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in the days before his inauguration, President Trump announced his own cryptocurrency, TRUMP coin, a move that could stand to make the Trump family significantly wealthier. And now, Trump has offered investors something else—access to him, when he recently announced he’ll hold a private dinner with the largest investors in TRUMP coin. In this week’s episode, we talk about Trump’s venture into cryptocurrency and the giant web of ethical concerns it presents.
You can follow Michael Calore on Bluesky at @snackfight, Lauren Goode on Bluesky at @laurengoode, and Katie Drummond on Bluesky at @katie-drummond. Write to us at uncannyvalley@wired.com.
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Transcript
Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.
Michael Calore: Hey there. This is Mike. Before we start, I want to take the chance to remind you that we love to hear from you. Do you have a tech-related question that’s been on your mind or just a topic that you wished we talked about on the show? If so, you can write to us at uncannyvalley@wired.com. If you’ve been listening and you enjoy our episodes, please rate the show and leave a review on your podcast app of choice. It really helps other people find us. Thanks. Hello to you both. GM, GM to you both.
Lauren Goode: Flag me, we’re all going to make it.
Michael Calore: That’s how the crypto people say, good morning.
Lauren Goode: Do you mean the crypto boys?
Michael Calore: The crypto boys?
Lauren Goode: Yes.
Michael Calore: Well, I guess it’s afternoon. How do they say good afternoon, GA? They probably don’t say good afternoon because they’re too busy hustling.
Lauren Goode: They say HODL.
Katie Drummond: Did we start?
Michael Calore: Yes, we did. This is WIRED’s Uncanny Valley, a show about the people, power, and influence of Silicon Valley. Today, we’re talking about Trump’s ventures into cryptocurrency and the web of conflict of interests that those ventures are just one small part of. On April 23rd, Trump announced that he would hold a private dinner with the largest investors in his self-branded cryptocurrency, TrumpCoin. The announcement created a trading frenzy that on paper added hundreds of millions of dollars to Trump’s net worth. The dinner has now been officially set for May 22, and it is raising ethical and constitutional concerns, with many pointing out that the president is effectively selling access to his administration, but that’s just the beginning of how Trump’s ongoing business ventures are pushing the line between money and politics. I’m Michael Calore, director of consumer tech and culture here at WIRED.
Lauren Goode: I’m Lauren Goode. I’m a senior writer at WIRED.
Katie Drummond: And I’m Katie Drummond, WIRED’s global editorial director.
Michael Calore: So before we dive into Trump’s crypto saga, it’s worth pointing out that he wasn’t always the biggest fan of the industry. As early as 2021, he called bitcoin a scam and said that it should be regulated “very, very high.” Not only has Trump changed his views on cryptocurrency, but in January of this year, three days before he was inaugurated for his second term, he launched his own meme coin. This is where the technical terms come into the show, because I just said meme coin. Maybe we should define some of these things like meme coins and cryptocurrency and how it differentiates from bitcoin and stablecoin.
Lauren Goode: Yes, good call. Cryptocurrency, let’s start with cryptocurrency. Basically, it is decentralized, not regulated, digital money.
Michael Calore: OK, I’m bored.
Lauren Goode: No one government controls it, either the governance of it or the market value of it, and I think a lot of people conflate cryptocurrency with bitcoin because bitcoin is the Kleenex of crypto or the Tampax. I want to force all of the crypto boys to compare this in their minds to Tampax. Bitcoin is the name brand everybody thinks of. It was the first established cryptocurrency. Bitcoin’s value is determined both by people essentially believing in it and also by the fact that it does have scarcity. No more than 21 million bitcoins can exist, though there are plenty of other crypto coins people can get into.
Katie Drummond: People are going to get so mad at me for saying this, but just listening to you talk about that, I still cannot believe that this even exists. I’m just like, “Uh-huh.”
Lauren Goode: It has existed in concept for decades. Then, while getting ready for this podcast, I realized that it only came into existence around 2009.
Katie Drummond: Early recent history.
Lauren Goode: It’s one of those moments that I have from time to time covering this world where I go, “Oh, my God. We’ve lived through bitcoin, the smartphone, and now this AI revolution. Literally, what a time to be alive.”
Katie Drummond: Oh, I remember a friend in … I guess it would’ve been the early 2010s who had to divest of her bitcoin because she was a journalist and she took me out for sushi dinner and paid for it with bitcoin that would now be worth half a million dollars, like something like deeply, deeply upsetting. But let me explain my favorite type of coin. This will tell you a little bit about my personality: stablecoin. A stablecoin is probably the only type of cryptocurrency I would ever consider investing in. It is a cryptocurrency whose value is pegged or tied to a stable asset. We like stable assets here in the Drummond household. Often that is a fiat currency, so like the US dollar or a commodity like gold. So, the most common stablecoin that you may have heard of is tether. So, I think tether is the biggest stablecoin out there on the market, and it is pegged to the US dollar.
Lauren Goode: That means that when the value of the dollar fluctuates, the value of the stablecoin also fluctuates.
Katie Drummond: Yes.
Michael Calore: Because you can always trade a stablecoin for a dollar.
Lauren Goode: Got it.
Michael Calore: Yeah. So, if you own 80 coins, you can get $80 tomorrow.
Katie Drummond: There’s something very reassuring about that to me personally.
Michael Calore: Same. Well, I’ll tell you about the absolute opposite of that, which is the chaos known as the meme coin.
Lauren Goode: Exciting.
Katie Drummond: I don’t like this.
Michael Calore: The only reason that meme coins exist is to enable people to financially speculate on the market. So, a meme coin is generated based on a person or a meme or a concept like Doge, Dogecoin, Trump, TrumpCoin. They say, “I’m just going to make a coin, and if you buy a bunch of these coins, then I get the money and the value goes up, or it goes down based on how popular I am and how much people want to give me money.”
Lauren Goode: And how much people are posting about it on Reddit or doing Twitch Live streams about it.
Michael Calore: Yeah. And theoretically, it could be a good investment. Most likely it is a bad investment. It’s basically you buy meme coins to establish clout in certain communities. There are some meme coins that will serve as a ticket. So, when we’re talking about Trump selling TrumpCoin and people buy TrumpCoins so that they can attend a dinner, then that is a use for a meme coin that’s pretty common. It turns into something called a utility asset, which is boring. All you need to know is that if you buy the coins, then you gain clout in the community that is around that coin’s personality.
Lauren Goode: And even if it turns into that utility asset, it’s still not regulated. None of this is regulated.
Michael Calore: No, no. None of this is regulated.
Katie Drummond: Well, let’s talk more about that dinner, that dinner.
Michael Calore: So Trump’s meme coin has gathered a lot of attention. The exclusive access that he’s promising will go to the top 220 owners of TrumpCoins. So, of all the people who went out and bought TrumpCoin, the top 220 asset holders are going to attend a private dinner that is set to happen later this month.
Lauren Goode: So our colleague Joel Khalili has been reporting on this, and we just have to go back very quickly to January. This was a few days before Trump entered the Oval Office again. That’s when Trump launched his meme coin. He put on Truth Social, “My new official Trump meme is here.” Also, he put winning.
Katie Drummond: I mean, there are so many things I could say about Donald Trump. His voice on social can be very funny.
Lauren Goode: I mean, we can all hear it in our heads. The following day, the coins that were released into circulation, which Joel reported was around 20 percent of the coins to start, were worth $14 billion. Let’s just sit with that for a second. An incoming president of the United States launched an online cryptocurrency scheme days before taking office that boosted his own net worth significantly. Axios reported at the time that the value of these coins made up 89percent of Trump’s net worth. On top of that, a week later, Melania, his wife, the first lady, also released a meme coin. Around the time those coins were circulating, they were worth a billion dollars.
Katie Drummond: I wonder, two things, and then Lauren, I’ll let you keep going. I wonder one, why throw the Melania coin in there? We’re already talking about $14 billion of value. I guess they felt like throwing another $1 billion on top of that. Random, maybe she just really wanted her own meme coin. The other question I have is, have we figured out who got to him? So this is a president who when he was in office the first time, had only bad things to say about cryptocurrency. Right before he’s inaugurated, second go around, has come up with the ultimate scheme to massively enrich himself and his family and is all in on crypto. I am very curious about how he went from point A to point B, and essentially who got to him. Who got in this man’s ear and told him to do this? Because he certainly does not have the technological prowess or the cryptocurrency expertise to come up with this plan on his own. It’s just an interesting question to think about. I would love to see that reported somewhere.
Michael Calore: I would speculate that it was his oldest sons.
Katie Drummond: The boys.
Lauren Goode: Oh, interesting.
Michael Calore: Yeah, Don Jr. and Eric Trump, because they got into cryptocurrency in 2024 when they launched World Liberty Financial with a couple of business partners.
Katie Drummond: Oh, of course, which we’re going to talk about later. That makes a lot of sense while I’m filing that away to force someone to report it out.
Lauren Goode: Well, yeah, and if anyone has any insight into that, we’d love to hear it. My guess would be it would be the direct pipeline from Silicon Valley to the administration. But once again, we’re all ears. I mean, I think we should just very quickly, the concerns about this, right? One is that this whole thing ends up being a rug pull where there are regular people who actually buy into this coin and stand to lose a lot from it. The other concern is that this ends up being a catalyst for bribery, and then it becomes a question of whether or not this is even constitutional.
Michael Calore: Right. So, let’s talk about the bribery aspect or the access peddling aspect. What’s up with the dinner?
Katie Drummond: Trump essentially offered to host this private dinner, 220 of his top meme coin investors, essentially offering, just to make this very, very clear, direct access to him in exchange for buying into a meme coin that will personally enrich him and his family. So, as Joel wrote in a piece, “The dinner gambit puts the TrumpCoin in a different class entirely. In establishing an explicit quid pro quo, a large investment in exchange for an audience, the maneuver has effectively turned Trump into a utility coin, an asset that bestows on holders some perk or advantage, not what you like to see in the context of the United States President.” I think it’s also worth broadening this out for a minute to point out that President Trump is actually having a lot of dinners. He is having many, many dinners of a suspicious flavor, right? Not all of them are even tied to his meme coin. This meme coin dinner is the latest in what has been a pretty steady line of events that he has been hosting. Not so much acting in capacity as President Trump sitting in Washington, DC, but he has been hosting dinners at Mar-a-Lago, where he is asking business leaders or anyone with money to spend somewhere between $1 million and $5 million for the privilege of eating dinner with him, sometimes involving candles, as we have seen in some of these invitations that WIRED has obtained and reported on. So, this is a pay-for-access scheme that is happening right out in the open between the president of the United States and business leaders with an agenda who want to curry favor. This meme coin dinner is basically a new version of that. In the case of these Mar-a-Lago dinners he was hosting previously, the money from those dinners ostensibly appears to funnel into a PAC, which is a little bit mystifying given that Trump cannot run for a third term, unclear exactly what is happening with that money from the Mar-a-Lago dinners. But when we’re talking about the meme coin dinner, the money essentially goes to the Trump family pot, which as far as the White House and the president’s communication staff are concerned, that money is being overseen by the Trump family, by the Trump sons. There’s no conflict of interest here. This has nothing to do with Donald Trump. At some point in the very near future, this man will be out of office and he will once again be able to access the many billions of dollars he has amassed by allowing anyone with a checkbook and some basic competency around buying cryptocurrency to eat a meal with him. So, that’s a little bit about the dinners.
Michael Calore: So what do people get? Is it just a candlelight dinner?
Katie Drummond: Well, presumably they get a meal, unclear on exactly what is being served. But there are even tiers for these dinners, for this meme coin dinner. So, there are additional perks. There is a VIP White House tour and a special reception for the meme coin’s 25 biggest holders. So, if you are among this very small elite group, you get a tour of the White House. I don’t know. I can think of better VIP perks off the top of my head, and that wouldn’t be one of them. But I think my favorite part of all of this, from everything that I have read, is that anyone buying into this meme coin dinner. So, if you are amassing a fortune of Trump meme coin, I mean God help you, if you are amassing a fortune to try to get into this dinner, you should be aware of the fact that there is a warning attached to this invitation saying that the president himself may not even attend the dinner or that the event could be canceled for any reason. Individuals would get a Trump NFT. Remember that scam, a Trump NFT as a consolation prize. So, what this all says is that obviously, to Trump, the dinner actually happening doesn’t matter. He doesn’t give a shit who ends up sitting at a dinner table trying to trade this or that with him or barter this or that. He doesn’t care about any of these relationships or any of these people. The speculative bidding against the meme coin, driving up the value of that meme coin is the entire point. Whether this dinner actually happens or not, TBD.
Michael Calore: There’s a secondary aspect too to the meme coin, because let’s say you want to go to the open market and you want to buy TrumpCoin. So, two of the organizations that are in charge of the buying and the selling of the coins in the open market are called CIC Digital LLC and Fight Fight Fight LLC.
Katie Drummond: I can’t believe that LLC was up for grabs. I can’t believe I didn’t get that.
Lauren Goode: Say what you will about the current administration. The naming convention is just …
Katie Drummond: It’s beautiful.
Michael Calore: Fight Fight Fight. So, both of these companies are offshoots of a larger conglomerate that is owned by the Trump family.
Lauren Goode: Well, we know that CIC Digital is owned by the Trump organization. Fight Fight Fight, which I can’t believe I have to say again, it’s a little less clear. But together, these two entities collectively own 80 percent of the Trump carts.
Michael Calore: What these two companies do is they make money and they make profit from fees whenever people buy and trade coins. So, they basically serve as an intermediary for transactions between anybody selling a coin, anybody buying a coin. In the crypto market, when you serve as an intermediary, they call this market making. So, these are market maker companies. As Joel Khalili, our colleague, he’s written a lot about TrumpCoin. In a recent story, a source told him this, and I want to say it to you, “The optics of profiting from selling your own coin are terrible, while profiting from the market making is opaque enough to protect your reputation.”
Katie Drummond: I really want to know who that source was.
Michael Calore: Basically like serving as a banker is better than owning the bank account with regards to your public.
Katie Drummond: But just to be clear, in this case with regards to the TrumpCoin, the Trump family is both the bank account and the banker, right? This is Trump’s meme coin, but his family is essentially overseeing the LLCs that are profiting from the coin. Is that right?
Michael Calore: Yeah.
Katie Drummond: Which is nuts.
Lauren Goode: I just looked up the official Trump token on Robinhood right now. According to gettrumpmemes.com, 20 percent of the supply, like Joel reported, was available at launch. Then it goes on to describe how CIC Digital LLC, an affiliate of the Trump organization, collectively own 80 percent of the remaining non-public supply subject to a three-year unlocking schedule. So, yeah, the other 80 percent is owned by a Trump family organization.
Michael Calore: They can just sell them whenever.
Katie Drummond: Good opportunity to remind everyone that this is not regulated. These transactions and these coins are not regulated. This is wild. It is wild.
Michael Calore: So the price has been fluctuating a lot, and there is some incentive to buy TrumpCoin if you are a speculator and you want to buy low and sell high, but really, who is buying these coins? Is it just Trump supporters with disposable income? Is it people who want to sit down for a candlelight and get a VIP tour of the White House?
Lauren Goode: That’s an expensive candle.
Katie Drummond: I think what’s additionally galling and frightening about all of this is that we don’t know and we really can’t know. That is part of the problem, a big part of the problems. So, the names of the Trump meme coin holders are concealed, right? These are alphanumeric crypto wallet addresses. These are pseudonyms. We don’t actually have the full names and the full backstories of any of these people who are buying and selling this meme coin. Usually, this makes sense for lots of reasons, right? Access to the president of the United States is a controlled matter. You can’t buy your way in. You can’t just call the president and set up coffee. That is not how this works. So, let’s say foreign actors buy their way into this dinner. Let’s say a representative of Russia or a government decide that they want a seat at this table. Based on how this process works, that is by all appearances entirely possible. The fact that the American public, that Congress, that nobody has any idea who is buying and selling this coin, who is in that top group of 220 people, who is in that top group of 25 people who are apparently getting a VIP tour of the White House, we have no idea who any of them are.
Lauren Goode: The really big question with that is whether this means the president is in violation of the emoluments clause of the US Constitution, which restricts federal officeholders from accepting gifts, emoluments, offices, or titles from foreign states without the consent of Congress. So, if someone from Russia, just use that example again, is buying into the TrumpCoin and contributing directly to Trump’s net worth, they don’t have to disclose their identity when they’re buying that coin. That’s by nature of the technology. That’s not by nature of the law.
Michael Calore: We can’t look and see who is on the list of 220 people because it’s just a bunch of cryptocurrency wallet numbers.
Lauren Goode: The Trump administration has not said whether or not they’re going to publicly reveal the list of people who are at this dinner.
Michael Calore: So this is obviously all very distressing, but we should outline quickly before we move on, who are the winners here and who are the losers?
Katie Drummond: Well, look, I’ll take the winners. That’s easy. The Trump family, big winner here, and whichever meme coin holder or foreign actor manages to convince the president to do some business. Those are the winners. The people with a seat at the table who spent the money to get the access to get what they want, those people might win. The Trump family certainly is coming out way ahead on this, billions of dollars ahead on this, while Donald Trump is sitting in office as the president of the United States. It’s unbelievable. Lauren, any losers?
Lauren Goode: I mean us, the American people. There is just almost nothing about this that benefits the people of the United States. I feel like if we could all just take a step back for a moment in this year, and by we, I mean the American people, and remind ourselves that our public servants are supposed to be serving the American people. They’re supposed to be providing opportunities for the people of the country to live a better life. They’re supposed to facilitate a fair market and stable economy. Katie, your favorite word, stable.
Katie Drummond: I do like a stable economy.
Lauren Goode: Which as of April has not been the case, supposed to offer protections and support in terms of public health, which as we discussed last week on the podcast, has not been the case. They’re supposed to carry out priorities in the interest of national security. If they would only stop using unauthorized Signal chats to do that, they’re not supposed to be running a crypto grift or any grift that benefits them this richly. You could maybe, maybe argue that having a tech-forward administration committed to seriously evaluating the role of cryptocurrency in modern society is a good thing, but that’s not what this is. This to me feels like a scheme.
Michael Calore: And it’s difficult to pin actual tangible harm on people because if you look at some of the things that the Trump administration has been doing with regards to trimming back government spending, they’re cutting programs that cut access to people and then you can actually trace that they actively cause harm. They’re denying people specific benefits that help them stay alive, help them stay in their homes, et cetera. With this, it’s like, “Yeah, who’s it really hurting?” Well, it’s hurting our whole notion of how government is supposed to work and how international relations are supposed to work, how access to powerful people in our government is supposed to work. It’s breaking my mind.
Lauren Goode: There’s a famous Alexander Hamilton quote, which I’m not going to get right at the moment, but is basically that one of the greatest threats that you have to the republic is the idea that a foreign adversary could buy its way in.
Michael Calore: So, beyond the TrumpCoin frenzy, there has also been increasing reporting and scrutiny surrounding the recent business deals led by Donald Trump’s two oldest sons, Eric and Donald Trump Jr. Let’s run through those business deals.
Katie Drummond: Boy, there’s a lot to cover here. So, let’s start with stablecoin business. So, last week, Eric Trump showed up on stage. He was in Dubai. He showed up at a crypto conference, Token 2049, and he was with the cofounder of World Liberty Financial. He was with the son of the White House envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, where they announced the USD1 crypto stablecoin. Now, it’s important to note here that the Trump family holds a 60 percent stake in World Liberty Financial. So, basically by transacting in this stablecoin USD1, entities who are affiliated with foreign powers, essentially foreign actors could indirectly transfer wealth, transfer money to the Trump family, and essentially buy their way in to access, again, similar to the dinner we were just talking about, buy access to the president of the United States. Now, it doesn’t stop there. There was a New York Times story published earlier this week that literally, like I was reading the story, I was in a cab, my jaw was on the floor of the taxi through the entire story. So, the story was about Don Jr. and Eric, and let me read you just a little bit of it. This story touched on all of the different business exploits that these boys have going on all around the world, particularly in the Middle East. So, “a luxury hotel in Dubai, a second high-end residential tower in Saudi Arabia, two cryptocurrency ventures based in the United States, a new golf course and villa complex in Qatar, and a new private club in Washington.” So those are just a few of the deals that Eric and Don Jr. are brokering all over the world, all on behalf of the Trump Foundation, which Eric runs. Now, some of these ventures, it’s important to note, also involve foreign governments. So, including the government of Qatar, government of the UAE, it’s a mess. I mean, these guys are everywhere all at once. They are doing a lot of business deals, leveraging the Trump name for sure, leveraging the fact that their dad is in office, but the complexity here is that all of this money funnels into the Trump Foundation, which will directly benefit Donald Trump himself. So, it’s not out of the ordinary. It’s not crazy for the offspring or the family members of a sitting president to essentially cash in on that status. It’s a little icky, but it happens all the time. It’s very conventional, at least in US politics. What is particularly unique about this situation is that the president himself also stands to gain financially from the ventures that his sons are undertaking. That is the key distinction here.
Michael Calore: And to be clear about how this works, the announcement that you’re talking about that was made on stage in the Mideast was that there was an investment fund that is controlled by the United Arab Emirates. They said that they were going to invest $2 billion in Binance and that they were going to make that investment with USD1 coin, which is the coin that is run by World Liberty Financial. So, they take $2 billion and they buy $2 billion worth of this coin. So, now World Liberty Financial is controlling $2 billion. What do they do with it? They buy Treasury bonds. That’s how they lock the price of the coin to the US dollar. They invest in the US Treasury. So, you earn interest when you buy treasury bonds. So, with today’s exchange rates, if you buy $2 billion worth of treasury bonds—
Lauren Goode: Two bills.
Michael Calore: … you will make $85 million approximately in interest every year.
Lauren Goode: Who makes that money though, the UAE fund that invested?
Michael Calore: World Liberty Financial.
Lauren Goode: Which is partially owned by the Trumps.
Michael Calore: Yes.
Katie Drummond: Well, they have a 60 percent stake. So, largely, yes.
Michael Calore: Yes.
Katie Drummond: Mike, that was a very good explanation.
Michael Calore: Thanks.
Katie Drummond: I’m honestly surprised that Eric and Don were smart enough to cook this up. I mean, this is pretty good. It’s pretty good.
Michael Calore: Well, as you mentioned, they only owned a portion of the company. There are also a lot of crypto people working at the company behind the scenes.
Katie Drummond: Someone else had a strategic hand in this one. But still, I mean, we are talking about just astronomical wealth accumulation. I mean, these are huge amounts of money that we’re talking about just on that one piece around the stablecoin, not to mention all of these other business deals happening all across the Middle East, happening here in the United States. It is a sweeping grift, a global grift by the Trump family to capitalize on the fact that their dad is the president of the United States. It is really, really, truly unprecedented. I think it’s also important to note that I think in a more normal news environment, in a more conventional news cycle, any single one of these business ventures would be getting a ton of attention. In the Biden era, I mean, this would be Super Bowl. This is really truly nutso stuff. It is genuinely not getting that much attention. There has not been much reporting about what Don Jr. and Eric are doing at all of these conferences and events and with all these business deals because their dad is making so much news on a daily basis that nobody can keep up. Nobody is paying attention to the fact that any of this is happening because it’s chaos out there, right? Everybody’s talking about tariffs. Meanwhile, Eric and Don Jr. just landed a stablecoin deal that would net their family 85 million bucks a year. It’s crazy.
Michael Calore: Yeah, I mean, there have been some political responses to it, right? Congress is slightly concerned about this at least.
Katie Drummond: Yeah, I mean, in the way that US politics is working so well right now. I mean, look, the GOP, not surprisingly, to my knowledge, I have not heard much from them. I think that they are largely silent and continue to support Trump as president and all of the blatant grift and corruption that comes with it. The Democrats, as they have been for many months now, arguably many years, they’re upset. They’re not happy. Not sure what they’re going to do about it, but they’re there expressing their displeasure. So, there is crypto legislation making its way through Congress right now. There is the Genius Act named for Donald Trump. No, I’m just joking. It wasn’t. The Genius Act, actually, thank you for the laugh.
Lauren Goode: It was named for Marc Andreessen.
Katie Drummond: Wait, was it actually?
Lauren Goode: No, but let’s go with that.
Katie Drummond: OK. Sorry. I’m a dual citizen. I grew up in Canada. I’m very gullible. So, the Genius Act actually had bipartisan support until very recently. So, the Genius Act, I think it’s important to note it is backed by the crypto industry, but it would basically make it easier for stablecoins specifically to grow in the United States. It would basically create a regulatory framework for that one type of cryptocurrency to allow it to operate in a much more above-board conventional way in this country. But because of all these Trump family shenanigans, now some Democrats are getting cold feet. So, Elizabeth Warren is one example. She’s been particularly fervent as she often is to her credit in opposing the Genius Act. She actually gave a speech on the Senate floor earlier this week where she had a lot to say. So, she said in part, “The Genius Act makes this kind of corruption worse. There is nothing in this bill to stop it. Instead, the bill would accelerate it. President Trump and the crypto industry are not trying to jam through this bill because they know it will make the bribery and corruption harder. They are trying to jam it through because they know it will turbocharge the size and scale of the stablecoin market and help boost the value of their own stablecoin ventures, all while containing no real restrictions on the president’s self-dealing.” That really is, I think, the biggest concern among Democrats, which I don’t know, somehow they didn’t flag this several months ago. It was only when the Trump families started getting really blatant about this, was that the Genius Act, this bill basically does not have adequate protections for corruption. It’s just not set up to deal with what we’re seeing from the president himself, let alone independent actors who are not in office and who decide to behave in unscrupulous ways with stablecoins.
Lauren Goode: This is what I was saying earlier too, in that if we had an administration on either side of the political aisle that was committed to embracing the technology that we live with now, that is not going away, whether it is content moderation issues, policies around AI, or really seriously evaluating the role of cryptocurrency in the market, I think that that would be a valiant thing to do. I think that that would be a good effort to make. I don’t understand how you can be sitting in public office at the highest level and have these private investments while you’re also directly in charge of basically regulating this type of currency.
Katie Drummond: Well, you can’t. I mean, you can’t be doing that.
Lauren Goode: But they are.
Katie Drummond: Yet here we are.
Lauren Goode: Right.
Michael Calore: Yeah. I mean, this is also a symptom of the fact that the Republican Party controls the executive branch and the legislative branch, and basically, the entire crypto industry is now aligned politically to the right, not the entire crypto industry, but a very large sector of the crypto industry is now aligned to the political right because of this. Because the SEC, the Securities and Exchange Commission, who typically would be the people who would be very alarmed with what is going on, have said, “Yeah, this type of cryptocurrency, that falls outside of our jurisdiction.”
Lauren Goode: So, we keep saying that this is unprecedented. I mean, presidents have used their station of office to enrich themselves before, have they not?
Lauren Goode: Unfortunately, there are a lot of precedents for this. I think that in the most recent administration, the Biden administration, a lot of folks would point to the example of Hunter Biden, where his lucrative involvement with the gas company Burisma drew a lot of criticism. Republicans had alleged that this influenced Biden’s policy positions towards Ukraine just as one example. There are other examples of Neil Bush, the brother of President George W. Bush, Billy Carter, the brother of President Jimmy Carter, all having business dealings that created questions about potential conflicts of interest. This goes back to Lyndon Johnson. I was reading about how in the 1940s, Lady Bird Johnson bought a small broadcasting company in Texas. Lyndon Johnson was in the House of Representatives at the time. Later he became president. He claimed he had no stake in it, but by Texas law, he did have a half stake in this broadcasting station. There was a reportedly favorable string of decisions made by the FCC over the next several years that really benefited the Johnsons. They made millions off of this station that they bought for, I think, $17,500 back in the day. So, there are prior examples of this, not exactly crypto or meme coins, but business dealings. Lots of presidents also benefit from their status after they leave office, paid speeches, book deals, entire production companies like the Obamas. This is what typically happens when an American president leaves office these days. You could launch a goddamn Bush coin for all I care right now. I still won’t buy it, but feel free to tinker on the blockchain if you are no longer in office. While you are in office, the president must divest of private interests, so should the VP, so must their spouses and minor children. They have to be put in a blind trust. Sometimes high ranking officials might even choose to divest even if they’re not legally required to. That has happened before as well. So, I am not a presidential historian, but it does seem to me that the Trump family has just taken this to new levels with cryptocurrency, with everything else, and that the conflict of interest is actually happening right in front of us now.
Michael Calore: Yeah, except we still can’t see what’s happening because we don’t know who’s going to be at the dinner. It’s just so weird.
Lauren Goode: But even if we don’t know, even if let’s say we can somehow eliminate the concern that it is foreign adversaries who end up, not even adversaries, just foreign governments who end up buying into this coin, even if it’s all just incredibly wealthy Americans who want in, there’s still the opportunity for the sitting president to rake in millions of dollars and his family members to do that as well while he is acting president. It comes back to that question you asked earlier, Mike, of who are the winners and who are the losers? It’s really hard to say who the winners are here in the American public.
Katie Drummond: Well, other than that one big winner, the one who runs the country, he’s winning.
Michael Calore: So for parting thoughts, how do we see this all playing out over the next couple of months? I mean, obviously, we have the dinner coming up in May. Do we think there will be more dinners? Do we think that there will be more opportunities to buy an audience with the president?
Lauren Goode: I can tell you that we are probably not getting invited.
Katie Drummond: We didn’t get invited to Elon Musk’s exit interview that he did with 20 press outlets when he allegedly stepped back from Doge. So, no, I don’t think we’re getting invited to that dinner. I mean, I wish I could say, “Oh, no, Congress is going to come out swinging. This is going to get shut down. There’s no world in which this continues.” I think that realistically, the dinner will or will not happen. It doesn’t really matter. The money has been made. The precedent has been set. There will be more dinners. There will be more business dealings for the Trump family around the world. They will find, I suspect, new and honestly to their credit, enterprising and creative ways to leverage the family name and leverage cryptocurrency to continue to enrich themselves. I think that that’s not just the next couple of months. I think that that is the foreseeable future for as long as this presidency lasts.
Lauren Goode: I just want to know where the money’s going.
Michael Calore: It’s going to Mar-a-Lago. OK. Well, thanks to both of you for this lovely and uplifting conversation about the state of cryptocurrency and US politics. I really appreciate you both.
Lauren Goode: Buy the UV coin, the Uncanny Valley coin.
Katie Drummond: Oh, my God. Can you imagine?
Lauren Goode: We should launch a meme coin.
Katie Drummond: Guys, we could get rich. This is our move. Let’s do this.
Michael Calore: No, thanks.
Katie Drummond: Fine.
Michael Calore: Thank you for listening to Uncanny Valley. If you’d liked what you heard today, make sure to follow our show and rate it on your podcast app of choice. Please get in touch with us with any questions or comments or show suggestions you may have. The easiest way to do that is to write to us at uncannyvalley@wired.com. Today’s show was produced by Kyana Moghadam and Adriana Tapia. Amar Lal at Macro Sound mixed this episode. Jordan Bell is our executive producer. Condé Nast’s head of global audio is Chris Bannon. And Katie Drummond is WIRED’s global editorial director. Jake Lummus was our New York studio engineer. Matt Giles fact-checked this episode. Jordan Bell is our executive producer. Katie Drummond is WIRED’s global editorial director, and Chris Bannon is the head of global audio.
