Donald Trump was corrupt in his first term, using his various properties as cut-outs to collect money from foreign governments and businesses seeking favor. The properties also created opportunities to funnel money from the federal government and the GOP coffers into his bank account, forcing both to rent rooms and hold events at Mar-a-Lago and various Trump hotels. But all that is is a pittance compared to what Trump has set up in his second term. His crypto “firm” allows various actors to bribe Trump outside the normal banking system, making it hard to trace payments and hold people accountable.
Trump promised he’d bring manufacturing back to America, but he’s just increasing the number of people out there trying to rip you off.
Earlier this week, the New York Times published a mammoth report on World Liberty Financial, Trump’s relatively new cryptocurrency firm, which greases the wheels for a level of corruption beyond anything ever seen in American politics. Crypto hucksters talk about their industry in deliberately confusing terms, so ordinary people tune it out, but it’s not complicated. Trump sells digital “coins” online. Buying these coins is a way to write a check to Trump without going through the normal banking system, where federal regulators might interfere. The Times reporters carefully documented who is buying coins to “curry favor” with Trump: foreign governments, business owners who want federal investigations and/or criminal charges to go away and other crypto firms purchasing Trump’s endorsement. The latter is no different than Elon Musk writing fat campaign checks to Trump in exchange for a line of Tesla vehicles trotted out on the White House lawn, except with the crypto grift, the money goes straight into Trump’s wallet.
Unfortunately, it’s difficult to get the larger public interested in Trump selling the presidency for crypto coins (which he will convert to real cash). Trump’s corruption is well known, but doesn’t seem to hurt him politically. He was convicted of fraud just last year, leading to a half-billion-dollar civil judgment against his company, but he won the election anyway. Many voters seem to believe that, as gross as the corruption is, it doesn’t affect them or the price of eggs. In reality, however, Trump’s con artistry is a big factor in the larger scammification of the American economy, which hurts everyone, even those of us who think we’re smart enough not to fall for get-rich-quick schemes or snake oil cures being hawked from every corner. Trump promised he’d bring manufacturing back to America, but he’s just increasing the number of people out there trying to rip you off.
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World Liberty Financial’s founder, Zachary Folkman, goes by the cringeworthy name “ZMoney” and got his start in a more pedestrian scam: pickup artistry. He founded a company called Date Hotter Girls that offered the usual array of so-called classes on getting laid to men frustrated that women have a legal right to say “no.” This background is perfect, however, because pick-up artistry is the distillation of the ethos of MAGA grifting. The con artist promises his audience they’re in on the con, and they will work together to cheat someone else. In reality, the mark is the audience. With pick-up artistry, men are told they can learn to trick women into unwanted sex, but more often than not, they’re just fooled into spending a lot of money on useless “classes” — unlaid, but poorer. It mirrors how Trump promised his voters he’d make them all rich by screwing over foreign countries, but in reality tariffs will be paid by American consumers. Or how Trump sells his fans crypto coins at sky-high rates, with promises they’ll get rich quick, and then collects the check while the value plummets on “investors.”
It would be one thing if the only people harmed by Trump’s scams were his voters, but, because he’s president, it’s impacting everyone. His relentless corruption and apparent impunity send a message that cheaters prosper. Even many people who don’t like Trump absorb this message, if only through a “if he gets to do it, why can’t we?” mentality. This cultural shift is hard to measure, but it’s no doubt a contributing factor to the seemingly exponential growth in scamming, especially on social media. It’s impossible to get through the day without seeing influencers hyping shady schemes or ineffective supplements. That stuff increasingly creeps into the advertising streams of otherwise trustworthy personalities online, riding the “everyone else is doing it” mentality.
This can be most keenly felt around the tech industry, whose leaders are cozying up to Trump even as their products get shadier. The scamification of Silicon Valley is most obvious with the widespread embrace of crypto, but the poison is everywhere. Tesla, for example, is a real car company, in that they make cars people buy, but experts largely agree that the stock is way overvalued because investors are being hustled by Musk, who pretends to be an engineering genius and is forever making false promises of robots and self-driving cars that never seem to manifest. “Artificial intelligence” was hyped as the next big thing, but it’s increasingly clear it’s not intelligent, and has, in fact, made writing and search software actively harder to use. (Though it does provide fake girlfriends to lonely men, so the money will keep flowing.) It’s gotten so that once-respected tech billionaires sound like catfishing email scams, and no one bats an eye.
Normalization is scary enough. It makes it much harder for even smart, skeptical people to avoid fraudsters. But Trump, both for himself and to help out all the shifty money grubbers who backed him financially, is taking a sledgehammer to every federal system put in place to make it harder for hustlers to steal your money. The most prominent move was the decimation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), an agency established after the 2008 crash to prevent banks and other financial institutions from defrauding customers. Without the CFPB as a watchdog, ordinary people are going to see billions snaked out of their pockets every year, and the problem will likely escalate as banks get more comfortable with this no-consequences order.
Trump has also gone after the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) by firing its two Democratic commissioners. The FTC enforces anti-trust and “truth in advertising” laws, making it the enemy of an increasingly scam-dependent Silicon Valley. Politico reported earlier this week that Trump is interfering with the work of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which regulates markets trading in stocks, bonds, and other investment products. Trump’s personal interest is not mysterious — he’s been accused of market manipulation with his erratic tariff policies, a crime that would fall under the SEC’s jurisdiction. But he also has a lot of “friends” — who can now pay bribes through his crypto firm — who would like the SEC to overlook their illegal dealings.
This stuff matters, even to people whose investment portfolio doesn’t extend past a $500 savings account. The 2008 economic crash was caused by financial institutions engaging in shady and illegal behavior, from financing bad mortgages to selling artificially overvalued investments. One doesn’t need to know all the intricate finance lingo about “subprime mortgages” and investment “bundles” to understand why we must keep regulators in power who will prevent such shenanigans in the future. But Trump is firing all the cops who keep fraudsters at bay. If the bottom falls out again, everyone will feel the impact of that money getting sucked out of the economy. Even if it doesn’t affect the price of eggs, the cumulative loss of income will make life much harder for us all.
