Dear Weekend Jolter,
Once in a while, this newsletter pauses to highlight an important piece of analysis or reporting that ran in or on National Review. We are living in an ephemeral world, and some developments deserve to be rescued from the depths of endless scroll.
So I invite you, if you haven’t already, to check out the five-part series Andy McCarthy wrote on the sordid story of the Trump family’s financial entanglement with crypto, a Chinese-born (pardoned) felon, and UAE money. The Wall Street Journal helped blow open this story, with a thoroughly reported piece at the end of January on a half-billion-dollar investment backed by an Abu Dhabi royal in a Trump family cryptocurrency venture. The centrality of crypto to the plot makes the saga complicated from the outset — only the deeply unwell understand how crypto works — but despite White House and Trump Organization claims to the Journal that all was on the up and up, Andy sorts through the tale and explains why it’s redolent of the Biden family’s infamous influence-peddling. Only “you’d have to add two digits to the sum of Biden abuses of power, foreign entanglements, and corruption alleged . . . to get near what Trump has raked in just from the UAE.”
Andy sums up the key events in part 1. Pardon the long excerpt:
In autumn 2024, when it had become clear that he’d likely win back the White House in about six weeks, Donald Trump and his friend Steve Witkoff founded a crypto business called World Liberty Financial (WLF). . . .
A crypto business — whether in tokens, currency, or other iterations — is an ideal way to disguise political payoffs as financial transactions. And, because they have sons who do not hold government positions and could ostensibly run the crypto business, President Trump and his Middle East envoy, Witkoff, would be poised to claim that WLF is a private enterprise, walled off from Trump’s political influence — even though that influence was the magnet for foreign investment and consumer purchases.
Reportedly, and predictably, a Chinese-born Canadian billionaire felon named Changpeng Zhao, who ran a corrupt international cryptocurrency exchange called Binance and was desperately seeking a presidential pardon, contributed invaluable technical expertise for building WLF’s infrastructure. So did Zhao’s close associate, Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed al Nahyan, the top intelligence operative and the second-highest-ranking royal family member of the United Arab Emirates, a tiny, rich Gulf monarchy. The UAE had big ambitions to become an AI powerhouse but had been blocked by Washington from access to cutting-edge American chip technology because of its extensive ties to the Chinese Communist Party. The UAE also wanted a pardon for Zhao, who lives in Dubai and could move Binance to Abu Dhabi if regulatory complications from his felony convictions were removed.
Four days before Trump was inaugurated in January 2025, the UAE began pouring what is now publicly known to be at least $2.5 billion into the Trump crypto enterprise. Before Trump’s first year in office was over, Zhao had his pardon. And the UAE had its chips, in addition to being feted at the White House, inflated into a nation of real consequence in Middle East geopolitics, included in the Trump administration’s Stargate project to build global artificial intelligence and super-computing capacity, and given an ownership slice of TikTok.
In other words, a lot of transactions are at play. For the record, WLF claims that Trump and Witkoff haven’t been involved with the firm since taking office. But as with Hunter Biden’s curiously prominent role in foreign dealings during his dad’s time in office, one must wonder what value was being brought to the table by the Trump-tied crypto venture. In part 2, Andy dives into the pardon for Changpeng Zhao and his contributions to WLF’s rise. In part 3, he covers the role of the UAE’s “Spy Sheikh” (Tahnoon) in plowing money first into WLF and later into purchases of WLF’s stablecoin, USD1, for investment in the Binance exchange. In part 4, he returns to detailing Tahnoon’s investments around the time of Trump’s second inauguration and his pursuit of a change in U.S. policy concerning the UAE and U.S. chip tech.
The final installment is a comprehensive timeline of events. As Democrats start to sniff around and the story generates more coverage, that timeline will be an important reference. As Andy observes in concluding the series, Trump’s reported, always-fluctuating net worth increased by $3 billion last year through September, mostly from crypto, with the country’s chief executive presiding over what Forbes calls “the most lucrative presidency in American history.”
Whether Republicans show the same enthusiasm for getting to the bottom of these transactions as they (justly) did for investigating Biden Inc. remains to be seen. But the crypto saga should dispel any lingering notion that the swamp is in danger of being siphoned clean under President Trump. Its denizens are plumper than ever, and rumor has it that phrases of Mandarin and Arabic can be heard rising from the bog in the gloaming.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
It took Virginia Democrats about five seconds to overplay their hand: Virginia’s Gerrymandering Vandalism
A warning to Hong Kong, and the West: China’s Monstrous Sentencing of Jimmy Lai
Advice for Starmer (and Trump): The Best Chagos Deal Is No Deal
ARTICLES
Philip Klein: Will the AI Revolution Foment a Revolution?
Rich Lowry: Eileen Gu’s Terrible Choice
Elisha Maldonado: A Hong Kong Tragedy — and a Test for the U.S.
Anna Kwok: In Its Latest Act of Repression, Hong Kong Convicted My Father for My Activism
Audrey Fahlberg: Exclusive: DOJ Plans Supermax Prison Transfer for Death-Row Inmates Who Received Biden Commutation
Andrew E. Busch: Goodbye, Kostyantynivka
Brittany Bernstein: EPA Reverses Obama-Era Greenhouse Gas Endangerment Finding, Rolling Back Years of Environmental Regulation
Noah Rothman: Is Motiveless Political Violence Really on the Rise?
Dan McLaughlin: The Coming Political-Process Armageddon
John Kennedy: Census Numbers Paint a Misleading Picture of Poverty in America
Haley Strack: Montgomery County PTA Hosts Anti-ICE Training, Urges Parents to Create ‘Safe Passage’ for Illegal Immigrants
Jim Geraghty: The New York Times Changes Its Tune on Marijuana, at Last
Jeffrey Blehar: Bad Bunny’s Halftime Show Is Not an ‘Issue’ Worth Debating
CAPITAL MATTERS
Andrew Stuttaford reports on legislation by litigation: Lawfare Is the Climate Warriors’ Best Friend
John Puri, on the impending debt disaster: The Nation’s Fiscal Clouds Get Even Darker
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
I’m with Dan on this: What Popular Music Gave Up Doing
Armond White, for the headline win: Wuthering Lows: A Grossly Sexualized Brontë Adaptation
Where can you find the “best collection of Spanish art outside Spain”? Brian Allen has the answer, and a look at the country’s imperial-era fashion revolution: High Fashion Wasn’t Easy in Imperial Spain
EXCERPTS: WHAT PLANTS CRAVE
The debate over AI’s impact on the workforce is intensifying. Philip Klein uses a viral essay warning about a jobs apocalypse as a jumping-off point to ask free marketeers to consider the possibility that the doomers are right (Noah and Jeff also weigh in on this debate):
When people debate the potential economic and social impact of AI, there are two basic perspectives.
In the more optimistic view, AI will ultimately be like other technological advancements throughout history. It will cause disruption that may be felt hardest by certain professions, but it will gradually be integrated into our lives as a tool to make us more productive and better at our jobs, and it will free up time for leisure. If this plays out, a few decades from now, we’ll be able to objectively weigh the positives and negatives of AI just as we can with the internet, and the march of history will proceed more or less as it has.
But there is also a doomer view. Under such a scenario, AI advancements won’t proceed as gradually as past technological progress, a pace that gave society time to adjust. Instead, there will be vast leaps. Within a few years, jobs that have to this point required significant knowledge and experience will be done faster and cheaper by a bot. This will rapidly make large percentages of the white-collar workforce unemployable. . . .
What I worry about is that most thinkers, especially on my side, are betting on the first scenario without preparing for the second.
To state it more plainly, if we’re in a situation in which there is sudden and massive unemployment among white-collar workers, there is no obvious answer that those of us who believe in the free market and limited government have to offer. . . .
Most of the literature I have come across about AI from a free market perspective is more focused on making the first case I presented — the one cautioning against doomerism and arguing, essentially, that every time there is technological innovation, people warn about the coming calamity, but we have always ended up better off in the long run.
I have no doubt that this is a perfectly plausible possibility — and maybe the most likely one. But the question that I can’t get past is: What if the other scenario plays out?
It’s obvious what the answer will be from the other side. Democrats and big-government Republicans will say we need universal basic income — or some even worse form of government intervention. Yet it isn’t clear what free market folks could say.
What would be unique about the AI doomer scenario is that it would disproportionately hit higher-educated, white-collar workers, whereas past technological innovations have tended to hit blue-collar workers more. I say this not to be dismissive of the past struggles of displaced workers or to imply that white-collar workers’ losing their jobs is more important. I say this to underscore that such a disruption would be substantively unique in two major ways.
Dan McLaughlin looks into his crystal baseball and foresees the potential for a seismic battle over political process just a few years down the road:
If you think American politics is acrimonious now, wait for 2029. It’s not hard to envision a situation in which an Armageddon-level fight arrives in 2029–30 over changes to the ground rules of the American political process. . . .
Now, consider where the Democrats may stand in 2029–30. Start with their current mood. The street conflict with ICE has Democratic governors and mayors talking like the men who fired on Fort Sumter and deploying state resources to stalk federal agents. There are already candidates talking about “Reconstruction” or something like a South African–style or post-Nazi Truth and Reconciliation Commission. This is not how you talk or act when you think you are retaking power within a democratic system; it’s how you talk and act when you are overthrowing a tyrannical regime whose participants must not be allowed to take power again — including its voters. . . .
A popular-vote win with a narrower Electoral College win will be enough to convince Democrats yet again that they are the rightful majority, but not enough of one to fix their problem: It won’t realign the Sun Belt away from the GOP or deny the obvious writing on the wall from the 2030 Census that the House and the Electoral College will get dramatically redder in 2032, and that one more bad cycle could put Democrats in a very bad long-term hole in the Senate, which also means no hope of recapturing the Supreme Court.
At that point, what might Democrats consider in that brief window of power in 2029–30 to remake the system and the electorate in order to avoid getting annihilated under the existing rules in 2030–32? We’ve seen many of these proposals floated before:
- End the Senate filibuster.
- Pass national voting and election laws to abolish state voter ID laws and other election-integrity laws.
- Pass national legislation removing House redistricting from the control of state legislatures, possibly even to the extent of having maps drawn at the federal level and/or by unelected bodies.
- Expand the Supreme Court to pack it with an anti-constitutionalist majority.
- Admit new states such as D.C. and Puerto Rico and/or subdivide existing states.
- Abolish or fundamentally remake the Senate and the Electoral College.
- Use government power to remove Elon Musk from owning X and use his absence to bend the channels of social media in the direction of censoring more right-leaning content.
- Reopen the floodgates not only of immigration but of legalization and the vote for people illegally in the country.
The list can go on; there are many creative ways to use power to produce more power and redirect public funds toward allies while stifling the channels of fundraising and political speech for opponents. True, several of these things would be hard to do constitutionally, but that’s where control of the courts by people who don’t believe in a fixed, written constitution comes in.
Elisha Maldonado, with the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation, issues a call to action after the egregious sentencing of Jimmy Lai:
After five years of unjust imprisonment, Jimmy Lai, the 78-year-old publisher and founder of the now-defunct Apple Daily, has been sentenced to 20 years in prison, effectively a life sentence. From the start, Lai’s prosecution has been a sham. He was arrested on charges of sedition and colluding with foreign forces under the National Security Law and denied access to his chosen counsel and a jury trial. His case was repeatedly postponed for more than two years; finally, in December 2025, a guilty verdict was handed down by three judges handpicked by the Hong Kong government. Six former Apple Daily executives were sentenced alongside him. Lai’s sentence, of course, was essentially predetermined before his arrest.
Lai’s case isn’t an isolated Orwellian tragedy. It’s the starkest expression yet of how Beijing and its proxies have systematically dismantled Hong Kong’s freedoms and how the promise of “one country, two systems” has become a tool of tyranny. The charges against him — “conspiracy to collude with foreign forces” and “conspiracy to publish seditious materials” — are rooted not in violence or corruption, but in critical journalism and peaceful advocacy for democratic values.
Now is the time for those in the West, who enjoy the myriad freedoms that democratic values offer, to stand firm against the Chinese Communist Party. That publishing a newspaper critical of Beijing or liaising with foreign political figures is criminalized is a chilling statement about press freedom and civil liberties in Hong Kong.
For years, Western governments have denounced China’s repression in Hong Kong. But words haven’t translated into consequences significant enough to alter Beijing’s behavior. That must change.
President Trump is expected to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping in April. This is a rare and important diplomatic moment: If Trump is serious about human rights — as he has said he is — then securing Lai’s freedom and that of other political prisoners must be part of his agenda. Trump has the chance to do what his British counterpart, Prime Minister Keir Starmer, failed to do in January (Lai is a British citizen) in freeing Lai.
CODA
In the spirit of halftime shows, we’ll end today on Prince.
Thanks for tuning in.