The Trump Crypto Grift
When Presidents Become Shitcoin Salesmen
This piece is part of “The Big Squeeze,” a series examining how capital extracts value from every aspect of daily life — from subscription traps to housing crises, revealing how systematic wealth transfer is disguised as innovation and convenience.
I. The New Deal Becomes the New Grift
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s portrait still hangs in the Oval Office under Donald Trump. It’s an odd pairing — one president who built the social safety net, another who is dismantling it brick by brick. But the contrast isn’t just ideological. It’s existential.
Roosevelt gave America the New Deal. Trump has given us the New Grift.
In his first hundred days back in office, Trump hasn’t passed sweeping legislation. He hasn’t tackled inequality, joblessness, or the climate crisis. Instead, he’s presided over something else entirely: the rapid enrichment of his family through a dizzying array of crypto schemes.
Consider just two examples. In May, the Trump family launched a $TRUMP coin auction that raised more than $100 million, with winners — mostly wealthy foreigners — rewarded not with policy influence on paper, but with private dinners and photo ops with the president himself. Then, in September, the family’s stake in World Liberty Financial, their crypto startup, ballooned overnight when a stablecoin offering sent their net worth soaring by billions. Forbes estimates Trump himself went from $2.3 billion to $7.3 billion in a single day — without investing a single cent of his own money.
Historians now call Trump the “FDR of grift.” Where Roosevelt built programs for the public, Trump has built pipelines for private enrichment. The New Deal created Social Security. The New Grift Deal creates shitcoins. Roosevelt’s hundred days gave workers rights. Trump’s gave his family a fortune.
And here’s the most telling part: none of this is hidden. It isn’t shameful backroom corruption. It’s corruption as spectacle, livestreamed on X, branded into coins, and sold to the highest bidder. It’s not just that Trump is grifting. It’s that he’s turned the presidency itself into a grift — and dares us to stop him.
II. Capitalism Without the Mask
It’s tempting to see Trump’s crypto empire as an aberration — the grotesque excess of one uniquely corrupt man. But it’s not. Trump isn’t the bug in the system. He’s the system without the mask.
Crypto itself is capitalism in its purest form. No factories, no workers, no products you can touch. Just hype, speculation and the promise that if you get in early enough, someone else will be left holding the bag. It’s the logic of the stock market stripped bare: wealth from nothing, extraction without production.
That’s why Trump fits crypto so perfectly. He’s always thrived on brand over substance, spectacle over work. Casinos, steaks, “universities” — none of it was about building anything real. It was about selling the illusion of winning, cashing in, and leaving others holding the debt. Now he’s doing it from the White House, with his family and inner circle as co-investors.
This isn’t innovation. It’s not some bold new frontier of finance. It’s rentier capitalism in digital drag — where profits flow endlessly upward, and risk flows endlessly downward. The Trump family rakes in billions on meme coins, stablecoins, and mining schemes. Ordinary people? They’re left chasing phantom profits, watching their savings evaporate in minutes when a token’s value nosedives.
For decades, American capitalism at least pretended to reward work and production. You built cars, you got paid. You grew food, you earned a living. That was the mythology, anyway. But Trump’s presidency lays bare what the system has become: a pyramid scheme with nuclear codes. Power is wielded not to govern, but to pump the brand, juice the markets, and keep the grift alive.
III. How the Scam is Built
Every grift has a mechanism. Trump’s is simple: mint coins out of thin air, hype them through the power of the presidency, and watch the money roll in.
Start with the meme coins. The $TRUMP and $MELANIA tokens are marketed as harmless “collectibles,” patriotic souvenirs for the faithful. In reality, the Trump family owns 80% of the supply through shell companies. That means every time a supporter buys a coin, they’re directly enriching the family — and every time the price swings wildly, it’s ordinary buyers who get wiped out while the Trumps sit on billions. In late September, $TRUMP dropped 8% in five minutes, erasing millions in value. For retail investors, that’s devastation. For the family, it’s just another day holding the house edge.
Then there’s World Liberty Financial (WLFI), the family’s crown jewel. Founded by Don Jr., Eric, Barron, and Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, it has already shattered records. When the UAE’s Sheikh Tahnoon poured in $2 billion for WLFI’s stablecoin, it became the largest investment in a crypto firm in history. Two weeks later, the White House approved exports of scarce U.S. AI chips to UAE firms — a geopolitical favor that looks suspiciously like a return on investment. Ethics experts call it “incredible corruption.” Trump calls it business as usual.
WLFI’s September stablecoin launch alone sent the family’s net worth soaring by billions. Trump himself saw his fortune triple from $2.3 billion to $7.3 billion in a single day. Not because he invented anything. Not because he worked for it. But because his last name sits on the masthead.
And don’t forget American Bitcoin, Eric Trump’s mining company that now controls a $1.5 billion stake in the world’s most famous cryptocurrency. It’s a perfect family synergy: promote crypto from the Oval Office, loosen regulations, and then profit on the backend when the value of your own holdings climbs.
Even the side hustles follow the pattern. Remember the Qatari jet? A $400 million “gift to the nation” that Trump plans to use during his presidency, then enshrine in his library. It’s pitched as patriotic legacy, but it’s just another bribe disguised as history.
Together, these ventures form a single architecture: state power fused with speculative finance, national security traded for private gain, the presidency itself transformed into a pump-and-dump scheme.
IV. Patriotic Words, Predatory Deeds
No scam works without a story. Trump’s genius — if you can call it that — has always been to sell fraud as patriotism.
The family’s coins aren’t marketed as speculative tokens or pump-and-dump schemes. They’re “collectibles.” Souvenirs for true believers. Never mind that 80% of the supply is controlled by Trump companies. The language makes it sound like baseball cards, not financial instruments designed to funnel cash upward.
The $400 million Qatari jet isn’t described as a bribe. It’s a “gift to the nation.” As if a foreign monarchy were just doing America a favor, no strings attached. In reality, those strings are thicker than anchor rope.
World Liberty Financial isn’t pitched as a family slush fund. It’s the start of a “financial revolution.” A revolution where one family gets billions while everyone else gets burned.
And the big picture? Trump declares he’ll make the U.S. the “crypto capital of the planet.” It sounds like bold leadership. In practice, it means using public office to inflate the family’s private holdings, gut regulations, and turn citizens into exit liquidity for his latest scheme.
This is the same linguistic sleight of hand we saw in the subscription economy. “Collectibles” instead of coins. “Revolution” instead of racket. “Patriotism” instead of payoff. It’s how corruption becomes culture, and how people end up defending the very grift that’s draining them.
Because here’s the thing: language isn’t neutral. Call something a collectible, and people don’t think they’re being conned. Call a bribe a gift, and it feels like generosity. Call a scam a revolution, and you can sell it as progress. The words themselves are the camouflage that make predation look like patriotism.
V. Off the Charts: Counting the Grift
Let’s put some numbers on the table.
$148 million: raised through the $TRUMP coin auction, with buyers rewarded not with policies, but with dinner and selfies.
$2 billion: poured in by the UAE to World Liberty Financial’s stablecoin. The largest crypto investment in history — followed by Trump greenlighting the export of scarce U.S. AI chips.
$5 billion+: the estimated value of the Trump family’s crypto holdings today, more than their real estate empire ever produced.
$7.3 billion: Trump’s personal net worth after WLFI’s latest stablecoin launch, up from $2.3 billion a year ago — a fortune tripled overnight without him lifting a finger.
$239 million: raised by his inaugural committee, far beyond the event’s costs, with the excess still unaccounted for.
These are not the side hustles of a politician’s relatives. They are the presidency itself converted into a money machine.
To understand the scope, consider history’s benchmarks. In the 1970s, Richard Nixon accepted about $700,000 in taxpayer-funded home improvements — including a $6,600 gazebo. In the 1970s, Jimmy Carter’s brother embarrassed the White House by hawking “Billy Beer” and taking a $220,000 loan from Libya. A century ago, the Teapot Dome scandal saw Interior Secretary Albert Fall pocket $400,000 in bribes for oil leases worth $100 million. It was so scandalous that Fall went to prison, and Teapot Dome entered the lexicon as shorthand for corruption.
Now compare: a single Trump family crypto deal brought in five billion dollars. That’s not just bigger — it’s orders of magnitude larger. As one presidential historian put it, “Nixon was a piker.” Another called this “the largest public corruption scandal in U.S. history, and it’s not even close.”
And yet — unlike Teapot Dome — there’s no investigation, no resignations, no prison sentences. Just business as usual. The laws are weaker, the courts more captured, the Congress more complicit. Trump isn’t breaking the system. He’s proving what the system has become: a place where billion-dollar bribes can be laundered through coins and collectibles, and where ordinary citizens foot the bill.
Because make no mistake: someone always pays. When AI chips are traded for crypto investments, Americans lose strategic assets. When regulations are gutted to pump coin prices, citizens inherit the risk. When fortunes triple overnight for doing nothing, it’s because value has been siphoned from everyone else — savers, workers, taxpayers.
This isn’t just enrichment at the top. It’s extraction from the bottom. And the scale is, quite literally, off the charts.
VI. When the President Becomes the Pyramid Scheme
At this point it’s fair to ask: what does it mean when the president of the United States is running what amounts to a family pyramid scheme?
It means the mask is off. We’re living in a country where governance and grift have become indistinguishable. Where public office is just another lever to pump private assets. Where the president doesn’t even bother hiding the scam — he livestreams it, markets it and dares anyone to stop him.
History gives us warnings. In the last days of empire, elites stop building and start looting. Rome’s rulers melted down coinage for quick cash. The Gilded Age was riddled with railroad barons who bought senators like poker chips. Teapot Dome gave away oil fields for pocket change. Today, it’s AI chips swapped for stablecoins and meme coins sold as patriotic collectibles. The form changes. The logic doesn’t.
The tragedy is that ordinary Americans are the ones getting fleeced. Citizens are told they’re investing in the future, only to watch savings vanish when a token nosedives. Workers see national resources traded away in backroom deals. Taxpayers subsidize the costs while billionaires skim the profits. Cynicism grows — and cynicism is the scam’s best friend. Because when people believe “everyone’s corrupt,” they stop resisting corruption.
But cynicism isn’t the only option. Every scam depends on buy-in. Every pyramid collapses when the bottom stops playing along. Already, we see cracks: watchdog groups calling out conflicts of interest, lawmakers pushing bills to ban presidents from sponsoring crypto, ordinary citizens refusing to be marks.
Trump may be the “FDR of grift,” but that’s also his weakness. By showing the system in its rawest form — by turning the presidency itself into a coin-operated machine — he’s making visible what’s been hiding in plain sight for decades: capitalism itself is a grift. And what’s built can be unbuilt.
Another world is possible. One where public office serves the public. One where finance is a tool, not a trap. One where citizens are participants in democracy, not customers in a con. But it won’t be given. It has to be taken — by organizing, by refusing, by remembering that every scam depends on our compliance. The pyramid collapses the moment we decide to stop playing the game.
Sources
Adetunji, J. (2025). Trump’s love affair with crypto raises worries about presidential conflict and influence. The Conversation. https://doi.org/10.64628/ab.tnan379ch
Brad-Reed. (2025, September 16). “Incredible Corruption”: Blockbuster report on Trump crypto grift leaves observers stunned. Common Dreams. https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-uae-crypto-deal
Noah, T. (2025, September 17). Does anybody care this is the worst bribery scandal since Teapot Dome? The New Republic. https://newrepublic.com/article/200551/trump-witkoff-emiratis-bribery-corruption
Panetta, A. (2025, May 14). The ‘New Deal’ of grift: Trump sets standard for presidential self-enrichment. CBC. https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/trump-crypto-plane-real-estate-enrichment-1.7534231
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