Connecticut US Senator, Chris Murphy:
Trump’s Biggest Corruption is Flying Under the Radar
MAR 07, 2025
The scale of corruption in Trump’s White House has been stunning and
unprecedented. Trump sells access, charging $5 million for corporate CEOs
who want to meet with him. Elon Musk cancels contracts for his competitors
and awards them to himself. Charges are dropped against corrupt politicians as
long as the politicians pledge personal loyalty to Trump. The scope of the graft
is without precedent.
But there is a clear winner when it comes to the contest for the worst of the
corruption: the Trump crypto coin, and the alliance between Trump and crypto
industry. It’s all just a shameless scheme for Trump to legalize large scale
bribery, and shockingly, very few people seem to have taken notice.
For most people, the crypto industry is an enigma. Ordinary Americans don’t
understand and don’t try to understand it. That’s exactly why Trump knew it
would be the perfect way to launder money into his pocket.
First, let’s rewind the timeline a little. The crypto industry was furious that the
Biden administration didn’t let them run wild. Instead, the SEC and DOJ were
cracking down on fraud, scams, and theft, which made it a lot harder for these
billionaires to continue their get-rich-quick schemes.
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.
As an example, in the first minute of trading, one buyer purchased around 6
million tokens of Trump coin, sending the price through the roof. Two days later,
the buyer sold off the entire supply for a profit of more than $100 million. Trump
likely made money off those transactions, but we have no idea who the mystery
buyer was. Reporting suggests the buyer was likely operating out of…wait for
it…China.
It doesn’t stop there. When Trump cashes out, he’s not doing it through a
mainstream exchange. He’s doing it through unregulated Chinese exchanges.
Why? Because he’s got something to hide - either the sources of the money or
the people connected to him that are getting the payments - and faces much
less scrutiny by conducting his business on Chinese exchanges.
So, while Trump’s meme coin may seem like some silly, hard-to-understand
online fad, it could end up being the most insidious tools of corruption in the
history of the presidency. The whole scheme is akin to Trump posting his
Venmo or CashApp handle and inviting corporate interests and foreign
governments to send him funds. Just in secret.
Trump’s crypto scams are just further proof that this administration doesn’t give
a crap about you or helping our communities. The only thing they care about is
making money for Trump and his billionaire friends.
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