In the latest episode of Trump’s endless self-dealing, his crypto-friendly regulators have provided conditional approval for World Liberty Financial—the crypto firm that is the joint project of the Trump family and the Witkoff family—to become a trust bank. While a trust bank isn’t able to engage in the kinds of banking activities—taking deposits, issuing loans—it will be able to directly issue “stablecoin,” enabling the Trump family to earn even more on top of the fortune it’s already made: Trump personally earned more than $526 million last year from selling World Liberty-linked crypto tokens, plus another $263 million from selling equity in the firm to a group of investors led by a royal from the United Arab Emirates.
CNN explains that now he can go further to line his pockets:
World Liberty is celebrating the major milestone, while critics worry this is a new wrinkle on the classic case of the fox guarding the henhouse that will give corporations and foreign actors a new way to stealthily curry favor with the White House. Trump, his sons and other investors started World Liberty weeks before winning the 2024 election. After taking office, Trump appointed crypto-friendly regulators—some of whom have now blessed the firm’s plan to become a bank.
“Bank failures can be catastrophic, as we found out in 1929 and again in 2008,” Richard Painter, the top ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush, told CNN. “It is quite precarious to have the president and his family invested heavily in one of our most important regulated industries at the same time as he has the power to hire and fire the regulators.” … “President Trump is now the first President in history to approve, operate and supervise his own bank,” Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren, ranking member on the Senate Banking Committee, said in a statement. “This is the most brazen act of self-dealing our financial system has ever seen.”
Even before this decision, the Trump family crypto business was a profitable way to cash in on the willingness of Trump’s most gullible fans to splurge on Trump-branded projects, as well as a pipeline for political corruption on a massive scale. Until now, World Liberty has relied on a third party, BitGo, to issue and custody its stablecoin, splitting the proceeds. The trust charter lets the firm cut out that middleman and keep the revenue for itself.
The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.
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