President Donald Trump's family has been profiting big-time from controversial cryptocurrency deals, to the tune of $1.4 billion. And MS NOW's Nicolle Wallace and Vaughn Hillyard were floored on Wednesday, reviewing the president's son Eric's recent speech on why he's so keen to get into the crypto space.
"Let me show you all of the on-camera confessions," said Wallace, playing a clip of Eric Trump that, she noted, features him saying that "I went to crypto basically because I had to" and not just to grift off his association with the White House.
"My entire life was in the modern financial system, and it actually said it works really well for you know, maybe the top 1 percent or the top 0.1 percent, but it doesn't work for the rest of the world," said the younger Trump in the clip. "And it's a system that, until politics, until my family got into politics, I didn't realize how fragile it was. And the second you start saying something that goes against the system, they'll cancel you, they'll ostracize you, they'll come after you. And it's really amazing. That's actually what caused me to find cryptocurrency."
At this, Wallace had to stifle her laughter.
Eric Trump, she noted, is "basically arguing that he was so ... corrupt or shady, or maybe it was when his father was indicted, what, three dozen times he's describing himself as being ostracized, pushed out of the quote 'modern financial' system that quote 'works really well' for maybe the top 1 percent — I don't know what the son of American president is, if not, as he says, the top 0.1 percent — but he's basically confessing that he was pushed into crypto. It's insane."
Hillyard agreed, noting that what he's really saying is he had to go into an unregulated type of financial asset to protect it from "lawsuits by people like [New York Attorney General] Letitia James who are going to try to bankrupt ... the Trump Organization and the family."
That's really the meat of the issue, he added — "The fact is just how unregulated it is and how scrutinized crypto is, and they know that. And that is why, right, unlike the SEC being able to look at stock exchanges, that doesn't exist here in this realm."
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