkins, the new SEC chair, was the CEO of a consulting firm with several crypto clients whose first public appearance as chair was at a crypto roundtable where he vowed to throw out rules on digital assets imposed by his predecessor, even without congressional guidance. The attorney general is Pam Bondi; her brother Brad has advised multiple DeFi and other crypto projects for years, according to published reports. Even if one does run afoul of the law, there are options. Trevor Milton, former CEO of an electric truck company, was convicted of securities fraud and sentenced to four years in prison in 2022. (He was represented by Marc Mukasey, who had previously represented the Trump Organization.) After Milton and his wife made $1.8 million in pro-Trump political donations, he was pardoned by the president in March.

Those who don’t need pardons know well that enforcement of the vast array of exploitation facilitated by crypto seems likely to plummet. The prominent crypto figure and Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino, who almost certainly would not have attempted to enter the United States under the previous administration given the federal criminal investigation reportedly trailing him, has appeared with politicians in D.C., on conference panels, and at the New York Stock Exchange, despite his company being banned from doing business in New York state, a condition of an $18.5 million settlement that Tether reached in 2021 with state Attorney General Letitia James related to the cover-up of $850 million in missing company funds. (Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick was Tether’s primary U.S. banker and business partner when he was CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald. The portfolio at Cantor Fitzgerald has since been passed to Lutnick’s son.)

Above all, Trump’s crypto policies—which unite self-dealing and political favoritism toward a single industry to a unique degree—represent a scam upon the American people. Trump’s legal and regulatory moves will result in fewer prosecutions of financial criminals, fewer fines paid, and less attention from authorities on the plague of financial scams that rob Americans of billions of dollars per year, like pig butchering, the text-based scheme that lures in unsuspecting people to make worthless crypto investments. Fewer shitcoin dealers will be investigated for issuing unlicensed securities or defrauding customers, because the president is the country’s leading shitcoiner. Fewer stablecoins will be questioned about the assets backing their offerings, because the president has a stablecoin. Fewer crypto game magnates will face regulatory scrutiny for their exploitative, pyramid-scheme-like business models, because the president has a crypto game. And nobody will raise a peep about whether crypto tokens are unregistered securities, as long as the president is peddling unregistered securities.

By pardoning and commuting the sentences of crypto executives and convicted fraudsters like Ozy Media CEO Carlos Watson, Trump has signaled to major financial criminals that they have carte blanche, as long as they plan to pay up later. Lawyers and Trump-connected operatives are offering pardon consulting services for a minimum buy-in of $1 million, according to Bloomberg.

There are huge material costs to pardoning fraudsters and financial malefactors, in terms of individual losses, harm to legitimate businesses, and lost fines and restitution that were supposed to go to victims and the state. “In total, Donald Trump has granted pardons that have wiped out over $1 billion in debts owed by wealthy Americans who have committed fraud and broken the law,” said Liz Oyer, a former pardon attorney at the Department of Justice. It also serves to undermine any remaining faith the public might have that the government can hold white-collar criminals to account.

Fraud is a social crime, where people leverage the trust of those around them, and its growth erodes the social fabric. Trump-related companies’ meme coin pump-and-dump has already leveraged his supporters’ belief in him to scam them out of hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars. According to a recent analysis published by CNBC, “about 764,000 [crypto] wallets that purchased President Donald Trump’s $TRUMP meme coin have lost money on the investment.” At the same time, 58 wallets made a combined $1.1 billion in profit, likely because they were controlled by insiders. The tokens generated at least $324 million in trading fees, some chunk of which went to the Trump family.

“THE RISK OF POLITICIAN COINS comes from the fact that they are such a perfect bribery vehicle,” wrote Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of the Ethereum cryptocurrency, less than a week after the introduction of $TRUMP. “If a politician issues a coin, you do not even need to send *them* any coins to give them money. Instead, you just buy and hold the coin, and this increases the value of their holdings passively.”

Buterin added that there was “deniability” in this scheme—a person could claim they were buying the coin to gamble, not to enrich the politician behind it. “You can even hold the coin privately, and show that you are holding it to whoever you need to show.”

“This all very risky to democracy,” wrote Buterin. “I recommend politicians do not go down this path.”

They haven’t listened. Donald Trump may be the chief political purveyor of cryptocurrencies, but he’s being closely watched by his Republican allies, Argentina President Javier Milei, Central African Republic President Faustin-Archange Touadéra, and a host of other global politicians wondering how they might emulate his example.

Democratic opposition to Trump’s crypto ventures has been scattered and exceedingly late in coming. Speaking at a town hall about Trump’s dinner invite for token-holders, Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) said, “There is no doubt that this president’s conduct has already exceeded any prior standard for impeachment.” Earlier this year, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) and Rep. Sam Liccardo (D-CA) introduced the Modern Emoluments and Malfeasance Enforcement (or MEME) Act, which bans the president and members of Congress from selling their own crypto tokens. (A separate but similar bill called the End Crypto Corruption Act was introduced around the same time.)

“It’s essentially a way for any corporate CEO, any Saudi prince, any foreign oligarch who has business before the Trump administration, to send Trump money privately, secretly, and then whisper to the Trump administration about how much money they’ve sent and the favor that they need,” said Murphy in an announcement.

Sen. Murphy is correct, but the phenomenon he worries about is already happening. And if the MEME Act or the End Crypto Corruption Act passes, who would enforce it? Several Democrats are apparently content to collaborate in blessing this interlocking set of grifts, while pretending to take them on. But even if they stood strong in opposition, as long as Trump is president, the crypto industry will still likely get the market access and personalized rulemaking it desires.

With the president signing an executive order establishing a “strategic digital asset reserve,” the federal government is now exploring ways to acquire and hold more Bitcoin—an interesting thing to do in the same month that Trump’s sons announced an investment in a Bitcoin mining company. A similar effort seeks to put together a reserve of select tokens under the management of crypto and AI czar David Sacks, who has crypto industry investments through his VC firm Craft Ventures. One of the tokens included would be Solana, which has investments from Trumpworld figures like Marc Andreessen’s a16z and whose blockchain powers the $TRUMP and $MELANIA shitcoins. With a strategic crypto reserve, the financial interests of the president, his family, a powerful group of donors, and a new profit-seeking arm of the federal government manage to converge, a turducken of corruption.

We’ve never seen anything like it, but it was also entirely foreseeable—the natural outcome for an industry whose survival has depended on aggressive regulatory arbitrage and political influence campaigns. The problem for the American people is that “the crypto president,” as Trump now calls himself, is overwhelmingly incentivized to continue pumping a substance-free digital-asset bubble that will inevitably pop. Until that happens, the crypto industry will get more access to mainstream banking and financing, creating more crypto-based exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and other risky financial products that in turn will be bought up by retirement funds, unions, and institutional investors. And when it all blows up, we will struggle to explain to our friends and family how shitcoin-based ETFs became the credit default swaps of the latest elite-driven financial crisis.