Crypto Is the Perfect Currency for Trump's Corrupt Pay-to-Play Presidency
He is using this digital medium in unprecedented ways to monetize his power and personally enrich himself
Cryptocurrencies are largely speculative digital assets that investors buy in the hope that their value will go up, through a series of wild fluctuations, as other speculators also buy them. But the one prominent practical, real-world use that has emerged is that they are the perfect medium to curry favor with the president of the United States by increasing his net worth.
The Crypto Future That Never Happened
Cryptocurrency is a “digital currency” not backed by anything except the fact that other people voluntarily choose to trade for it online. Unlike gold or silver coins, it is not backed by the value of a physical commodity. Unlike traditional fiat currencies, it is not backed by the support of a government, its tax revenues, or its central bank.
The original cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, was built on the innovation of a digital “blockchain,” which doesn’t depend on one central clearing house to maintain a ledger of transactions. Instead, it creates a “distributed ledger” in which records of exchanges are stored across the internet. The real genius of Bitcoin, which debuted in 2009, is that you acquire the currency in the first place—digitally “mining” it—by performing the calculations that maintain this ledger. As the number of Bitcoins grows, so does the effort required to “mine” it, which protects Bitcoin holders from the obvious danger of devaluation.
There was tremendous enthusiasm for this idea because, like everything else in our digital age, it promised to cut out the middlemen. For the more libertarian-minded, it was going to cut out the government; for the more left-leaning, it was going to cut out the big banks. This surprisingly ideologically flexible enthusiasm, amplified by the prospect of speculative gains, fuels the crypto boom to this day.
In practice, however, Bitcoin has never widely functioned as digital money because its value fluctuates wildly. It may go up in value over time, but only if you are able to “hodl”—hold on for dear life, in Bitcoiner speak—during the times when it plunges. Nor does it function as a hedge against inflation. Bitcoin actually tends to decline when inflation increases, because bad economic news drives investors to seek safety in less speculative assets.
If this is true for Bitcoin, the most famous and widely adopted cryptocurrency, it applies with even greater force to the vast profusion of knock-off cryptocurrencies. Cryptocurrencies are backed by the mass psychology of the internet, and smaller currencies collapse completely if they can’t maintain the internet’s attention. That is one reason why about half have already done so.
Despite the promise of “decentralized finance,” crypto is mostly just financing its own speculative spiral. There are plenty of tech industry startups that deal in cryptocurrency but thus far there is a lack of companies that have used crypto to raise money to do anything productive in the real world. There are reports of crypto being used as a last resort in places where government currencies completely collapse, but for the rest of the world economy, it is far from the primary option.
Whatever future crypto is going to have, it is still mostly in the future.
Crypto Finds its Ultimate Use
But Donald Trump has stumbled upon an immediate real-world use for crypto.
Using crypto for transactions only makes sense if the risk and uncertainty of bypassing traditional payment methods is outweighed by the need for anonymity—often, if you’re doing something illegal. Crypto has been used by dissidents in dictatorships. But it’s also notorious as a medium for online transactions involving extortion and trading of contraband. Yet even this is something of a false promise. Because the blockchain is a public ledger, it is not actually all that anonymous, as some people have discovered to their chagrin.
Enter Trump, whose big innovation is to use cryptocurrency to collect bribes without requiring this level of secrecy. He figured out that he can do it out in the open in a way that seems to technically skirt the law, so it will never be investigated or prosecuted—at least while he remains in power.
A U.S. president who also controls a large business is always subject to financial influence from his investors and business partners. But at least when Trump plans to build a new resort, it requires the construction of physical assets. Cryptocurrency, by contrast, is backed by nothing and has no inherent value, so when his business partners throw money into Trump’s crypto ventures, they are essentially just transferring wealth to him directly—and getting something in return.
Take Justin Sun, a relentlessly self-promoting Chinese cryptocurrency scammer. According to an exposé in Popular Information, Sun was accused by the Securities and Exchange Commission of secretly paying celebrities to promote his crypto and engaging in “wash trading, which involves buying and selling a token quickly to fraudulently manufacture artificial interest.” But just after last year’s U.S. presidential election, Sun began pouring $75 million into the cryptocurrency issued by the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial, an investment that directly benefited Donald Trump to the tune of $50 million. In February, with Trump in office, the SEC suddenly found the need to suspend its case against Sun.
Sun is far from the only one doing this. The Chinese co-founder of the crypto exchange Binance has reportedly been offering attractive terms for the Trump family to buy shares in his firm—while also seeking a pardon from Trump, according to a Reuters investigation, on charges of laundering money for North Korean hackers, as well as “investment frauds and illegal drug sales.”
But Trump’s corruption has reached its purest form in his memecoin.
Monetizing Power
If cryptocurrencies are backed by the mass psychology of the internet, then the “memecoin” is the purest essence of crypto. It is backed by nothing but the celebrity of a person or trend, after whom it is named. In practice, this is used as a way for insiders—the famous person and his or her hangers-on—to cash in on their fame by fleecing the suckers who bought the memecoin.
An NPR report sums up memecoins succinctly: “They are typically created for entertainment or speculative purposes and are driven mostly by hype. As speculation, they tend to enrich early investors who are able to dump their coins before their value crashes.” One the most flagrant and salacious examples is the “Hawk Tuah rug pull.”
In essence, a memecoin is a way to turn fame into money directly. The celebrity doesn’t have to host a podcast or sell advertisements or endorse products. Coinholders give their money directly for nothing other than the ability to participate in celebrity vicariously—or perhaps for the hope of getting in and out early enough to rip off the other people who buy the coin.
In short, the memecoin is the product Trump has been waiting for his entire life. Just before his inauguration, he issued his own Trump-branded memecoin. (So did Melania.) But he isn’t just turning fame into money. He’s turning power into money.
It’s not enough to buy into Trump’s memecoin. You have to let him know you did it. A logistics company, for example, openly boasted about buying $20 million in Trump’s memecoin as “an effective way to advocate for fair, balanced, and free trade between Mexico and the U.S.” But they didn’t need to boast. Trump himself held an open competition for influence-peddling: a special dinner for the 220 largest holders of his memecoin. According to a CBC report:
In total, investors spent an estimated $148 million US on the $TRUMP meme coin to secure their seats at the dinner, with the top 25 holders spending more than $111 million, according to crypto intelligence firm Inca Digital. …
A company controlled by the Trump family and a second firm together hold 80 per cent of the remaining supply of $TRUMP coins and have so far earned $320.19 million in fees, including at least $1.35 million after the dinner announcement, according to blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis.
And yes, Justin Sun was there and posted a video about it. This is the sort of influence-peddling that in the past would have been done primarily through contributions to a politician’s campaign—but in that case, the money was supposed to be spent on the campaign. The new innovation is that now the money can go directly to the politician’s personal bottom line on the expectation that he will alter government policy to benefit the buyer.
And all of this is possible because, under the current administration, norms about the separation of the president from the operation of his business have been dropped. There is little fear of any independent investigation of attempts to seek favors in exchange for contributions to Trump’s business—something that Trump’s opposition in Congress attempt to reverse.
Innovation Out, Corruption In
But we have arrived at this moment because Silicon Valley and the tech world has diverted huge amounts of talent that used to go into writing software and making apps to the “grind” of crypto trading and a series of obviously fraudulent crypto-based scams like the NFT bubble. One Silicon Valley executive described the exodus as a “giant sucking sound coming from crypto.” The 2024 election was awash in crypto money, with more on tap for 2026, in an effort to ensure friendlier regulation, fewer prosecutions, and the kind of personal interventions we have already seen in this administration.
More influential than the money, however, is a culture in which truth doesn’t matter and hype triumphs over everything. Trump vacuuming up cash in an open-air market for political corruption simply reflects the dominant spirit of this era.
© The UnPopulist, 2025
Follow us on Bluesky, Threads, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and X.
We welcome your reactions and replies. Please adhere to our comments policy.
It's unfortunate because there are some narrow use cases for crypto, and smart regulation would make it easier to stop scams. I wrote an open letter of specific applications to the chair of the House Financial Services Committee after the election.
https://djcodes.substack.com/p/open-letter-to-rep-french-hill
The thing is that crypto can be used as for making it easier for humans to migrate between countries and world regions. Because it is not only about decentralised money but also about decentralised identification and citizenship https://vladanlausevic.medium.com/world-decentralized-citizenships-and-the-future-of-humanity-b606cd0fe29d