The Crypto President Has Arrived, and the Grift Is Booming

By
Hadas Thier

With Donald Trump back in the White House, the floodgates for cryptocurrency scams have been flung wide open.

Donald Trump speaking at the Bitcoin 2024 conference in Nashville, Tennessee, on July 27, 2024. (Brett Carlsen / Bloomberg via Getty Images

“You’re going to be very happy with me,” Donald Trump told thousands of rapt Bitcoin believers back in July. I was standing within the throng, having gone down to Nashville to cover the annual Bitcoin conference last summer.

The conference hall was chilly and darkened, but the energy level was feverishly high, the crowd whooping and hollering as the then-presidential hopeful hit all the right notes, calling Bitcoin a “miracle of humanity” and rattling off a list of promises — the most popular among them, to fire Gary Gensler, chair of the crypto-regulating Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

The SEC under Gensler was widely decried by the crypto community for what they claimed was the commission’s “reign of terror against crypto.” Trump also promised to commute the sentence of Ross Ulbricht, founder of Silk Road, a Bitcoin-fueled black market for drugs and contraband, and declared that he would create a “strategic national Bitcoin stockpile” with Bitcoin that has been seized by the Department of Justice.

Most of all, Trump vowed to help Bitcoin “skyrocket like never before, even beyond your expectations,” noting that Bitcoin prices surged by 3,900 percent during his first four years in the White House. “Now compare that to just after 3.5 years of [Joe] Biden and [Kamala] Harris adjusted for inflation. Bitcoin is up 50 percent. Now 50 percent sounds good, but not when you’re comparing it to almost 4,000 percent, right?”

Incidentally, during his first tenure in the White House, Trump had declared himself “not a fan” of crypto, complaining that the value of cryptocurrencies was “highly volatile and based on thin air.” But here we are in the dystopia that is 2025. Cryptocurrencies — digital tokens like Bitcoin, Ethereum, DOGE, and tens of thousands of others that can be created and traded on the internet using decentralized technology — are back in the mainstream. Their fraud and scam-riddled history remains, as does crypto’s lack of social utility and surplus of hype, speculation, and grift. And the newly converted Bitcoiner in Chief is now issuing $TRUMP, his own highly volatile meme coins, ostensibly conjuring up tens of billions of dollars out of thin air.

A Profitable Romance

The love affair between Trump and proponents of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is a relatively new, sometimes rocky, but highly profitable romance. Bitcoin had spent 2024 regaining the ground its valuation had very suddenly lost in 2022; other cryptocurrencies have followed the trend set by Bitcoin. By springtime of last year, Bitcoin’s price had already broken its previously wild records, and by the November elections, it was nearing a $70,000 price. Once Trump was declared winner, that number indeed skyrocketed like never before, just as he had promised, breaking the $100,000 mark within weeks.

That profitability is a two-way street. The crypto rich showered Trump and other crypto-friendly candidates with heaps of cash in the lead-up to the election, and the industry organized an aggressive and unprecedented fundraising operation, to the tune of almost $200 million through their Fairshake PAC and aligned super PACs. At the Bitcoin conference alone, Trump reportedly raised a full $21 million, mostly through a “roundtable” meeting whose entry fee was $844,600. Photo-ops with the president were not included. Those cost another $60,000 a pop.

Beyond the elections, and with his usual flair for unabashed conflicts of interest, Trump has gotten in on the grift itself — from non-fungible token (NFT) projects (digital tokens linked to media files that can be traded and sold); to financial stakes in the World Liberty Financial project, which claims it will develop a crypto trading service; to launching his very own memecoin, which mainstream media sources giddily and falsely claimed increased the Trump family’s net worth to the tune of tens of billions of dollars. On Wednesday, the hits kept coming with the launch of Truth.Fi, a crypto-focused financial services platform.

Trump’s conversion to cryptocurrencies began at the end of 2022, with the launch of his NFT collections — thousands of ultracringe digital images of the president, photoshopped to take decades off his appearance, and mocked up into superhero, cowboy, or rockstar versions of himself. Trump’s business partner Bill Zanker told Bloomberg that the president approved every one of the images: “He spends hours on it. He enjoys it. He calls it pop art.”

Sales of the NFTs brought in a few million dollars, along with mockery from many corners (including among the more ideological within the crypto space), and a burgeoning relationship with crypto supporters and industry leaders. “He fell in love with this crowd: young, ambitious, not regulated,” Zanker said.

But the grift and narcissism of Trump’s NFT collections seems to pale in comparison to his latest foray into another corner of cryptocurrencies: memecoins.

Trump’s appropriately named $TRUMP coin along with Dogecoin, DogWifHat, FartCoin, Pudgy Penguin, and tens of thousands of other “memecoins” are cryptocurrencies inspired by memes or jokes, with no pretense of utility or value, beyond pumping up prices via social media hype, hoping the coin you bet on takes off, and then dumping them on unsavvy investors. In fact, on July 13 alone, shortly after the failed attempt to assassinate Trump on the campaign trail, more than 2,000 memecoins related to Trump were created on the popular memecoin website pump.fun.

Among the myriad Trump-related memes, the $TRUMP token is the “official” coin connected to Trump himself. On the eve of his inauguration, while industry leaders were throwing a lavish “Crypto Ball,” featuring Snoop Dogg and Soulja Boy, with tickets that went for thousands of dollars, Trump did not appear at the gala himself. Instead, he was busy launching his own coin.

Posting on his Truth Social account, he wrote: “My NEW Official Trump Meme is HERE! It’s time to celebrate everything we stand for: WINNING!” Its logo features an airbrushed image of Trump holding his fist in the air, overlayed with the words “FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT!”

The Melania coin soon followed. And even Trump’s inauguration pastor, Lorenzo Sewell, launched the Lorenzo coin with an accompanying video on Twitter/X just hours after he delivered his inaugural benediction: “I need you to do me a favor and go and get that coin, in order for us to accomplish the vision that God has called us to do on our earth.”

The Adults in the Room

For many in the industry, the crypto president peddling his own memecoin soured their moment of euphoria. Tom Schmidt, a partner at a crypto venture capital firm Dragonfly, bemoaned, “I really was kind of bummed out when I saw it. It just felt very grifty and cheap.” Nic Carter from another crypto investment firm complained that the president’s meme “does the opposite of validating” the industry. “Now, on the cusp of getting some liberalization of crypto regulations in this country, the main thing people are thinking about crypto is, ‘Oh, it’s just a casino for these meme coins.’”

What the more serious adults in the crypto room want is two things: mainstream validation, and the ability to continue to operate without regulation or oversight. Ironically, a movement that was founded on a libertarian, anti-government ideology has come to rely on the government itself to force open these doors. Former PayPal CEO and now the “White House AI and Crypto Czar” David Sacks announced at the Crypto Ball: “The beginning of innovation in America for crypto has just begun.”

In the wake of the spectacular implosion of Sam Bankman-Fried’s unregulated crypto exchange, FTX, the Biden administration, and the SEC spent two years filing legal complaints against crypto companies and making it clear that the commission considered digital assets to be securities — a classification that comes with significant oversight. But the government was in no position to go after every one of the hundreds of thousands of new crypto tokens and assets. Instead, it targeted the exchanges that sold them, and also set forth guidance to banks, discouraging them from offering crypto custody services to their customers.

Truthfully, the regulatory warpath of the SEC was not all that powerful. It was an attempt to catch up with an industry that had been allowed to make up its own Wild West versions of financial assets, with no guardrails to protect millions of every-day new crypto investors whose interest was piqued by an avalanche of celebrity endorsements and the promise of breaking out of financial hardship. But now good times are here for the industry again. Sacks himself has already gone on record saying that Trump’s and others’ memecoins are collectibles, not securities.

Certainly, the crypto industry, riding high with absurdly lofty expectations, has had some early disappointments. First, Trump dropped his own memecoins, without warning or discussion with those industry bigwigs who were busy celebrating his inauguration at Crypto Ball. Then, rather than appoint a “crypto czar” from within their industry, the crypto movement had to settle on sharing the limelight with AI, with a “crypto and AI czar” that is merely friendly and hates regulations rather than a true crypto believer himself.

Finally, the much-anticipated crypto executive order essentially stated what was already going to happen: a deregulatory overhaul of the SEC and Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). Instead of announcing a Bitcoin Strategic Reserve, the order sets forth a working group that will “evaluate the potential creation and maintenance of a national digital asset stockpile and propose criteria for establishing such a stockpile.” This sparked a round of infighting within the industry between the Bitcoin purists who want only Bitcoin in the stockpile, and proponents of other crypto assets, some of whom seem to have lobbied the administration to widen the scope of the reserve. At the end of the day, the order was mostly symbolic and vague — as crypto researcher and critic Molly White put it, it amounted to “nothing much” at all.

But whatever the details and limitations, there’s no doubt that crypto has already gotten its primary wish fulfilled: to be able to play in its multitrillion-dollar sandbox with its own rules to its own benefit. Even the $Trump coin, as grifty and unserious as it makes the industry look to be, will ultimately onboard many more unwitting consumers into the Wild West of crypto, fostering wider adoption and growth for the industry as a whole. More people and more mainstream financial institutions will be convinced to invest in crypto. And the specter of enforcement actions against companies developing, selling, and promoting these assets has faded into the past — as though the billions of dollars lost to crypto fraud and scams never happened at all. These are truly dark, meme-filled days.