‘I have never seen such open corruption’: Trump’s crypto deals and loosening of rules shock observers

After courtship with the crypto market, the president now profits immensely from a sector he once called ‘looks like a scam’. Cryptocurrency multibillionaire Justin Sun could hardly contain his glee.

Last month, Sun publicly flaunted a $100,000 Donald Trump-branded watch that he was awarded at a private dinner at Trump’s Virginia golf club. Sun received the acknowledgment for investing $20 million in the crypto memecoin $Trump, ranking him first among 220 buyers of the token who received dinner invites. Trump’s much-hyped 22 May dinner and a White House tour the next day for 25 top memecoin buyers were designed to boost sales of $Trump and ended up generating about $148 million, much of it from anonymous and foreign buyers, for Trump and his associates.

The $Trump memecoin was launched days before Trump’s presidential inauguration, resulting in a surge of buyers and yielding tens of millions of dollars for Trump and some partners. Now, Trump’s new pro-crypto policies have benefited significant campaign donors who lead crypto companies, as well as Elon Musk, the world’s richest individual, who spent nearly $300 million to support Trump and holds substantial crypto investments in bitcoin through his electric car company Tesla and other ventures.

In Congress, leading Democrats, including Senator Richard Blumenthal from Connecticut and Representative Jamie Raskin from Maryland, announced separate inquiries into Trump’s crypto dealings in May. They criticized Trump for leveraging his position to enrich himself through his crypto operations. For instance, in March, Trump hosted the inaugural ‘crypto summit’ at the White House, where he vowed to end Biden’s ‘war on crypto’.