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Trump is making his first term grifting seem quaint
"Whether it’s the memecoin or stablecoin, there are a bunch of levers people can pull to directly enrich the president."
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During his first term as president, Donald Trump owned and profited from Trump-branded hotels, including one located just blocks from the White House, where private companies and foreign governments lined his pockets.
It was an unprecedented level of presidential corruption. And it seems quaint in comparison to what’s happening right now.
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We’ve previously covered Trump’s shitcoin and the world historical grift that is his “crypto reserve” idea. Now, the Trump family has devised another method by which interested parties can directly line his pockets — a USD1 stablecoin offered by the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial crypto company.
USD1 is already making the Trumps even more wealthy, as the New York Times explained last week.
Sitting in front of a packed auditorium in Dubai, a founder of the Trump family cryptocurrency business made a brief but monumental announcement on Thursday. A fund backed by Abu Dhabi, he said, would be making a $2 billion business deal using the Trump firm’s digital coins.
That transaction would be a major contribution by a foreign government to President Trump’s private venture — one that stands to generate hundreds of millions of dollars for the Trump family. And it is a public and vivid illustration of the ethical conflicts swirling around Mr. Trump’s crypto firm, which has blurred the boundary between business and government.
To get expert insight about the world of stablecoins and how Trump is cashing in, I connected with Zack Guzmán, a crypto journalist and founder of Coinage.
“If Tether is making $13 billion and controlling more than half of the stablecoin market as of today, then Trump doesn't even need to necessarily take a huge percentage of that market to start making a lot of money as well,” Guzmán told me. “And so by launching his stablecoin, USD1, he has rightfully triggered a lot of ethical concerns in terms of a president being tied to a digital dollar, which constitutionally is problematic.”
Guzmán told me that while some crypto founders and investors remain optimistic about the Trump presidency, there’s already some buyer’s remorse.
“When he talked on the campaign trail about making the US the crypto capital of the world, was it just about Trump trying to make money for himself and his family? It’s definitely fair to say the latter has been his priority so far.”
A full transcript of my conversation with Guzmán, lightly edited for length and clarity, follows.
