Trump’s Biggest Grift Yet

Written By Leeja Miller

Further Reading:

 

Burned By Billionaires by Chuck Collins

 

Sources:

Transcript:

You’re tuned in to Why, America? I’m Leeja Miller. “Trump-backed American Bitcoin mining firm to start trading on Nasdaq today” was the headline I read this morning LONG before I had had enough coffee to process what the fuck THAT means. So today we’re unpacking the Trump family crypto grift, as well as all the other ways he’s enriched himself from his political position, and why that SHOULDN’T be legal, and yet it is. And Trump, though he is doing it at an unprecedented scale, is certainly not the first politician to personally enrich themself while holding office. We’ll discuss efforts to ban our elected officials from trading stocks in the companies they directly regulate, and Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s $2 million dollar book deal in which, for a fee, she finally lays out why she ACTUALLY overturned Roe vs. Wade, an explanation she failed to give from the bench. Let’s get into it.

Here’s today’s thesis: Maybe politicians and Supreme Court justices would be a lot more willing to retire if they were banned from enriching themselves off book deals and insider trading and crypto and all the other shady ways they make side money while simultaneously holding public office or sitting on the bench. And you know I’m right. And that’s how you know it’s a fucking grift. They are clinging desperately to public office BECAUSE they can make more money that way. And listen, that’s not to say you shouldn’t be able to enrich yourself AFTER you hold public office. I don’t give two shits if Obama or Bush or the Clintons want to write books and do speaking tours. Because they are not actively and directly involved in the day to day workings of my government anymore. They, too, deserve freedom of speech, I GUESS. But when you get elected to public office, or accept the nomination to serve on the bench, that should come with an expectation that, for the good of the republic, some of your rights are curbed. It already does, frankly. You have a higher burden to prove defamation than the average person, to protect public debate from frivolous lawsuits brought by powerful people. You are required to disclose your personal finances, to a certain extent. There are things you are expected to give up that the average person does not, in order to be given political power. Because, and I cannot stress this enough, they work. For us. The entire underpinning of the whole idea of how this democratic republic was formed was based on consent of the governed. If we do not consent to being governed this way by these people, they do not legitimately govern us anymore. And I say that not because it’s true but to illustrate how far we’ve strayed from the ethos upon which this country was founded. At least theoretically. It was infected from the start with slavery and misogyny, so it has never truly lived up to its ideals, but up until about a decade ago, we had slowly made progress towards fulfilling those ideals. So I wanted to lay that out right at the beginning, that the entire underpinning of a democracy, and yes we are supposed to be one, is that the government’s legitimacy, the right of politicians to have power, is derived from the consent of the governed. Without our consent, state power is not justified or lawful. I wanted to lay that out right at the beginning so you can kind of keep that top of mind as I unravel all the ways these politicians and political appointees are enriching themselves with abandon on the back of our consent, which many of us did not freely give.

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On the campaign trail and during his presidency, Trump has repeatedly promised to make the United States the “crypto capital of the planet.” Meanwhile, his sons continue to expand the crypto-based empire attached to the Trump family name. Oh but no conflict of interest to see here!! It’s all managed by Trump’s CHILDREN, not Donald Trump himself, under the name Trump, which is also the name of the President, by the direct descendants of the President, but there’s absolutely nothing to see here. According to ethics experts, the President of the United States is exempted from conflict of interest laws because he oversees so many different things as president that it wouldn’t be possible to completely rid him of ALL conflicts of interests. As with so many systems in the day to day functioning of our government, the entire conflict of interest ethics issue when it comes to the presidency relies on a president’s good-faith effort to separate his personal interests from the country’s when he takes office. For most of the last 250 years, we had an electorate that was, apparently, somewhat capable of picking a president whose ethics aligned with this ethos, who could be trusted to do things in good faith. Unfortunately, just trusting politicians to act in good faith is actually bad. Because there are a LOT of politicians who are in it for the clout and the power, and now thanks to the Supreme Court the president is literally above the law and the electorate chose a literal convicted criminal to man the White House, so any assumptions about “good faith” exhibited by the President of the United States is out the window. If it isn’t written into law, it doesn’t stand a chance. And even if it is, it also doesn’t seem to stand much of a chance either, though it’s important to celebrate the little wins we can get, like Alligator Alcatraz getting shut down, at least for now. The courts ARE still dealing blows to the Trump regime, and it’s important not to give up or lose hope cuz that’s what they want from us. BUT I DIGRESS.

Okay, bitcoin and Trump’s crypto grift. Just as a really quick primer on what the fuck bitcoin is, even though I know it’s been around for years, but there’s a few quick definitions worth going through because the Trump family is betting on you not knowing the difference and being too confused to follow along. Here are the important terms to know: cryptocurrency, blockchains, crypto mining, stable coin, meme coin, and crypto treasury.

Cryptocurrency is a digital asset, a form of digital money, that isn’t issued by a government or bank. Instead it runs on decentralized peer to peer networks called a blockchain. A blockchain is basically a fancy, giant spreadsheet that records every crypto transaction ever. Every transaction is written in a block that is permanent and linked together, which makes it nearly impossible to alter or fake the blockchain. It’s a permanent ledger. Because there is no central bank or authority checking and recording each transaction, it is the peer to peer computer network doing the checking. They do this through crypto mining wherein thousands of computers compete to solve ever more complex math puzzles. The first computer to solve the puzzle gets to write the next block of transactions into the blockchain and, as a reward, the computer and the miner attached to it gets to earn crypto. This steadily issues new coins into circulation like a digital mint. It also is seen as a bit of a liberalization of money flow because there is no central authority controlling it, and mining makes it really hard for anyone to hack or change the blockchain because of the amount of computing power required for mining. And it’s a LOT of computing power. Crypto mining uses more energy than some countries.

Generally, cryptocurrencies like bitcoin are entirely speculative and based on nothing. In the traditional stock market, you are purchasing stocks in actual existing companies that, at least in theory, produce goods or services and create profits. That is also speculative, as the value of any company stock is going to be based on supply and demand and especially for startups and tech can be wildly overblown. But beneath it all there is an actual company producing actual goods or services and profits. Crypto, on the other hand, is attached to nothing, it’s literally just people betting whether the value of a coin will go up or down. Some people call bitcoin “digital gold” because it is scarce, there are only 21 million bitcoins and more are not being created, so the scarcity is seen by some as a store of value outside of the traditional financial system, like holding on to a chunk of gold separate from your bank accounts. But again it’s not attached to anything other than speculation. Bitcoin has value because people want it, not because it generates… anything of value.

Stable coins are a type of crypto designed to hold steadier value by being pegged to something like the US dollar, gold, or another stable asset that actually exists in the real world. They are used as tools within the crypto system to transfer money, hold onto profit outside of traditional dollars, or used as collateral for loans in decentralized financial markets. The problem with stable coins, as with the entire crypto market, is that up until recently it was highly unregulated. So even if you invested in stablecoins, you are just trusting that the issuer of the coin actually has the US dollars in reserve to back up the stable coin, and if they go under there’s nothing to protect your investment. But back in July, Congress passed the GENIUS Act, which stands for Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for US Stablecoins, GENIUS, which requires stablecoin issuers to fully back their tokens with cash or short-term treasury bonds, submit to audits, and follow anti-money laundering rules. But the stablecoin issuers still aren’t FDIC insured, so if you invest in stablecoin and the issuer collapses, you are out your investment, which has happened before.

A meme coin is a crypto coin created as a joke usually based on internet memes, like Dogecoin. Some gain actual market value based solely on hype, but most are junk coins.

A crypto treasury is a pool of crypto held by an organization, company, or decentralized community, basically acting as their budget used to fund operations or invest in projects.

Okay, I think that’s all the basics you need to understand to follow what the fuck is happening in Trump world around crypto. So today, Wednesday September 3rd, a bitcoin mining company called American Bitcoin backed by Don Jr and Erik went public on NASDAQ. It’s a joint venture between tweedledee and tweedledum with Hut 8, a bitcoin mining company. By partnering with an existing mining company to create a new mining company they were able to get access to Hut 8’s fancy computer chips needed to do all the mining, remember it takes alot of computer power, and Hut 8 gets access to the clout that comes from the Trump name–but obviously there’s no conflicts of interest here!!!

According to fortune, quote “Eric Trump has pitched his new Bitcoin mining company as a means for investors to gain exposure to the world’s largest cryptocurrency. “I think ultimately it will become a Bitcoin proxy,” he previously told Fortune. “There’s no doubt about it.”” So even if you’re a traditional investor in the stock market, you can buy stock in a bitcoin mining company which, according to tweedledum, is like investing in crypto as an industry without having to actually invest in crypto. So their crypto mining company went public today.

On Monday, their crypto World Liberty Financial Tokens started trading on crypto exchanges. Those tokens were created by a company called World Liberty Financial, which lists Eric, Don Jr, and Barron as co-founders and touts itself as a decentralized finance platform. As of today, the World Liberty tokens have lost 21% of their value since they began trading on Monday. Though the token was last valued at $6.7 billion dollars according to reporting from Reuters and has made the Trump family $5 billion dollars richer, at least on paper, over this last week. Donald Trump the president owns 15.75 billion world liberty tokens, worth $3.4 billion dollars, making crypto the largest source of his fortune now. World Liberty Financial also issues a dollar backed stablecoin called USD1, which has a market value of 2.5 billion dollars.

Trump also launched a memecoin in the lead up to the inauguration, literally tied directly to his presidential position, which peaked at around $9 billion dollars in value and has since slumped to 1.7 billion dollars in value.

And then the Trump family has stakes in the value of crypto through their Trump Media company, which owns Truth Social, and raised 2 and a half billion dollars through the sale of shares and bonds to invest in bitcoin to hold as assets on its balance sheet, a bitcoin treasury. And Eric and Don Jr also own a stake in a crypto treasury investment firm called Dominari Holdings. Their shares are worth about $6 million a piece.

There’s even more to it than that but it gets weird and technical because one thing rich people loooooove to do is to create shell companies inside holding companies inside conglomerates inside parent companies on and on so it becomes impossible to really fit together the puzzle of their finances, which is very much on purpose because how the fuck is the IRS going to audit all that? They’re not. According to the forthcoming book Burned by Billionaires by Chuck Collins, 10 to 12 percent of the world’s wealth, literally trillions of dollars, is hidden away through quote “a combination of tax-haven secrecy jurisdictions, shell companies, opaque trusts, and other mechanisms. The Tax Justice Network estimates that between 24 and 36 TRILLION DOLLARS is sequestered across the globe, away from the prying eyes of the government and the media. And you better bet Trump and his team of wealth defenders is well versed in how to hide those assets. So tracing just how much the Trump family has enriched themselves off crypto, a form of currency meant to be decentralized and outside the prying eyes of government, is pretty much impossible. Not to mention the other more physical grifts the President has engaged in, like selling Trump bibles, printed in China, which he made about 300,000 in profits on. But that’s just according to official filings.

But the reason why it’s important to know about this crypto fortune that Trump and his sons are playing with and making LITERALLY BILLIONS off of, again just on paper but still, BILLIONS, is because Trump is president, and as president he has promised to make America the crypto capital of the world. This is the literal definition of corruption, he is a politician enriching himself and using his position of power for personal gain without giving two shits about the American people. According to reporting from the New York Times, his sons are openly willing to admit as much, quote “Donald Trump Jr. has said that the family restrained itself during his father’s first term only to be criticized anyway, so it made no sense to hold back anymore. “They’re going to hit you no matter what,” he said. “So we’re just going to play the game.”” Yes, if you can believe it, his first term was restrained, but now they have realized they don’t have to follow any rules or worry about any sort of blowback, because no one seems to care, or they are flooding the zone with so much information and outrage that none of us has time to care. For comparison, I’ll quote from that same New York Times article: “When Hillary Clinton was first lady, a furor erupted over reports that she had once made $100,000 from a $1,000 investment in cattle futures. Even though it had happened a dozen years before her husband became president, it became a scandal that lasted weeks and forced the White House to initiate a review.” And now here we are.

Just at his properties alone, Trump has made nearly $40 million dollars according to Open Secrets data off of official trips and politicians visiting and spending money at his properties, holding galas at resorts, private clubs, and hotels, which they know Trump will see and allow them to put money directly into his coffers, away from the prying eyes of campaign finance laws, in order to buy favor with the President of the United States. Not to mention the amount of tax dollars spent at Trump properties. According to Did Trump Golf Today dot com, Trump has golfed 55 out of the 227 days since returning to office, or 24.2% of the presidency spent golfing, with an estimated cost to taxpayers just for his golfing at $77 MILLION dollars. There is no president in history that has grifted so close to the sun as Trump has, and there is no sign that he or his family is slowing down, even after he dies, which God willing will be soon, the Trump name will continue to enrich his heirs because of their association with Trump the president. Yes, he was rich before he became president, but he has never been richer than he is right now, and a lot of that wealth is built on the back of the clout he has as president, of people willing to give him money to gain his favor, and of policy he is able to influence because of the death grip he has on our Congress.

Which is why I am skeptical that a bill going through the Senate right now that would ban lawmakers from trading in individual stocks will ultimately be signed into law. Because grifters are gonna grift, and according to a New York Times investigation back in 2022, one fifth of lawmakers trade in stocks associated directly with the work they do in committees to regulate those companies and industries. The act is, cleverly, called the PELOSI Act, which stands for Preventing Elected Leaders from Owning Securities and Investments. Nancy Pelosi is notorious for the amount of money she’s made, through her husband, on trading individual stocks. This is the equivalent to legalized insider trading. If you have knowledge that isn’t public about forthcoming legislation or regulations that will impact a company or an industry, you cannot trade based on that insider knowledge. Unless you are a member of Congress, then it’s fine. And we’re not stupid, over 80% of voters support banning members of Congress from trading individual stocks. And there is bipartisan support for this bill, but I don’t see it being enough to actually go through, because it requires the legislators to regulate themselves and their ability to profit off their position and their insider knowledge.

And speaking of grifting off your political position, it’s not just done through insider trading. There is a major market for book deals for people actively holding office. Marjorie Taylor Greene was the highest grossing author in Congress in 2024, according to Business Insider, earning $178,000 in book royalties from her 2023 autobiography. Rank and file members of congress earn a $174,000 yearly salary, for comparison. John Fetterman got a $172,000 advance for his forthcoming memoir. Raphael Warnock and Bernie Sanders both earned around $150,000 each in book royalties as well. In 2020, members of Congress raked in a total of $1.8 million dollars from book advances and royalties alone. According to the 1978 Ethics in Government Act, Congressmembers are barred from earning 15% in excess of their yearly congressional salary on outside income. This applies to speaking events, which they are not allowed to collect payment for. But writing a book means royalties, not employment, which aren’t included in that outside earning ban. And the Supreme Court, in its self-written joke of an ethics code, explicitly permits justices to profit off the writing and publishing of books while still sitting on the bench. Which is exactly what Amy Coney Barrett did in her book deal that reportedly earned her a $2 million dollar advance. In that book, titled Listening to the Law, she says that the decision to legalize abortion in Roe vs. Wade was an exercise of raw judicial power that was getting ahead of public sentiment on the abortion issue. She writes “Abortion not only lacked long-standing protection in American law — it had long been forbidden.” This despite the fact that the decision in Roe v. Wade spends a great deal of time laying out all the ways in which abortion has been allowed throughout history and in English common law, which is what US law is based on and which is what this very supreme court loves to turn to only when it suits them best, like in banning nationwide injunctions. Then english common law is clearly the standard that we should all be looking to. But with abortion no no don’t be preposterous. It’s almost like you can cherry pick history to fit any judicial argument you want. Which I know I harp on about whenever I can but that’s because it’s so important to know that YOU CAN CHERRY PICK HISTORY TO FIT ANY JUDICIAL ARGUMENT YOU WANT. Anyway it’s just notable and important to point out, as the Daily Beast did recently, that Amy Coney Barrett, in exchange for $2 million dollars, is more than happy to opine further on why she voted in favor of doing away with Roe v. Wade, but she provided no written opinion in the official Dobbs decision that did away with Roe and, at her confirmation hearing she refused to say anything about whether she thought Roe v. Wade was correctly decided. It’s all a fucking grift.

Which is why I say members of Congress and anyone in a politically appointed position, should be banned from writing books and profiting in that way while still holding office. That, combined with a ban on insider trading for Congressmembers, would lead to a LOT of earlier retirements, opening up the field for younger people to step in. You should not be able to make $2 million dollars because of your position on the Supreme Court, that is obscene. And this is a bipartisan issue, they are all grifting off their political positions and it hurts the rest of us. And, again, that’s not to say they can never write a book, they just have to wait until after they leave office to do so. In 2017, the Obamas signed a joint book deal that included a $65 MILLION DOLLAR advance. That’s fucking obscene. But listen they served their time. They are still influential but they are not actively holding positions of power. The dynamics are different. The potential for corruption is different. It matters whether our elected officials can become millionaires simply because of their political positions, because of insider knowledge they can use to trade with or because of the publicity they naturally get as elected officials leading to book deals and sales. They should not be able to make themselves that much money while still in power. It is too tempting to become greedy, to hang on to your position for dear life not only because it gives you political power but because it gives you the relevance you need to sign another book deal.

But now we have a convicted felon in the White House whose entire family has made the decision that they do not care about optics, they do not care about ethics, the people are gonna criticize you no matter what you do so you might as well get your bag while you have the chance, and they have pushed presidential norms around conflicts of interest and ethics so far out the fucking window that I genuinely don’t know how we come back from this. Because we are truly a populist country at this point, we are searching for the people who have the charisma uniqueness nerve and talent to get the people goin, who cares if they have knowledge or experience or integrity, and the type of person that rises to the top of that kind of field, history has shown us, tends to be prone to corruption, no matter which side of the political spectrum they fall on. Because the cult of personality seems to override our critical thinking skills and cult leaders can get away with all manner of horrible abuses long before the cult members realize what’s up. That is the reality we are living in in the United States, and Trump and his family are taking full advantage, to the tune of literal billions of dollars. The only saving grace at this point is that crypto is literally fake fucking money it’s literally made up it’s based on absolutely nothing so one can only hope that those billions on paper never manifest into any actual value, which would be par for the course of the Trump empire: one long line of grifters who have offered absolutely nothing of substance or value to the world.

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And if you liked this episode, you’ll like the one from last week about why Trump REALLY cares about flag burning.

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