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Teapot Dome. Watergate. They’re Nothing Compared to This.

October 17, 2025
in News
We’ve Never Seen Anything Like Trump and Crypto.
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If you were an authoritarian seeking to influence another head of state, you might offer him a luxuriously appointed Boeing 747 airplane. You might spend big at his hotels or invest in one of the many companies owned by him and his children. You might buy his sneakers, NFTs and other branded products. In the case of President Trump, a potential influence peddler has a vast menu of choices.

But why bother with all that? While campaigning, Mr. Trump announced his cryptocurrency venture World Liberty Financial, and, just days before inauguration, his namesake memecoin. Anyone can indirectly deliver money to a Trump family entity simply by buying World Liberty’s tokens. Mr. Trump and his family have accrued billions of dollars in paper wealth through crypto ventures owned by the president, his sons and family friends.

With World Liberty, Trump has created a powerful vehicle for those seeking influence. Anyone — you, me, an Emirati prince — can put money in his pocket by simply buying the tokens the company issues. The key is the convenience factor. For influence peddlers, bags of cash and Swiss bank accounts have been replaced by crypto tokens that can be quickly shuttled between digital wallets and cryptocurrency exchanges. Savvier crypto users — nation-states, hacker groups, money launderers — can use digital “mixers” and other tools to obfuscate their trail.

It’s precisely these conveniences that have also made crypto a favored tool of criminal organizations and sanctions evaders.

We’ve never seen anything like this before. You can tick off notorious executive branch scandals — President Ulysses S. Grant’s rogues’ gallery of corrupt advisers, Teapot Dome’s bribes for oil leases in the Harding administration, Watergate and the downfall of Richard Nixon — but none of them featured this scale of mixing of personal and government interests, much less the sheer accumulation of profit, of Mr. Trump’s multibillion-dollar crypto windfall.

There’s little innovation at work here, except the bold use of the sitting president’s name, image and social media presence to promote crypto products that are little different than thousands of others in the volatile, fraud-riddled crypto markets. For MAGA fans and everyday speculators, buying these tokens might lead to them losing their shirts. And certainly, a president roping his political supporters into an investment as risky as crypto is condemnable.

But the larger risk concerns Mr. Trump and the huge amount of money that powerful overseas actors can potentially funnel toward him. If you are a head of state, it is in your direct political interest to buy Mr. Trump’s tokens or invest in one of his crypto ventures.

These are the skewed incentives that Mr. Trump’s crypto dropbox brings to the political scene. Take a look at two recent multibillion-dollar deals involving Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, one of the most influential figures in the United Arab Emirates, and Steve Witkoff, Mr. Trump’s Middle East envoy.

In the first deal, the state-backed investment fund that Sheikh Tahnoon heads pledged $2 billion in USD1 tokens, a stablecoin issued by World Liberty Financial, to complete an investment in Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange. (Stablecoins are supposed to remain at a stable value and operate as a kind of ersatz digital dollar, and thus are widely used in crypto transactions.) A Binance founder, Changpeng Zhao, is seeking a pardon from Mr. Trump after pleading guilty to money laundering.

In the second deal, Mr. Witkoff and David Sacks, a longtime venture capitalist and tech executive who was named Mr. Trump’s A.I. and crypto czar, secured a deal that allows the Emirates to buy hundreds of thousands of high-end chips needed for artificial intelligence data centers. These chips are highly coveted in the larger global A.I. race, and they are subject to stringent export regulations. In this case, experts expressed concern that the U.A.E. might share the chips with Chinese concerns.

While there was no evidence of an explicit quid pro quo between these deals, they included many of the same people and overlapping interests. And they blended private and government business in a manner that has become a hallmark of this Trump administration.

Sheikh Tahnoon’s decision to use $2 billion worth of USD1 stablecoins is revealing. If his goal was to merely invest in Binance, he could have wired $2 billion directly to it. By using World Liberty Financial’s USD1 stablecoins as a kind of financial intermediary, Sheikh Tahnoon was also jump-starting a company that has financially benefited Mr. Witkoff and Mr. Trump.

Despite the whiff of scandal, much of Mr. Trump’s crypto activity has happened in the relative open, with some of the crypto industry’s most notorious personalities celebrating eight- or nine-figure purchases of World Liberty Financial’s WLFI token. The flamboyant Chinese crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun has posted repeatedly on social media about his many millions of dollars worth of World Liberty tokens and Mr. Trump’s memecoin while positioning himself as a major backer of Mr. Trump’s crypto ventures.

In February, the Securities and Exchange Commission asked a federal judge to pause a civil fraud case against Mr. Sun. The pause was granted. In May, Mr. Sun’s position as the top holder of Mr. Trump’s memecoin earned him, and dozens of other top $TRUMP owners, an invitation to a dinner at Trump National Golf Club in Virginia. There, Mr. Sun received a gold watch.

In another era (in other words, a few years ago), we would have already had congressional hearings and law enforcement investigations into the president’s crypto business interests. But the Supreme Court’s recent decision related to presidential immunity signals that such moves could end up being practically superfluous.

The Department of Justice will not indict a sitting president, and to start his term, Mr. Trump fired 18 inspectors general, who might otherwise have been able to investigate and shine light on the crypto activities of this administration. In February, he ordered the Justice Department to suspend enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which prohibits the bribery of foreign officials. (Four months later, the suspension was lifted.) Enforcement agencies have shifted their priorities away from crypto, while the administration has helped usher in legislation favored by the crypto industry.

Mr. Trump and his sons’ enormous accumulation of crypto wealth appears set to continue throughout his term. There seems to be no upper bound to how much foreign money can be channeled toward him. It’s an open door to a form of corruption, at the highest level, that Americans have never had to confront. But we must confront the dark possibilities it presents.

Jacob Silverman is the author of “Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley” and the host of the podcast “Understood: The Making of Musk.”

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].

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The post Teapot Dome. Watergate. They’re Nothing Compared to This. appeared first on New York Times.

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