Trump Is Ripping Off His Supporters With a New Coin. They Deserve It.
By Tim Miller and Jonathan V. Last, The Bulwark
A new scam right before the next Trump era.
Transcript (lightly edited by AI):
Tim Miller: Hey guys, it’s Tim Miller from The Bulwark. I’m here with my buddy JVL because I need to bring in his expertise as an investor into various Trump ventures. We had big news last night, Friday night. During the crypto ball, which was happening – the MAGA crypto inaugural ball – Trump dropped a new coin of his own.
Three days before he became president, he dropped a new coin. He had an ICO for the MAGA TRUMP coin, all capital CRUMP coin, which went live Friday night. And I got to tell you, this is one of the most stunning things maybe in the history of society.
For many of you who tune out as soon as you hear Bitcoin, JVL and I will explain this to you, and then we’ll explain how fucking insane this is. JVL, do you want to give, as an investor, maybe a little perspective on what it is you’re putting money in?
Legal Disclaimer: Our attorney would like us to tell you that none of what follows is financial advice or legal advice. This is for entertainment purposes only.
JVL: For people who understand crypto and blockchain, basically, it’s pretend money. There are as many blockchains as there are stars in the sky. A couple of them are used as actual currencies. Bitcoin is used as a currency. Ethereum is used as a currency. And then there are some other blockchains which are used for other stuff. NFTs take place on blockchains, non-fungible tokens. Donald Trump did some dabbling in that. People may remember the Trump trading cards with him as an astronaut or Rambo – just normal things that a guy running for president would do.
Tim: This is an important distinction. This is why this is actually big news and very interesting. This is separate from the Trump NFTs, which are basically just like for people who really get lost in fungibility and tokens. They’re basically just digital baseball cards. That’s what he was doing with the NFT. This is something completely different. This is an actual investment vehicle.
JVL: This is a meme coin, otherwise known as a shit coin, which is not intended for investment and which nobody will ever use as currency. You will never be able to take your shit coin and purchase anything real with it. The Hawk Tua girl had her own shit coin. You will never be able to take that and say, “I would like to use my Hawk coin to purchase a Tesla.”
These things are essentially schemes that resemble pyramids in some way. They’re basically gigantic wealth transfers from dumb people to smart people – or maybe not even smart people, but from marks to sharps. They have no value. People are investing, meaning buying these coins, not because they think they will be able to do anything with them, but because they think other people are going to buy them, driving the price up so they can be the sharps who sell before the rubes realize what’s going on.
I should disclose – I’m one of the sharps. I got in early at 5 a.m. this morning. I put in three hundred and I am currently holding diamond hands more than 13 Trump coins.
Tim: I’d probably recommend selling soon, because I have a couple additional facts to bring to the table. Trump drops this coin three days before becoming president of these United States. This happens after the chair of the SEC, who’s been one of the only people in the government trying to put regulations around these various shit coins and cryptocurrency – he is the devil to the crypto bros. It’s a guy named Gary Gensler. He’s resigning January 20th, and Trump will be able to put his own people in there.
When the coin initially launched Friday night, 80% of the tokens vest to Trump and Trump’s business partners – Fight Fight Fight, LLC. And so 80% of the coins are held by them. And the value of this thing shot to $32 billion in total market cap, of which Trump held 80%, allegedly. As Axios reports, that would mean Trump would have made more than $25 billion on paper for himself and his companies based on this coin.
You mentioned the Hawk Tua coin earlier. For people that didn’t follow that, the Hawk Tua girl – Hayley Welch, she has her own podcast, she’s a competitor of yours JVL – launched a coin that had a similar initial trajectory. A lot of positive momentum on that coin for about 15 minutes, and then – poof – collapse. A lot of regular folks that were big fans of Hawk Tua Girl lost their ass on this. A few hundred people lost their ass. Because what happened is this happened very, very quickly. It was about 15 minutes, I believe the value spiked. And then all of a sudden it went through the floor because 10 large accounts suddenly sold everything.
And there is, I believe, some legal action right now trying to figure out if what was done was coordinated, if it was coordinated who it was coordinated by. Was this a rug pull, which is what people call it in the industry when the team behind a coin pumps – you know, pump and dump is what they would call it in stock world. But this isn’t the stock because these are tokens and not securities.
This is as Matt Levine of Bloomberg always says, it’s like the people in crypto are making a speed run through the entire history of financial assets in like five years. So, yeah, you’ve got a couple hundred people who are looking to file a class action suit. I don’t know how it’s going to proceed or not.
JVL: It’s not the type of thing you need to regulate. When they have terms for things like rug pulls, you wouldn’t think that’s the type of industry that would need any sort of oversight at all or any sort of regulation. Why would it? Because it’s all being done for fun. It says this, you know, when you log into your app, your moonshot app or whatever, it says very clearly on the first page that you never see again: None of this should be done for investment purposes. This is all for fun and entertainment.
I think that’s actually the best way to understand it – it’s gambling for even stupider people. When you go into a casino, unless you’re a very stupid person, you know the rules and you know who the house is. And when you get into crypto, the answer is if you’re not the house, then you’re the mark.
And that’s basically what this is. It is amazing to me that the incoming president of the United States is running one of these things. Not going to call it a scam. I wouldn’t call it a scam. But on the other hand, I feel like the people who would willingly transfer their wealth on something like this deserve it.
If people are happy to just lose money on this in the way that – I don’t know how closely you follow the DJT stock, but you know, the Trump stock, which is the most ludicrous stock. Again, I’m a shareholder. I’ve got two shares of DJT stock and I am diamond hands to the moon on that baby. Someday I’m going to buy a yacht with those shares.
Tim: So we had somebody file a whole bunch of FOIA requests to the SEC trying to find if there were complaints about DJT stock. And there were a huge number of complaints. The complaints were not from people saying, “I can’t believe I got scammed.” No, no. They were from people saying, “Please, Mr. SEC, investigate all of the nefarious forces which are preventing this stock from being worth a bazillion more dollars than it already is because surely it is collusion from the deep state or it is short sellers, naked short sellers, or foreign governments who are preventing DJT, the stock of this great company which has total revenues in the six-digit range… Please investigate why these people are trying to hurt Donald Trump’s company.”
And I just – this is why I like the Trump coin. I mean, again, if we live in a world where these people keep getting insulated from the consequences of their choices, then we’re going to keep getting things like Donald Trump.
We can point and laugh and make fun of the coin, and we’ll keep doing that while the people that invested in this in the first hour get obscenely wealthy based on something with very little value. No value? Any value? Substantive value? None of this is financial advice.
The Tesla stock may or may not be inflated. People think it’s inflated. But at least he’s selling cars. He does sell a car with it. At least there’s a product.
JVL: Yeah, and in theory, there are consumers who use the product, who are satisfied, who would purchase another one or recommend it to a friend.
Tim: That’s not what’s happening here. This is just pure… But the Trump part of it, to do this… Because I got a question from somebody, multiple people. When I made fun of this on Elon’s platform, their ex, multiple people replied to me. And I was like, “Tim, people just don’t care about the corruption.” Like, you know, and they’re always like inaugural mugs, you know, R&C and W, they sold some collector’s edition presidential plates.
Sure, that’s always happened. That’s a tale as old as time. Like, this is a bipartisan thing and nobody really cares about this kind of corruption and it’s just Trump is just a little more gaudy about it. And it’s important to just say, like, this is nothing like that. This is nothing like a commemorative coin where you spend $60 and you get to put it up in your office or whatever so that you can brag about it or show it off to your friends or signal to people at the office that you are a supporter of that president.
This is an investment vehicle slash currency. You might not like these people, JVL, or care about them, but real people could lose real money on this. And the money that they lose is not going to go into some PAC that supports Republican candidates or Democratic candidates if it was the Obama coin. It’s going to Eric Trump. We don’t actually know, but it’s going to whoever it turns out is involved in the Fight Fight Fight LLC.
Back in the old days, this would be a massive story if a politician just took cash from people. And in this case, some people, some well-meaning people could lose their money. Some people that just want to find a way to give Trump money could lose their money. There’s somebody that put in a million in this the first second that it started. We don’t know who. There’s no tracking. So somebody could just put in a million, give it to Donald Trump, tell them when they’re next at Mar-a-Lago, and it could just be used as a straight bribe. And like that is insane. Why is this not what people understood this? I feel like it would be wall to wall coverage. Maybe not anymore. I don’t know.
JVL: So I want to talk about the bribe aspect, but then I want to do something that’s going to make you hate me. One of the things that I think is interesting is that Trump has very cleverly found a way to do bribery, allegedly, in public with consent of both parties. And one of those things is like the stocks. I don’t know if you know this, but it was disclosed that Pam Bondi is a significant stockholder in DJT.
Tim: She had to sell in December, or she said she was going to. I haven’t actually seen the paper, but as reported she was to sell millions. She had 3.9 millions.
JVL: But again, this is you know one way to read that is a show of support would be to buy a bunch of shares to help prop up the stock price of your company which you are the – again, Donald Trump is the largest shareholder of DJT, and so anybody who buys DJT stock is propping up the price of his interest.
The other of which we saw late this week, which is that Paramount or Viacom – I forget who the parent company is – with CBS is considering settling the 60 Minutes lawsuit. And so I don’t know if you saw this but one of the ridiculous – not legal advice – lawsuits that Trump filed was the one against the pollster and Seltzer from the Des Moines Register. One was against 60 Minutes for airing an edited version of the Kamala Harris interview and that this was election interference. It’s the dumbest thing anybody’s ever heard.
Yeah, so we looked at that and it’s like, this is what broadcast television, this is what all television does. But here’s the thing – you and I, and I’m gonna give Trump credit for playing four-dimensional chess. You and I looked at that and said, this is so stupid. Look at this. He’s going to get pantsed. Or we said, this is so sinister, look, he’s trying to chill things and intimidate the media, but that’s not what’s going on.
What’s going on is that the CBS parent company has a prospective merger that is going to come before the Trump administration. And so by having Trump the person, not the office of president, file a civil lawsuit against them, that gives them the opportunity to settle that lawsuit and to settle it with very strict non-disclosure terms to it. And who can say? Maybe that winds up helping their case for merger approval.
This is using civil litigation not for the purposes of intimidating or extorting people, but like cooperatively with the plaintiff and the defendant working cooperatively to use that to transfer funds legally, totally legally. And to then lock that fund transfer behind an NDA so that nobody can ever see what happens in order to then auction off core government services.
That’s, again, slow clap. This is – I am like Ron Burgundy. I’m not even mad. You ate the whole wheel of cheese. I’m impressed.
Tim: Sure. But isn’t – I mean, I don’t want to really turn this into a media criticism because it’s really about all of us. It’s about the media. It’s about everyone. It’s about Democrats. It’s about anyone involved in public life. It’s one of those things where it’s so brazen and so shameless and so ridiculous that people just kind of like, well, you know, and move on.
It’s like the 10,000 dollar paper bag – people can wrap their head around that. It’s like, he got 10,000 bucks, gave a contract over here to Joe, can’t do that. Okay. That politician, that’s corruption that you can wrap your head around. It’s small ball. That’s tangible.
The scale of this is just so enormous and just the brazenness, how in your face it is. It’s not a secret bag hand. It’s like, no, it’s like, go ahead, put money in the coin. Put money in the coin if you want.
JVL: This is the American way, right? You steal a car and you go to jail, but you steal $100 million and universities name libraries after you. That is a tale as old as time.
Tim: I would think there would be a reaction to this. The laws of political gravity our whole life said that there would be a reaction to somebody trying to make themselves a billion dollars off of the public trust and putting regular people in a position where they could lose their savings to invest in some sort of shit coin. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills. Why am I the only one upset? Why aren’t you upset? This is outrageous.
JVL: It is outrageous, but unlike most of the bad things that are going to happen under Trump, which are going to be designed to hurt the people who don’t like Trump – and this is what… So, I mean, again, to make this serious for a minute.
I believe that the Trump mass deportations are going to be targeted at blue cities and blue states, and that the idea behind it is going to be to try to cripple blue economies and weaken Democratic governors and mayors politically while preserving cheap labor and the good economic things that immigration brings in red states and red municipalities. I think that’s what he’s going to try to do, but I have a take on why that’s not going to work, that we’re going to save for a different YouTube. People need to subscribe to the feed, but continue.
Unlike those, in this case, the people who are going to get hurt are his people and they’re doing it willingly and I would like to sit around and make a couple bucks watching these mouth breathers burn their hands touching the stove.
Tim: This should be the only story of the inauguration. If it wasn’t Trump, if we weren’t all frogs boiling in water, and if everyone hadn’t just decided, well, fuck it, the people have gone for Trump, so I guess this is part of the deal now. Had Obama or Bush or any president, you name them, three days before the election said, “I am going to launch a pretty shady financial vehicle that is going to enrich me to the tune of $25 billion, potentially, allegedly” – it’s the only thing anybody would cover about the inauguration. People wouldn’t even be able to get to the speech because that would be so unprecedented and insane.
And yet here we are. We’ll see what happens. JVL, thank you for jumping on on the weekend. We’ll be back. Trump has a rally tomorrow. Maybe it’ll come up. We’ll see how it goes. Good luck, America. See you guys soon.
