President Donald Trump and his family have made unfathomable profits off their cryptocurrency ventures, Tim O'Brien wrote for Bloomberg Opinion on Thursday — and it is a new level of brazenness from a president who once made his real feelings about crypto tokens very clear.
"Trump is 80, and he has been working for the better part of 60 years," wrote O'Brien. "His crypto windfall is certainly far larger than any amount he earned in a single year as a real estate developer, casino impresario and reality TV oddity during that span."
What makes his dealings so much more obvious, he noted, is that six years ago, in Trump's first term, he bluntly said of Bitcoin, "it just seems like a scam. I don’t like it because it’s another currency competing against the dollar."
Flash forward to today, and Trump has launched his own "memecoins" for a quick profit, as his son Eric uses his crypto venture World Liberty Financial to make deals with foreign governments. It all adds up to a windfall of $1.4 billion for his family.
"Trump has used his Oval Office perch to help engineer federal support for an industry he once derided as a 'scam' before a philosophic conversion that convinced him to set up various crypto ventures just before his 2024 reelection," wrote O'Brien. Trump, for his part, says his youngest son Barron convinced him crypto was worth investing in. "But I suspect that Trump, who can spot a pile of money a mile away, probably understood that the White House might afford him an opportunity to cash in on crypto, an industry that still lacks a widespread and demonstrable corporate or consumer use case."
Trump has also profited off of suspiciously timed stock trades, but his financial disclosure clearly shows that "the stock market wasn’t the primary engine spinning gold inside his portfolio. He had crypto to thank for that," wrote O'Brien. Even some of Trump's own voters, who got fleeced in many of these rug-pull schemes, are starting to take notice.
The bottom line, O'Brien concluded, is that "Trump, who is a practiced observer of his audience and can usually read it infallibly, surely recognizes that apathy. He’s laughing all the way to the crypto bank."