Donald Trump bankrupts everything he touches and that is a business fact– casinos, airlines, online universities, even football leagues have failed under his control. Then came reality TV, where Trump re-branded himself as a shark entrepreneur which helped him win the US Presidency in 2016. He lost in 2020, tried to overthrow the Constitution in 2021, then retreated to his Mar-a-Lago compound and hatched a new plan which included re-taking the Presidency & crypto.
Trump needed money during his inter-presidential years. He faced lawsuits of every type and was virtually bankrupt until he was once again bailed out, this time by his Truth Social IPO, which attracted billions from venture capitalists & hedge funds. Basically it was a ruling class tithe to Trump on his political future.
This is when Elon Musk became more & more tied to Trump. After buying Twitter, Musk allowed Trump back onto the platform which he had been banned since 1/6, which Trump then refused because he was now invested in Truth Social. Elon Musk was the primary economic force that rescued Trump from financial ruin after his electoral defeat in November 2020 to Joe Biden. That’s why he’s now Trump’s closest White House advisor.
Not coincidentally, Elon Musk, the largest bitcoin/crypto whale in the world, has turned Trump onto crypto. A bevy of legislative efforts are currently under way federally and in individual states meant to provide a regulatory framework that ensures no consumer protections while providing institutions federal bailout protections in case of industry insolvency. These are the purposes behind the GENIUS Act and other rubbish Libertarian nostrums currently being moved through both houses of Congress. The purpose of the Trump-Musk crypto campaign is to raid federal & state treasuries and replace their dollars with crypto. There is virtually no reporting or analysis of any of this in the mass media.
Meanwhile, SEC & FTC investigations & prosecutions into crypto criminality are being halted & abandoned as an economic policy of the Trump administration. Examples include:
Justin Sun, the Chinese-born crypto billionaire, inventor of the TRON crypto token and the USDD stablecoin. Justin Sun recently donated $75M in crypto tokens to World Liberty Financial (WLF)– Trump’s crypto platform. This made yet another SEC crypto investigation disappear, and WLF now owns huge stashes of TRON, etc. Take a look at this WLF portfolio screenshot:
Here’s an interesting reader comment I read on Yahoo: “Imagine if President Obama and his daughters were being funneled 75 million dollars from a Chinese national through crypto mined for and held in an account the Obama’s owned, so the Chinese national could have an SEC investigation in to his company scuttled. It would be on Fox News 24/7 and there’d be an immediate impeachment inquiry, likely with a few Dems on board. But when Trump does it it’s expected and tolerated. His diehards probably think it’s edgy and cool. The rest of the GOP is essentially complicit in this open crypto-corruption. It’s a pay to play admin and nobody will do anything about it. Notice how this story has zero traction.”
Recall that Justin Sun is the clown who bought a piece of “conceptual art” consisting of a banana duct-taped to a wall in late November 2024 and then ate the fruit a few days later. This “artwork” sensationally claimed to have sold for $6.2M, was paid for entirely in crypto, which was ridiculously overvalued then with bitcoin at ~$95K. So in crypto terms, Justin Sun paid 65.25 bitcoins for a duct-taped banana, not 6.2 million dollars as was widely reported. In terms of gauging the modern art market, 65 bitcoins is what a duct-taped banana is worth.
Gemini faced SEC allegations that the crypto firm offered and sold unregistered securities through its Gemini Earn program. In February, Cameron Winklevoss stated that the regulator had closed an investigation into a separate matter involving Gemini. Additionally, the company agreed in January to pay a wrist-slap $5M FTC penalty over “false and misleading” statements related to 2017 bitcoin futures contracts. Tyler & Cameron Winklevoss’ Gemini crypto exchange just opened a Miami office, as the lure of Florida for crypto companies is clearly linked to its ‘Wild West’ regulatory environment under Trump stooge governor Ron DeSantis, along with the absence of state income tax for residents. According to Bloomberg, Gemini filed confidentially for an IPO earlier this year.
Binance, is the largest crypto exchange in terms of daily trading volume. Binance was founded in 2017 by Changpeng Zhao, a software CEO who served four months in prison last year after pleading guilty to violating U.S. laws against money laundering at the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange. “CZ” is still considered one of the most powerful players in crypto.
Coinbase was founded in 2012 by Brian Armstrong and is the largest U.S. based crypto exchange and biggest bitcoin custodian, holding 12% of the total supply. The SEC has agreed on February 27 to dismiss its lawsuit against Coinbase alleging that it was operating an unregistered exchange and facilitating the trading of unregistered securities. This signaled a major shift in US government policy on crypto.
David Sacks is Trump’s AI & crypto czar. Co-founder of Paypal, David Sacks has been a key figure in the tech industry for over two decades and is reportedly close with Elon Musk. Both Sacks & Musk surely helped Trump in taking over the crypto platform World Liberty Financial in 2024-25, finally getting the Donald a ‘respectable’ foothold in the crypto industry.
Everything in crypto now is moving towards stablecoins, which are tokens pegged to the dollar or some other currency at a 1:1 ratio. A recent Bank of International Settlements study of 60 stablecoins revealed they all lose their peg at some point, meaning they are the opposite of stable.
‘WLFI’ is Trump’s latest crypto token, and what is it worth you ask? Google AI has an answer: A World Liberty Financial (WLFI) crypto token is currently US $0.00000000000007093, with a 24-hour trading volume of $N/A. A Trump stablecoin (USD1) is in the works, with tokens to be minted on the Ethereum (ETH) and Binance Smart Chain (BSC) blockchains– all owned & controlled by all DJT’s crypto cronies.
The Trump family gets 75% of net revenues from World Liberty Finance token sales, and WLF tokens are non-tradeable with holders not able to share in the profits. It’s the craziest disclosure agreement you would ever want to review, basically telling the buyer to “fuck off” after their money and/or crypto is transferred to WLF. Basically, the Trump empire will take whatever you want to trade in return for his worthless made-up crypto tokens.
What happens then? Since Trump was inaugurated, the TRUMP and MELANIA memecoins (Melania above) have lost 83% and 95% of their value, according to Coindesk. If you are looking for an indicator for which way things will go in crypto, Coindesk reported yesterday, “The TRUMP memecoin will undergo a major token unlock next week, with the team behind the project set to receive $320 million, around 20% of the circulating supply. The unlock might be another blow for the thousands of investors who reportedly lost a collective $2 billion after purchasing the token in January… Token unlocks are typically bearish events, as they involve flooding the market with fresh supply without providing incentives to drive demand.”
Apparently on April 9, Trump panicked and sold off large holdings of ETH at a huge loss just as his tariff hikes went into effect and as the financial markets were melting down. The Coindesk headline read: Trump-Backed World Liberty Financial Begins Selling ETH as Losses Top $125M– It sold ETH at $1,465 after buying it at $3,259. “Great time to buy,” was what Trump posted on Truth Social the day he was dumping ETH at a heavy loss. The next day (4/10), the Trump team denied their crypto dump publicly in order to restore investor confidence in crypto. What will the Trump position on crypto be tomorrow, who knows? It depends on which way the wind is blowing.
On February 5, 2025, Anthony Scaramucci, former Trump White House communications director tweeted, “Now anyone in world can essentially deposit money into the bank account of the President of the USA with a couple clicks. Every favor — geopolitical, corporate or personal — is now on sale, right out in the open.” The entire press media has resolutely declined to comment on this state of affairs.
The Senate Banking Committee is expected to soon mark up the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act, a Republican-led bill co-sponsored by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY). Gillibrand has worked for years to push crypto-friendly legislation through Congress, and reportedly now has a critical mass of Democrats (bribed with millions from crypto PACs) ready to collaborate with the Trump White House.
Final thoughts: Crypto is the perfect vehicle for a billionaire mafia heist of treasury funds, 401K pensions, etc. Trump, Musk, Sacks and the rest of these crypto-criminals want everything for themselves and they now have the keys. This executive bourgeois criminality must be exposed & punished collectively by an organized international working class armed with a revolutionary socialist program. Historically speaking, crypto will be seen as the most extreme distortion of economic reality in late-stage capitalism. Materially speaking, most things that are fake actually had something real at some point, but completely bankrupt from its inception, crypto is unique in that it NEVER had any legitimate use value. To understand how & why we are where we are now is to understand crypto.
The half-baked Libertarians who contributed to the original bitcoin ‘white paper’ post-2008 crash have seen their de-centralized finance (de-fi) dream turn into a Trump regulatory money-making monopoly. Irony? Not really, these pseudo-revolutionary pencil-necks can’t see past next week– politically & economically speaking. This is the bitter end of a reality that began for the crypto industry when interest rates started going up after 10 years at near zero created an incubator for crypto. ‘De-fi communities’ once thrived online, spreading their bitcoin gospel incessantly on social media which became the primary grassroots driver for crypto legitimacy. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has reluctantly & all-too-late taken up the torch of liberal resistance in Congress, as she is about to be swallowed whole by crypto PAC money. Leading CIA Democrat Mark Warner is among those supporting Trump on crypto.
** Asterisk comments on the duct-taped banana Justin Sun purchased last fall. First, he ate the banana (not the original banana duct-taped to the wall because that one had rotted), but the question remains what did Justin Sun do with the duct-tape? He paid a lot of bitcoin for that, and there’s no mention of the duct-tape in the media reports I’ve surveyed. It’s all about a replacement banana and artistically speaking I can’t understand the duct-tape disconnect. Isn’t art supposed to be about the whole? Justin Sun has got a roll of duct-tape from which he can make a shitload of memecoins and what is he doing with it?
More importantly, does Sotheby’s accept bitcoin for their auctioneer fees? The actual sale price (in US dollars) was ~$5.2M, payable in crypto, which translated into 55 bitcoins. I suspect Sotheby’s doesn’t accept crypto for their cut, so the artist gets paid in bitcoin from the buyer, while the art house gets paid a million US dollars– a crystallization of capitalist art market economics.
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