Trump’s crypto swindle: How the President pickpocketed his supporters

By James J. Devine

Let’s be brutally honest about what just happened: Donald Trump, the self-proclaimed “voice of the working class,” just executed one of the most audacious wealth transfers in American political history—and his most loyal followers paid the price.

The numbers are staggering, almost beyond comprehension. While hundreds of thousands of ordinary Americans—many of them MAGA faithful who believed their president would never steer them wrong—watched their $TRUMP coin investments evaporate into digital dust, the man himself pocketed a cool $636 million from transaction fees alone. Not from savvy investing.

Not from building anything of value. From fees—the financial equivalent of a casino taking a cut while the gamblers go broke. Reports based on Trump’s financial disclosures last week revealed that he made $2.2 billion, but that money came out of the pockets of MAGA faithful who never imagined the president would rob them—but now, they have been robbed.

Let that sink in. The president of the United States structured his crypto ventures so that he could not lose. Front-end loaded. Risk-free. A guaranteed payout regardless of whether his supporters’ dreams—and their life savings—crashed with the market.

And crash they did.

The Chainalysis data tells a devastating story: 764,000 crypto wallets, mostly small holders—the very people who scraped together their savings because they believed in the Trump brand—lost money on $TRUMP. Meanwhile, 58 early traders walked away with $1.1 billion in profits. This isn’t capitalism; it’s a rigged game where the house always wins, and the house is named Trump.

“I Don’t Know” About the Money?

When asked about his staggering $1.4 billion crypto haul, Trump offered the most convenient defense of the wealthy: plausible deniability. “I don’t know if I had a better career in politics or business,” he mused, as if he were some passive observer of his own fortune. He claimed investment advisers make all the decisions without consulting him.

This is the same man who boasts about his business acumen at every rally, who wrote The Art of the Deal, who insisted he alone could fix the economy.

But when it comes to the ethically dubious ways he enriched himself off his supporters’ desperation? Suddenly he’s hands-off. Suddenly he doesn’t speak to the money managers. Suddenly his brokerage accounts are “closed” and he’s just a passive beneficiary of others’ decisions.

The audacity is breathtaking.

The Regulatory Capture

What makes this particularly galling is the timing. As Trump was raking in millions from World Liberty Financial’s $WLFI coin—which has since plummeted 80% in value—his administration was busy dismantling the very regulatory structures that might have protected his investors from predatory behavior.

The Securities and Exchange Commission, led by Trump appointees, conveniently announced it would not regulate memecoins as securities. John Reed Stark, former chief of the SEC’s online investment fraud office, called it what it is: a “pump-and-dump scheme that enriches a few at the expense of the masses.” And the SEC has “gleefully abandoned” investors.

This is regulatory capture at its most brazen. The Trump administration created a legal safe harbor for his own ventures to profit, knowing full well that the speculative frenzy would attract his most devoted followers. The government that should have protected small investors instead opened the floodgates for exploitation.

The 75 Percent Cut

Consider the structure of World Liberty Financial: Trump’s entity received a 75 percent cut of all $WLFI sales. Three-quarters of every dollar invested went straight to the Trump family’s coffers. The remaining 25 percent funded the actual venture—a venture whose coin price has since collapsed to less than 6 cents.

This isn’t business; it’s a royalty scheme. It’s franchising the presidency itself. Investors weren’t buying into a company with a viable business model; they were buying proximity to power, betting that Trump’s return to the White House would magically inflate the value of whatever he touched.

But the magic didn’t work. The coin crashed. The investors lost. And Trump walked away with his 75 percent cut anyway.

The International Dimension

The foreign deals add another layer of corruption. The United Arab Emirates secretly purchased a stake in World Liberty just as Trump was returning to the White House. Qatar donated a new Air Force One. Foreign governments with business before the administration were funneling money into Trump’s crypto ventures while his family conducted international deals with nations that have keen interests in U.S. policy.

Trump abandoned his first-term pledge to avoid foreign business entanglements. “I found out that nobody cared,” he told The New York Times.

Nobody cared except the American people who trusted him, and the foreign governments who now have a financial stake in his success.

The Desperate Dinner

Perhaps the most pathetic detail is the dinner at Mar-a-Lago, staged to juice the price of a dying memecoin. When the initial hype faded and the coin started its inevitable slide toward worthlessness, Trump held a special event for top buyers, sparking a bidding war that temporarily pumped the price.

It didn’t work. Not really. The coin now hovers around $2.83, an 80 percent decline from a year earlier. One investor, Morten Christensen, who actually attended the event, called it “completely dead.” “Nobody cares about a meme that’s down 97 percent,” he said.

Even the true believers—the ones who flew to Florida, who paid top dollar to dine with the president, who convinced themselves that this time it would be different—have been abandoned. Even Justin Sun, the crypto mogul who spent tens of millions on Trump’s coins, is now suing World Liberty, claiming they illegally blocked him from selling his stash to prop up the price.

When your biggest investors are suing you, you’re not running a legitimate business. You’re running a con.

The Stock Market Gambit

And then there are the stock purchases. On July 23, Trump bought up to $5 million each in Broadcom, Meta, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Nvidia—all companies that would benefit from his administration’s AI deregulation push. The same day, the White House unveiled its artificial intelligence action plan expressing a desire to deregulate the industry.

The timing is either impossibly coincidental or deeply corrupt. Trump paid a small fine for failing to report these purchases on time, as required by law. A small fine. For the president of the United States trading in companies directly affected by his own policy announcements.

But again, he claims ignorance. He doesn’t speak to his investment advisers. He doesn’t know what they buy. He just puts his money in “closed accounts” and watches it grow.

The Defense That Indicts

The White House’s defense is that “all actions by President Trump and his administration are taken in the best interest of the American people” and that “neither the president nor his family has ever engaged—or will ever engage—in conflicts of interest.”

This is absurd on its face. The very structure of the Trump crypto ventures—the 75 percent cut, the front-loaded fees, the regulatory changes that protected his profits—demonstrates that these ventures were designed to enrich him regardless of whether they enriched his investors. When hundreds of thousands of Americans lose money while the president makes $636 million, the interests are not aligned. The “best interest of the American people” cannot simultaneously be served by extracting wealth from 764,000 investors and funneling it to one man and his family.

The Reckoning That Won’t Come

There will be no justice for the $TRUMP coin investors. The SEC has abdicated its responsibility. The courts are slow and unlikely to pierce the sophisticated legal structures Trump’s team has erected. And Trump himself will simply move on to the next grift, the next venture, the next opportunity to monetize the presidency.

But we should not let this pass without calling it what it is: a predatory exploitation of trust. Trump’s supporters believed in him. They believed that his return to the White House would bring prosperity—for them as well as for him. They saw the $TRUMP coin not as a speculative gamble but as an investment in the movement, a way to show their loyalty and share in the coming golden age.

Instead, they were fleeced. Their loyalty was monetized and their savings extracted. And the man they trusted is now worth $1.4 billion more, sitting in the White House, claiming he doesn’t know how it happened.

This is not just a scandal. It is a fundamental indictment of who Donald Trump is: not a businessman, not a populist, not a champion of the working class. He is a predator who has found a way to make his supporters pay for the privilege of being exploited.

The Trump coin isn’t just a memecoin. It’s a memorial to the gullibility of the faithful—and a monument to the greed of the man who sold them out.