Chris Murphy's Substack

03/07/2025

Everyone knows Donald Trump can be bought, and the 2024 election was the perfect opportunity for the crypto industry to get someone in the White House who would let them continue to abuse the public. The industry poured $130 million into Trump’s campaign, and when he did, they started cashing in.

Almost immediately, investigations into major cryptocurrency firms have been halted. Lawsuits over crypto fraud dropped. And then, this weekend, Trump announced a new national crypto reserve, declaring “I will make sure the U.S. is the Crypto Capital of the World.” The reserve is basically a vehicle to use the government to prop up the industry – using public resources to put money into the hands of crypto billionaires.

But that’s not the worst of it. No, the real grift is the Trump “meme coin”, which enables a kind of legalized presidential money laundering of a scale and scope never before seen in America.

Right before the inauguration, Trump launched his own ‘meme coin’ called $TRUMP. It’s a digital asset with a value tied to, well, nothing, other than the popularity of Trump himself. It has no independent value. Its price is just a function of demand. If a lot of people want it, its price goes up. If nobody wants it, its price plummets.

Trump knew his MAGA supporters, wild with enthusiasm during the inauguration, would buy up a ton of the worthless coin. It worked. When prices jumped from 18 cents to $75 apiece, his net worth, on paper, swelled to more than $56 billion. And when it fell back down to $17, where it sits today, many of his supporters who bought at the top lost actual real money. He duped his followers into buying the coin (with its real value of $0) at its highest price, knowing it was going to crash.

Trump doesn’t need to care about the fluctuation of the cost because he gets a transaction fee every time coin trades are made. The Trump family made $100 million just in trading fees, while many of his supporters have lost thousands of dollars.

But the real scam is not the transaction fees. No, it’s the way that the coin can be inflated in value, at key moments, to allow Trump to swell his fortune. Trump held back 80% of the coin, and he will put more up for sale when the price once again spikes. And how does the price spike, allowing Trump to cash in with an additional release of the coin? Well, all it takes is a few Russian oligarchs or billionaire CEOs to buy a large quantity of coin (therefore increasing net demand) for the price to rise.

You might think, surely, that’s illegal for a foreign government or a CEO to manipulate the Trump coin market to enrich Trump. Amazingly, it is not! There is nothing stopping a Russian oligarch, a Saudi prince, or an oil company’s CEO from buying $TRUMP to put money directly into Trump’s pocket. And guess what, we aren’t even yet to the worst part.

The biggest scam is that we will never know who is buying the Trump coin to inflate the price and put cash into Trump’s pocket, because the buyers of the coin are secret! So it’s essentially a private conduit for bribery. Billionaires with business before the U.S. government can buy coin in order to make Trump rich, and then whisper to Trump that they need a favor. And the American people would never know.