A new political storm is brewing.
A new political storm is brewing.
W e’re all going to have to take a crash course in crypto.
That has become apparent from a spate of reporting in the ten days since the New York Times published its 4,000-word exposé on President Trump’s cryptocurrency venture, World Liberty Financial (WLF). As Rich Lowry and I discussed on our NR podcast this week, the unfolding story is going to drive media-Democratic complex yowling for the next two years, leading into the 2026 midterms and, if Democrats take one or both houses of Congress, potentially to 2027 impeachment proceedings that are already being contemplated. That has the president in a lather, as demonstrated by the diatribe he posted a few days ago — on X, whose userbase dwarfs that of his usual Truth Social perch.
The unease on Capitol Hill is not confined to Democrats, although, for now at least, Republican grousing is sotto voce. While the president will dismiss it as another “Russia, Russia, Russia,” the blockbuster Times report — “Secret Deals, Foreign Investments, Presidential Policy Changes: The Rise of Trump’s Crypto Firm” — is alarming. So was the follow-up report two days later, after the announcement that an entity controlled by a foreign regime, the United Arab Emirates, would buy $2 billion of the Trump family’s new “stablecoin” (a digital currency whose producers function, and generate income, like a bank) to consummate an investment in Binance — a crypto exchange. And not just any crypto exchange: Binance is under U.S. government monitoring because of its criminal violations of federal money-laundering laws. In 2023, Binance’s founder and now Trump business partner, Changpeng Zhao, a Chinese-born Canadian billionaire, pled guilty to a felony money-laundering charge that landed him in prison for four months. He is said to be lobbying the president for a pardon.
Zhao is just one of the darkly intriguing figures circling in and around the Trump family crypto venture.
Amid the ado over the Biden family corruption scandal — which we covered extensively, but which resulted only in ado rather than impeachment — I often observed that if President Biden were a Republican president, particularly Trump, the media would have been the wind at the back of a probe by House Democrats, rather than the gale in the faces of their GOP counterparts. Well, this time it’s Trump involved in a dubious business, openly associating with partners and investors who ran afoul of the law during the Biden years — and the president seems to have convinced himself that, since he was targeted by the Biden Justice Department, the similar legal travails of crypto entrepreneurs are a badge of honor, not a neon-flashing danger sign.
The $27 million Republicans traced from foreign agents into Biden family coffers is a pittance compared to the dollar figures we’re talking about in the Trump crypto capers — there are several components. Still, well aware that they were involved in dodgy activity, the Bidens energetically, if not very competently, tried to cover their tracks. They had wound down their biggest influence-peddling schemes by 2019, obviously because Biden was launching his White House bid. The Bidens labored mightily to sustain the implausible illusion that Joe Biden did not and would not exploit his political office for personal gain, laughably claiming that he was uninformed about the activities of his son Hunter, his brother Jim, and their associates — even though Joe was the business.
Donald Trump is a very different kind of cat. He has brashly taken on the mantel of “the crypto president.” In fact, the strategic plan World Liberty Financial published when it started operations in September 2024 — shortly before the election — was that the now-president would serve as “Chief Crypto Advocate.”
As with every other promotion in his long career of booms and busts, Donald Trump is hyping the crypto industry in plain sight. Meantime, big crypto ventures are rolled out by WLF, spearheaded by his older sons, Don Jr. and Eric, with hands-on help from their business partners, who include Zach Witkoff, the son of Steve Witkoff, the president’s old pal and, now, his bumbling emissary to sundry global hotspots.
If someone has the temerity to point out the blatant conflicts of interest created when a president driving crypto policy is deeply invested in the crypto industry, the president counters, “The law’s totally on my side, the president can’t have a conflict of interest.”
That’s not true. Yes, the rules that bind most government officials are not enforceable against the president. As the sole official vested by the Constitution with executive power, the president does not recuse himself from controversies due to financial or personal entanglements. But that doesn’t mean he’s not accountable. It means that, in our system, the check against executive self-dealing is Congress, not a federal bureaucracy.
Naturally, the president is well aware of this; that’s why he also takes pains to point out that his assets are held in a trust. As Forbes reports, however, the structure of the trust provides the president with more control over his business empire than he lets on. Even if that weren’t the case, he is still patently the beneficiary if the assets in his trust soar in value; and the trust is managed by Trump’s sons Don Jr. and Eric, who are major players in the crypto ventures.
The Trump administration has also been assiduous in relying on Trump v. United States, last July’s seminal Supreme Court ruling, which held that presidents have presumptive immunity from prosecution for all actions within the broad ambit of executive authority — and absolute immunity for actions at the “core” of executive power. The Justice Department cites the precedent even when there seems to be little if any apparent connection between the relevant litigation issue and potential lawsuits against the president. With sundry indications that Trump intends to press the limits of his power — not just on conflicts but, for example, on the unprecedented tariffs he has unilaterally decreed and on executive orders he has issued that, in essence, are unconstitutional bills of attainder against law firms and others regarded as political enemies — we are reminded, again, that the check on abuse of executive power is Congress.
Having tamed the Republicans who now control Congress, the president is currently unconcerned about that check. There is, however, another more basic explanation for his apparent heedlessness about the conflicts at issue: Cryptocurrency is shrouded in mystery.
People have a poor understanding of what crypto is and how it works. How could it be otherwise when some of our top economists, finance experts, and wealth managers have such divergent views on whether (a) crypto assets have intrinsic value; or (b) have value that, if not intrinsic, has been established by staying power (over a decade now) and the consequent expectation that investors will continue driving up the price; or (c) have no real value and resemble a scam akin to a Ponzi scheme that will inevitably crash. And it’s not just the economics and finance crowd. Government agencies and courts struggle over whether crypto is regulable as a security or a commodity — under laws written decades before crypto existed.
For cognitive dissonance, look to Gary Gensler, the Biden-era SEC chairman. Rather than trying to outlaw established cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, Gensler sought to bring them into the thicket of securities trading bound by exacting government disclosure requirements, in order to give investors some assurance of their bona fides. So would that make them safe? Au contraire. Gensler: “Bitcoin is primarily a speculative, volatile asset that’s also used for illicit activity including ransomware, money laundering, sanction invasion and terrorist financing.”
Thanks for clearing that up.
The opacity of crypto creates opportunities for mischief. Regardless of whether you believe cryptocurrency is essentially a fraud, there can be no gainsaying that it is fraud adjacent — Gensler’s got that part right. It is not as untraceable as many of the fraudsters would like to think, but crypto’s anonymity and the capacity it provides to transact outside regular, government-regulated financial channels are major attractions to cybercriminals who are up to no good. That said, they can also be a godsend for innocent people trapped in countries with corrupt regimes and grossly inflated fiat currencies.
In its big report, the Times asserted that Trump and his family are making the most of mischief potential and have thus “eviscerated the boundary between private enterprise and government policy in ways without precedent in modern American history.” I’m not so sure about the “without precedent” part.
The Trump crypto enterprise has precedent in grand ventures anchored by other famous politicians. While publicly portrayed as high-minded or at least conventional, these business arrangements held little evident asset value for “partners” in exchange for their “investments” . . . except for the access it bought and the high potential that the politician’s influence in the halls of power would be profitable.
Think: the Clinton Foundation and the Biden family influence-peddling business. Portrayed as funding pools for, respectively, global good works and business-as-usual Washington insider lobbying, these arrangements can be ways for circumventing campaign finance restrictions. They can put a benign face on what would otherwise be the public-relations damage politicians sustain when it’s revealed that they’ve accepted piles of money from deep-pocketed supplicants, especially foreigners.
The Clinton and Biden enterprises successfully leveraged the prestige and influence of association with the presidency. Perceiving that he is immune and larger than life, Trump is leveraging the power of the presidency itself.
In the next two columns, we’ll look closer at WLF: First, at its formation and its various ventures — cryptocurrency, memecoin, and stablecoin. Then, we’ll explore its investors — several of whom are foreigners, have had run-ins with American law enforcement authorities, and/or hope to do lucrative business in the United States with the help of the “crypto president.”