Trump turns his crypto con into another Ponzi scheme – Capitol Hill Blue
Convicted felon and court-certified sexual predator criminal president Donald Trump’s failing second term into one crooked scheme after another as he loots the United States treasury and his shrinking, gullible cult of MAGA Maggots of billions.
In The New York Times, columnist Thomas B. Edsall writes that Trump pulls billions into the accounts of he and his sons with “A Blatant Gargantuan Conflict of Interest”:
The Trump family’s crypto business exemplifies all of the sleaziest aspects of the president’s code of conduct, if we can call it that.
It is almost certainly unconstitutional and may well be illegal. Estimates vary, but according to a cryptocurrency analytics firm reported on in The Times, the Trumps made at least $1.4 billion, and their investors lost nearly $4 billion from purchases of Trump-linked crypto. These purchases have — let’s say — coincided with pardons, dropped investigations and favorable regulatory decisions.
This crypto scheme is central to President Trump’s personal agenda: to use his office to vastly increase his and his family’s fortune.
The icing on the cake: A growing number of economists and financial analysts argue that crypto is itself a fiction, lacking a backup system of gold, silver or perhaps most important a national government, ordinarily considered essential ingredients of a currency.
As far back as October 2018, Nouriel Roubini, an economist at N.Y.U., testified before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs: “It is clear by now that Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies represent the mother of all bubbles.”
In September of 2022, Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, declared: “I’m a major skeptic on crypto tokens.” Dimon went on to suggest that they are “decentralized Ponzi schemes.”
In 2023, Steve Hanke, a professor of applied economics at Johns Hopkins, dismissed crypto: “Bitcoin is a bubble. It has no inherent value and is terribly overpriced.” He added that “buying Bitcoin is a fool’s game.” It’s a critique he has repeated often since then.
I asked a wide range of crypto experts about the Trump family’s involvement in the industry, and more than half pointed me to an independent analyst, Molly White, who regularly produces detailed reports for her newsletter, Citation Needed.
White, whose work has been praised in The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times and The Guardian, emailed her reply to my queries: “I wouldn’t say that running a crypto business inherently would lead to corrupt transactions, except that crypto is extremely poorly regulated.”
However, White continued,
shady actors are extremely normalized in the crypto world so the usual reputational screening that might keep someone like that from investing in a business doesn’t seem to apply.
I do think Trump’s dealings are both illegal and unconstitutional. While it’s challenging to definitively prove a quid pro quo, the sheer number of times an individual or company has supported Trump’s campaign or invested in his crypto businesses and then quickly enjoyed favorable policy treatment or regulatory relief is so long it’s hard to believe it’s all coincidence.
The deals with the U.A.E. and the business with Justin Sun are particularly fishy. There should be serious investigations into all of this, whether under the foreign emoluments clause or 18 USC §201, and Trump should face both impeachment and criminal consequences.
Edsall adds:
Speaking of the last national election, White wrote, “the crypto industry was quite successful in politics in 2024, installing at least six new pro-crypto senators and more than a dozen representatives.”
With Trump in the White House and Republicans in control of Congress, White said, the key regulatory agencies are controlled by “loyalist, pro-crypto commissioners.”
Like virtually everything he does, the criminal president Trump spends most of his time in office looking for ways to make billions through his presidency.
During his first term in office, Trump used his “Trump International Hotel” in the converted post office on Capitol Hill to book overpriced events for foreign governments while charging extravagant rates to our government agencies for events, lodging and use of the facility. He milked the profits while the hotel was operating at a loss, which was not revealed until after he left office and sold the hotel to a national chain.
He charges the Secret Service rates for rooms at his golf clubs while they are “protecting him” during his many weekends spent during his time in office, both in the first term and the second, which came after a four-year term of Democrat Joe Biden.
Notes House Democratic Whip Katherine Clark:
Donald Trump is stealing from taxpayers to fund tax cuts for billionaires, and House Republicans are celebrating. Trump is illegally taking money from child care, veterans, community health centers, police, firefighters, and schools — all bipartisan funding for the American people.
The consequences of the Republicans’ betrayal will be swift: higher costs for parents, cuts for first responders, no school lunches for hungry kids, families and veterans without housing, homes without heat, and businesses unable to meet payroll.
This is all part of Donald Trump’s plot to enrich himself and his billionaire cronies while leaving everyday Americans to foot the bill. First, he fired the inspectors general charged with fighting corruption. Now, he’s tossing aside the Constitution to seize money that belongs to taxpayers.
House Democrats will not allow Republicans to further rig the system against hardworking Americans. We will fight back.”
Writes Larry Beck in Fair Observer:
One of the best barometers of graft and corruption is the rate at which those close to the original perpetrators become perpetrators themselves. The rate goes up when it becomes clear to those collateral beneficiaries that if they don’t actively collaborate now, they may not get another opportunity to max out. To them, it is simply not enough to be a beneficiary of the graft and corruption of others; they can only maximize their take by collaboratively adding to the overall pot from which the whole gang will ultimately feed.
In this context, US President Donald Trump is the North Star for every thief, grifter and influence peddler on the planet. What makes him different is that he is openly doing what others have dreamed of doing and then tried to do surreptitiously. Trump is a corrupt gift that keeps on giving to the lap dogs in his midst who facilitate the corruption and then line up to take their cut of the action.
Keeping track of the almost daily stench emanating from the White House and from the mansions of the cavorting and cowering tycoons is more than a full-time job. Luckily, others have been busy cataloging Trump’s corruption and its reach. It seems safe to say that Trump is already the most corrupt president in US history, and he has not even completed half of his four-year term.
Trump has packed the American government with his cheaters, crooks and con artists. In the House, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson is a co-conspirator. Self-declared “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth is another, along with tainted FBI Director Kash Patel and the MAGA Maggots that control the GOP in the House and Senate.
They support and protect Trump and his corruption. A house cleaning is overdue and time is running out.
