Of all of Donald Trump’s attempts to capitalize on his presidency, his turn to crypto president—and crypto entrepreneur—has been his most lucrative. By some estimates, he’s made over $1 billion playing with crypto, a remarkable sum considering how few people can really explain what his crypto businesses are doing. So where is that money coming from, and what is a crypto entrepreneur? No, really—what is he doing?
I tried to explain all that in a piece today, because the crypto industry is something that’s actually polling worse than Trump right now. According to the Pew Research Center, 63 percent of Americans don’t trust it. It’s not an easy task.
Despite Trump’s attempts to sell a meme coin in his likeness, a foray so clownish that even many crypto enthusiasts shudder at it (which I wrote about earlier this month), his biggest crypto endeavor is something called World Liberty Financial. During his first term, Trump said crypto “seems like a scam,” but with WLF, he dove into the deepest end of the crypto pool, something called decentralized finance (DeFi), which purports to be a system of banking devoid of humans and biases (like the kind that kicked Trump out of most traditional banks following the January 6 attack). But he hasn’t really followed through with that—he has sold big chunks of the business to the “spy sheikh” brother of the United Arab Emirates’ monarch—and now investors in his scheme are getting wary.
Are the wheels finally coming off?
—Russ Choma
