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- [00:01]
A
I'm Daniel James and you're listening to 7am. Donald Trump returned to the White House, promising to make America the crypto capital of the world, despite having once dismissed bitcoin as not money and warned it was based on thin air in a 2019 tweet. In his first year back in office, Trump has set that skepticism aside as it became clear crypto presented an extraordinary business opportunity. A new financial disclosure hints at just how lucrative those ventures have become. And while some investors have lost heavily, Trump's own fortune has surged, raising questions about how far a president can go in turning public office into a money making machine. Today, journalist and research director for Public citizens Trump Accountability Project, Zach Everson. Donald Trump's crypto empire and the new frontier of political corruption in America. It's Friday, july 3rd. Zach, thanks for joining us. We've got Trump's latest financial disclosure. What did it reveal about the president's wealth since taking office?
- [01:16]
B
The presidency has paid Donald Trump quite well, and that's not money coming directly from the US taxpayers. It revealed that he has made at least $1.4 billion from crypto in the last year, which is just an astronomical amount of money. All told, his net worth, Forbes estimates it to be about 6 billion and change. So he is really doing better now than he has ever done in his entire career as a businessman.
- [01:43]
A
I guess that begs the question, how does that compare to other presidents? Zach?
- [01:46]
B
It compares quite favorably. We haven't seen any sort of record of any other presidents reporting anything remotely like this. And it's not just crypto, it's really everything. Now, he earned more than $86 million in legal settlements as well. Those included the 24.5 million from Metta, $16 million apiece from Paramount and Disney. He reported over 22,000 stock trades in the last year or so, which again, is just an astronomical number. I think with Joe Biden, it was in the dozens. And President Trump's biggest stock holdings include Amazon, Metta, Nvidia and Tesla. He is very active financially. His entire financial disclosure came to 927 pages. Very lucrative year last year. What message does this send to average Americans, especially those who may be struggling right now financially?
- [02:38]
C
I don't get involved in my personal. We have funds that run my money.
- [02:42]
B
But you are benefiting.
- [02:44]
C
Well, I've made a lot of money before I became president and they invest my money and I don't talk to them. I never, I don't even speak to them. So I have many people, I don't know what they Call closed accounts or something. You put your money in and that's it. I don't talk to them. They're big institutions and they run it.
- [03:01]
A
And he's made money selling other things as well, Like Trump banned Bibles and sneakers and other sort of small items.
- [03:08]
B
You've got bibles, you've got sneakers, you've got Trump fragrance, which I'm sure you're familiar with.
- [03:13]
A
I'm wearing it right now, Zach.
- [03:15]
B
Yeah, I can smell it through the camera. Yeah, I mean, he's really opened himself up to willing to profit in any way possible in a way that we didn't even see in the first term. One of the examples I give for that is the online TrumpStore.com that didn't even exist at the beginning of his first term. It just directed people to a physical retail shop in Trump Tower in New York. Within hours of him being reelected, they already had out the 45, 47 line, referring to the numbers of his presidency peddling merch. And if you go on there right now, there are dozens of different types of MAGA hats. The Trump Organization's official website is now selling Trump 2028 merchandise. But watch this. We're celebrating our 250th birthday. He's got all sorts of stuff pegged to that. You know, it doesn't matter that he's not 250, though. He is getting up there. You know, Trump 250 is on a whole bunch of merchandise that he's selling. And he made several million dollars off that last year. But again, not as. Not as much as crypto.
- [04:19]
A
The big ticket Item is crypto, $1.4 billion in income from that source. When we say income from crypto, what does that mean in this case?
- [04:29]
B
In this case, you know, he is actually making money off this. That's one of the things when people hear crypto, it's. Oh, it's pretend money. It's magic beans without the magic. Donald Trump has his deals structured so that he gets paid. These deals get him paid upfront. So, for example, with his Meme coin, which I think he made about $600 million off of last year, that's a marketing deal. He was paid to use his image on that. So the coin, which was trading for as high as about $74 and is now down to $1.78, people who bought that lost out on it, but Donald Trump still got paid from it. We've had a lot of reporting on him making money off this, be it World Liberty Financial Token sales, selling a significant amount of the company to the UAE's National Security Advisor. So we've seen enough reports trickling in over the course of the last year that this number, unfortunately, was not a surprise.
- [05:23]
A
So tell me a little bit more about where this money is coming from. Because Donald Trump famously wasn't always a crypto guy.
- [05:30]
C
It just seems like a scam. I don't like it because it's another currency competing against the dollar.
- [05:36]
A
So how does he end up in the crypto business?
- [05:39]
B
He learned that there was real money to be made out of thin air. He will credit it with some of it to his son Bannon, who was pretty savvy in crypto, supposedly and has helped him figure out this stuff. But he really started off gradually.
- [05:54]
C
Hello everyone, this is Donald Trump, hopefully your favorite president of all time. Better than Lincoln, better than Washington, with an important announcement to make. I'm doing my first official Donald J. Trump NFT collection right here. And right now they're called Trump Digital Trading Cards.
- [06:12]
B
The first product he put out there were NFTs, which are digital trading cards.
- [06:17]
C
And you get a chance to meet me, go to collect trump cards.com right now. And remember, Christmas is coming and this makes a great Christmas gift.
- [06:30]
B
And he did all right with that. So then you saw later on he launched World Liberty Financial in the waning days of the 2024 presidential campaign, and that at first just put out a token that allowed you to vote on matters concerning World Liberty Financial. It didn't convey ownership, you couldn't even sell it up front. But they did sell a chunk of those. And then right before he was inaugurated again, they launched the Meme Coin, which took off spectacularly. And later on, World Liberty Financial launched a second product, USD1. Now that's a Stablecoin pegged to the value of the US dollar and supposedly backed one to one with government reserves. And he makes money off that by people depositing money, similar to how a bank makes money. People give him fiat currency and then by him, World Liberty Financial, World Liberty Financial gives them the stablecoin. And the whole time that stablecoin is in circulation, World Liberty Financial earns interest on the money that's being made off of it. So that's really how he's pulling in all this money from crypto.
- [07:31]
A
And when he was selling tokens and the like, there were perks that people that were purchasing those tokens were able to avail themselves of. What were some of those so called perks?
- [07:42]
B
Yeah, so called is a great way of putting it because there were a Lot of complaints. The biggest one was a dinner in his D.C. area golf club where he attended. Now, they said he was there in his personal capacity, but I believe he was behind a lectern that showed the presidential seal. But he flew in, made a couple remarks, and got out of there. So there were a lot of people who attended that and were upset. There was a similar event recently at Mar a Lago, his Florida residence, for people who own a lot of it. And they've really tried to incentivize people to keep the Meme Coin around. So they've been trying to drive up use of the token through, through selling access and little perks.
- [08:21]
A
So for the average person trying to get in on this record, cryptocurrency is a famously risky investment. So what has happened to those who have bought in?
- [08:30]
B
Yeah, you know, like so many other cryptocurrencies, the problem is not being an insider, you know, and people who get into business with Donald Trump. This is a guy who's been convicted of business fraud. He's taken several hotels to bankruptcy, like, don't do it. But people did it and, you know, figuring, oh, it's the President, we're going to do all right. According to Reuters, people who invested in his products lost $2.3 billion. You know, we've just seen the market value of these things crash. As we talked about with the Meme Coin, it was at $74. Now it's down to $1.78. So the people who got in early through those sales, they're up. But if you just bought it when it hit the open market and you weren't an accredited investor or foreigner, you're down. You know, it seems like almost everybody who's engaged in Trump's crypto schemes after the original interest in it has lost most of the money.
- [09:22]
A
Coming up, how crypto became a full family business. Zach. It isn't just Trump cashing in on all of this. It's become a family business now as well. With Melania and his sons, how involved are they and what kind of money are they making?
- [09:42]
B
So Melania's. We got some information from her from the disclosure. Because presidents are required to disclose their spouse's income, she's doing all right. Not as well as Donald Trump. She made about $7 million last year from her Meme Coin, which was released shortly after his. The sons are really the ones who are super engaged in this with him. In World Liberty Financial, they're both listed as co. Founder. Excuse me. All three of them are listed as co founders there and are actively involved in the company. Don Jr. And Eric are involved in another company called American Bitcoin, which mines its own bitcoin. So those guys are all in on crypto. And again, according to Forbes, we've seen seen their finances just skyrocket. You know, they were worth, I think Eric was worth about 40 million according to Forbes, before this presidency last they did it in late fall, he was worth 500 million. Donald Trump's also seen his net worth go up about tenfold. And those numbers are several months old and almost certainly much higher right now. So while they did profit during the first presidency, it wasn't a ton. But they are out to show that they learned some lessons from the first presidency and they are ready to make some money off those this time around.
- [10:51]
A
And of course, Zach Trump isn't just passively making money from crypto. He is the President of the United States, which means he can create rules and conditions that help his investments thrive. Is that what has happened here? What has his administration done on that front to affect the value of this cryptocurrency?
- [11:10]
B
Yeah, it's really convenient to be launching crypto ventures while also oversee the regulatory system of the United States in that regard. We've seen pardons to business partners in the crypto, most significantly CZ and Binance. They are incredibly important to World Liberty Financial, helping it set up the plumbing that got it running churning trades to make it look like it was more active than it was, having incentives for people to keep it in their account and actually holding a significant amount of it for themselves. Last I checked, of the stablecoin, the USD1, 87% of it was held at Binance and Binance is banned from the United States. So that means if the rules are being followed, 87% of it is in overseas hands. But you know, Binance, CZ got pardoned and there were a whole bunch of other investigations that got dropped. Justin sun being amongst them. You're seeing all sorts of benefits to crypto exchanges that have listed his currencies for trade. And yeah, with regulation, we passed a stablecoin bill and it is set up perfectly for his stablecoin. You know, it kind of kneecapped a lot of the competitors that maybe weren't as prepared with reserves as his was, but his is, you know, his, his was okay, no surprise from a distance
- [12:27]
A
and probably even close up. Zach, a lot of this looks like it's clearly a conflict of interest, clearly corruption. But is any of it illegal and is there any oversight or investigation into this at all currently. Yeah.
- [12:41]
B
From a layperson's look, it is clearly a conflict of interest. By law, the president cannot have conflicts of interest. I mean, that is explicitly stated that the president and the vice president cannot have conflicts of interest. The Constitution does preclude the president from receiving money from foreign governments. That was never really put to the test in our entire history. We haven't really got a definitive case law on that. There was a look at, you know, there's some cases during Trump's first term that looked at it, but they never got resolved. So we don't know if, you know, Donald Trump accepting tens of millions of dollars from a company backed by the spymaster of the UAE counts. You know, right now, Republicans hold both chambers of our Congress, and they are not investigating. You know, as angry as they were about Hunter Biden and some of his apparent wrongdoing, which was not great, he was joining, he was clearly cashing in on his dad's name. The amount of what Hunter Biden did and got the Republicans so upset about is minuscule compared to what the Trumps are doing. One thing I think a lot of us take hope is we saw what happened in Hungary, where corruption was just such a major issue there to drive out an entrenched power, that you're hearing Democrats saying, okay, we think this corruption is going to play like this. And polls are showing that it is resonating with voters. The issue, again, is that it's hard to make a lot of these people who've lost money to Donald Trump seem sympathetic and that, you know, to the rest of the country, and that they're Trump supporters who put money in a guy who's got a reputation of not being a great investment.
- [14:19]
A
And finally, Zach, what are the broader ethical implications of Trump cashing in on the presidency like this? Are we opening a Pandora's box here when it comes to how political power could be monetized in the United States?
- [14:31]
B
That box was opened during his first term when he didn't suffer any consequences for how he monetized the office there. That paled in comparison to what he's done this term. You know, the thought would be that Joe Biden and the Democrats would come in, they would have some power, they would see, okay, here's what Donald Trump did. Here's how he got away with it. You know, yes, okay, this was never done before, but it was legal. Let's try to close that loophole. Let's put in some rules here. And they did nothing of the sort. And there was no really reckoning with what he did. So when he came back into power, it's all out there again. You know, my hope is that now is just so blatantly obvious and so massive that whomever takes power after Donald Trump will go ahead and say, okay, yes, we need to get some checks put in here because we have seen somebody absolutely exploit these rules and we can't let that happen again. But that's my hope.
- [15:27]
A
Well, I think it's many people's hope. Zach, thank you so much for joining us.
- [15:31]
B
Thanks for having me on. DANIEL.
- [15:43]
A
Also in the news, Shadow Assistant Finance Minister Simon Kennedy says the Albanese government is crumbling to the gambling lobby as it introduces its gambling ad reform into Parliament. The coalition, the Greens and the crossbenches are all pushing for changes to the bill, which limits TV and radio ads only during certain times and creates an opt out feature for online platforms. The legislation will now be sent to an eight week Senate inquiry. And a United nations scientific panel has released its first global report on artificial intelligence. The report, compiled by 40 experts, say AI could transform healthcare, hunger relief, education and climate action if used responsibly. But the technology is advancing faster than governments can regulate it. The report also says power is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few companies and countries, with the United States controlling 75% of computing power and the world's largest AI clusters. I'm Daniel James. Thanks once again for listening to 7aM we'll be back tomorrow.