“Government efficiency” is the watchword of the moment, with President Donald Trump making Elon Musk a leader of an advisory commission named the “Department of Government Efficiency.” The acronym, DOGE, is inspired by a jokingly named crypto coin Musk has long celebrated and profited from.
While the Musk-led DOGE project claims to be about increasing efficiency in government (a potentially convenient euphemism for oligarchs who want to secure even lower taxes and remove regulatory restrictions), DOGE-like meme coins could be used to help politicians carry out corruption more efficiently.
Friday night on Truth Social, Trump announced a new digital token called $TRUMP.
Friday night on Truth Social, Trump announced a new digital token called $TRUMP. His account posted, “My NEW Official Trump Meme is HERE! It’s time to celebrate everything we stand for: WINNING!” On Thursday, Trump said his administration will consider creating a “national digital asset stockpile,” an announcement that didn’t go as far as the creation of the reserve that crypto advocates wanted him to announce.The price of Trump’s meme coin quickly shot up to $75, a 650% increase over its Friday launch price. On Sunday night, Jon Christian, the executive editor of Futurism, argued “it appears that Trump has now accumulated vastly more wealth in the past 24 hours than he did in his entire life previously.” The price started falling Sunday afternoon after a $MELANIA coin was introduced. As of Thursday afternoon, the price of $TRUMP was hovering around $36.
There is substantial evidence suggesting that during the first Trump administration, the Trump family benefited from foreign entities buying up blocks of rooms at Trump-owned hotels. There are gross stories about the fees racked up by the Secret Service for golf carts so that it could protect Trump during the hundreds of rounds of golf he chose to play on Trump-owned golf courses. In addition, the Trump family seems to have received trademarks in China around the time the president softened his stance on Chinese telecom company ZTE.In October 2019, when then-acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney announced that the 46th G7 summit would be held at a Trump-owned hotel in Miami, he insisted it wasn’t a problem and said Trump “has pretty much made it very clear since he’s got here that he doesn’t profit from being here” and that he “will not be profiting here.” Lawsuits brought against Trump alleging that he’d violated the Constitution’s emoluments clause were dismissed as moot after President Joe Biden took office.
There was no shortage of smoke suggesting that fires of corruption burned during Trump 1.0.
There was no shortage of smoke suggesting that fires of corruption burned during Trump 1.0. However, even a summary of worrisome facts from the indefatigable corruption watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington did not lead to any allegations of life-altering gains by the Trump family during his first term.But accumulating more money in 24 hours than he had in his entire life is different — and worrisome.
The way Trump made money during his first administration came with expenses. Golf carts aren’t free, and they require maintenance and storage. Running a hotel is a real business with real costs.
Crypto is not, in any meaningful sense, real. The ongoing expenses associated with having unleashed code on the universe are… de minimis.
If Trump wants to make much more money this time around, he could have hardly come upon a better plan than crypto.Why should people care about Trump marketing a coin? A few reasons come to mind. First, Trump having billions of dollars in wealth tied up in a cryptocurrency would obviously impact how his administration approaches regulating the crypto market. Will Trump fight for the public interest in regulating crypto — a key mechanism for the funding of ransomware, fentanyl and terrorism — if doing so could threaten the lucrative digital asset industry, an outsize share of which is controlled by a small elite?
Second, crypto markets are frequently believed to be subject to manipulation by “whales,” i.e., large investors. Having a Trump asset so susceptible to manipulation is highly concerning. Consider whales who might manipulate the Trump coin’s worth to buy influence with the president by intervening with purchases at strategic moments.
We should not want the president focusing on the fluctuations in a meme coin’s worth.
Since, as NBC News has reported, “all holders’ wallets … are visible on the blockchain,” Trump would understand who stepped up for him. But it is hard to imagine any criminal liability (unlike if they handed Trump, say, gold bars), since they could just claim they thought the asset was priced too attractively to pass up. Do we think, for example, that Chinese multinational corporations might have cause to try to get on the good side of Trump? The TikTok story suggests it’s possible.It would be better for America if Trump’s wealth were put into some staid mutual funds, the boring, traditional tools of wealth management. We should not want the president focusing on the fluctuations in a meme coin’s worth.
So for those who center the public interest, there is much that is distressing in the emergence of Trump as a crypto billionaire. And vigilance is in order.
Jeff Hauser
Jeff Hauser is the founder and executive director of the Revolving Door Project, which fights against corporate influence in politics, especially the executive branch. Trained as a lawyer at NYU Law School, Hauser has served in various political positions, including as the political spokesperson for the AFL-CIO.
