Trump's chief gift is for grift

His 'meme coin' scam makes Watergate, Teapot Dome, Crédit Mobilier and all other White House scandals through history look like child's play

What’s in a name? For Donald, a scam worth billions of dollars.

Donald J. Trump may understand the global economy at a fifth-grade level, but he's a post-doc in grifting.

Sure, he wanted to be president again to stay out of jail for the crimes he committed while in the White House his first time.

Sure, he lusted to abuse the power of the executive branch to exact cruel revenge on all who annoyed him during his first term, and to reward, with pardons or patronage, those who stayed loyal.

But what drove him equally to regain this job - whose core, constitutional duties interest him not at all - was his grifter's instinct that, if you want to run a lucrative long con, no better spot exists on Planet Earth than the Resolute Desk.

That's why, days before he was inaugurated, he launched $Trump, a "meme coin" that could be bought and sold on cryptocurrency markets.

Reading that last sentence, the bulk of Americans probably will go, "Huh? What? Speak English."

And that's a part of the con that makes Trump's swindler heart flutter with delight: This one hides in plain sight. Those who get the scam can jump into the game - making dough while making Trump richer - while most Americans, including the many aging techno-dolts in Congress, have no clue.

But Chris Murphy, junior senator from Connecticut, is young (as senators go) and no techno-dolt.

Like a digital Paul Revere, he's been riding the social media circuit lately trying to alert his colleagues and all Americans to the enormous corruption and policy damage that $Trump has already fueled and will continue to do as it metastasizes.

Let's take a step back: What's cryptocurrency?

It's a digital form of currency, run on a decentralized, peer-to-peer system for recording transactions, protected by cryptography (hence the name). No nation or international authority regulates crypto, nor does any tangible asset (e.g. gold) stand behind the value of a crypto "coin." A "meme coin" like $Trump is a simple digital token with no intrinsic value. Its value on crypto markets, though, is whatever some sucker (or schemer) is willing to pay for it in a given moment.

Since emerging in the last decade, crypto has become both the fuel of many a youthful dream of wealth and a favored medium for money laundering and other illegal transactions.

And, now, it’s a swell way secretly to bribe a nation's chief executive in return for favorable treatment, on taxes, regulation, legal problems or, ahem, tariffs.

Joe Biden's team tried to put some manners on the Wild West of crypto, which has already featured some spectacular crash-and-burn disasters, as well as plenty run-of-the-mill crimes.

Not surprisingly, the cocky bros of crypto poured roughly $130 million into Trump's 2024 campaign, recognizing a kindred spirit when they saw one.

A kind take on the early January launch of $Trump would have been that, in doing so, Trump was just signaling his solidarity with the crypto community. A more cynical, accurate take is that he was telling the many "meme coin" charlatans out there already trolling for suckers, "Hey, hold my beer. Watch this!"

Let's bring in Murphy to explain how the scam works and how it sets up unprecedented levels of Oval Office corruption and influence peddling. You can read his full Substack explication here, or watch it on Instagram here, but for the TLDR crowd (though, really, what are you doing here, on my loquacious Substack?), here's the core of his case:

Trump knew his MAGA supporters, wild with enthusiasm during the inauguration, would buy up a ton of the worthless coin. It worked. When prices jumped from 18 cents to $75 apiece, his net worth, on paper, swelled to more than $56 billion. And when it fell back down to $17, where it sits today, many of his supporters who bought at the top lost actual, real money. He duped his followers into buying the coin (with its real value of $0) at its highest price, knowing it was going to crash.

Trump doesn’t need to care about the fluctuation of the cost because he gets a transaction fee every time coin trades are made. The Trump family made $100 million just in trading fees, while many of his supporters have lost thousands of dollars.

But the real scam is not the transaction fees. No, it’s the way that the coin can be inflated in value, at key moments, to allow Trump to swell his fortune. Trump held back 80% of the coin, and he will put more up for sale when the price once again spikes. And how does the price spike, allowing Trump to cash in with an additional release of the coin? Well, all it takes is a few Russian oligarchs or billionaire CEOs to buy a large quantity of coin (therefore increasing net demand) for the price to rise. ...

The biggest scam is that we will never know who is buying the Trump coin to inflate the price and put cash into Trump’s pocket, because the buyers of the coin are secret! So it’s essentially a private conduit for bribery. Billionaires with business before the U.S. government can buy coin in order to make Trump rich, and then whisper to Trump that they need a favor. And the American people would never know.

Two delicious footnotes here:

· To further disguise the identities of those who buy $Trump tokens, our president tends to cash out his profits from the scam on Chinese crypto exchanges.

· Also, the fine print of the transactions stipulates that any MAGA suckers who lost money trying to prop up their hero by buying his digital likeness can't sue to recover their losses.

What a guy.

Perhaps you think Murphy is just another lefty politician in the throes of TDS (Trump Derangement System) indulging paranoid fantasies.

Well, here's a real fact to ruminate on, from CNN.com on Feb. 28:

A businessman who pumped $75 million into the Trump family-backed crypto token finds himself in a fortunate position this week as federal securities regulators are hitting pause on their civil fraud case against him.

On Wednesday, lawyers for the Securities and Exchange Commission and Justin Sun, a 34-year-old Chinese crypto entrepreneur, asked a federal judge to put the agency’s case on hold, citing the interests of both sides and “the public’s interest.”

OK, maybe by now you're saying to yourself: "Hmm, that sure looks grungy. Can't possibly be legal, can it?"

Well, due to the dearth of legal and regulatory guardrails around crypto (which won't be changing during a Trump regime) no, there's probably nothing illegal about what Sun did.

Nor is it likely, given the way the U.S. Supreme Court has narrowed the definition of political influence peddling down to almost nothing, that Trump could ever be convicted of extortion or official corruption based on the known facts of something like the Sun deal.

But I didn't tell you all this just to fill you with more helpless rage.

Perhaps, just perhaps - thanks to an obscure piece of our beloved, tattered Constitution - Trump's greed has unwittingly sown the seeds of his own demise.

Imagine you're a foreign leader or corporate chieftain hoping to carve out a waiver from the absurd tariff regime Trump and his dim lackeys rolled out this week. What would be the quietest, most efficient way to earn his attention and favor?

Just snarf up some $Trump coins for a ridiculous six-figure markup, wait a beat or two for Trump to savor his windfall, then make your plea.

But if you, unlike Mr. Sun, are a foreign government or an individual being used as a foreign government conduit, your meme coin buying spree would put Trump afoul of the Constitution's "emoluments clause."

Article 1 prohibits federal officials from receiving an "emolument" - that is, a salary, fee, or profit based on their official capacity - from a foreign government.

Now, yes, since January 2017, Trump has violated the emoluments clause about as often as he's eaten cheeseburgers or played golf, and never been called to account for it.

Why could this time be different? While crypto is still a little exotic, the age-old, grimy, quid pro quo corruption at the heart of the $Trump scam is a heck of a lot easier to grasp than the Ukraine mess that fostered Impeachment the First.

And the scale of the graft here is breathtaking, the arrogance blatant, the violence to the rule of law incalculable.

Holy emoluments, Batman! All he is doing here is trading on the power of his office to enrich himself; his coins would have zero value were he not in charge of the richest nation on earth - and willing to subvert the rule of law in return for a digital bribe.

A possibly key point: Trump launched his meme coin a couple days before he took the oath of office on Jan. 20. So, the precipitating action of this high crime against the Constitution can't be excused as "an official act," thereby eluding the ridiculous immunity the Supreme Court granted Trump last year, squelching Jack Smith's corruption investigation.

You might be thinking: Now, wait a minute, Satullo, what are you smoking?

As bad as this grift is, who's going to hold the Orange God to account? Not the captive GOP majorities in Congress. Not the Supreme Court judges who watered down corruption law in part to bless their own conflict-of-interest grifts.

Yeah, fair points.

But let's wait a bit for more Americans to feel the weight of Trump's tariffs on their 401(k)'s, their gas prices, their grocery bills, their business bottom lines, or the cost of that F-150 they've been eyeing.

You know, the tariffs they can’t get out from under even as Trump's crypto buyers get special treatment.

Let the rage simmer and bubble.

Meanwhile, urge Murphy and the growing group of aroused Dems in Congress to "do something" by digging up more of the disgusting details and appalling outcomes of this grift. Keep reminding MAGA loyalists that they were the first targets of this pitiless con.

Let the terms "meme coin" and "emoluments" become as regular a topic of outraged voter emails and town hall tirades as Elon Musk is now. Let that rage swell a blue wave in the 2024 midterms that makes a House impeachment based on the "emoluments clause" a foregone conclusion.

This might even be just the huge, blatant beast of Trumpist wrong-doing needed to persuade a few of the GOP senators and high court justices who've always secretly despised Trump to lend a quiet hand to fired-up Democrats as they try to rid the Republic of a toxic lame duck.

So, c'mon, people. Do something. Urge your elected representatives to dig and dig hard into Trump's crypto scheme.

A boy's gotta dream, you know? The other way leads to despair.

I know it's a long, long shot.

So were the American Revolution and the Emancipation Proclamation.