The Supreme Court may have granted President Donald Trump an unprecedentedform of immunity for official acts, but that won't shield him from a potential flurry of lawsuits from nearly a million people, former State Department official Richard Stengel argued Sunday.
“There's been corruption of some types in the Oval Office before, but the scale of what he's doing is just beyond imagination,” Stengel said Sunday during an appearance on MS NOW.
“He's violating so many conflicts of interests – the Emoluments Clause both domestic and foreign, the fact that the [United Arab Emirates] spent $400 million buying his meme coin – it's mind-boggling!”
As noted by Stengel, Trump was granted by the Supreme Court in 2024 presumptive immunity from all criminal liability for official acts. The court’s ruling did not, however, provide any immunity for non-official acts, leading Stengel to predict that the president may soon face an onslaught of lawsuits from the nearly 1 million who lost a collective $3.81 billion on the president’s official cryptocurrency token known as “TRUMP.”
“He is still available for prosecution for acts that he does as a private citizen, and I would suspect, after his presidency, a lot of these will be investigated,” Stengel said. “I assume also there will be shareholder lawsuits by the million people that lost [nearly] $4 billion on buying his meme coin.”
Trump’s recent financial disclosures revealed that the president’s wealth had grown by around $2.2 billion during his first year back in the White House, something he attributed to the stock market’s strong performance.
“You know why I’m profiting?” Trump said last week when asked about his exploding personal wealth. “Because the stock market’s going up, everybody’s profiting.”
Stengel said Trump’s claim may come as a surprise to his own supporters.
“Well, I think his supporters would be surprised because they haven't been benefitting from the stock market like he has,” Stengel said. “I think part of his technique is that he does it in public, he does it at a scale that people find mind-boggling so we don't actually know how to deal with it.”