There's been a lot going on this week so you may have missed Donald Trump introducing his latest business venture on Monday. You read that right. He may be in the final stretch of his third presidential campaign but he found the time to formally introduce his latest money-making scheme to the public. And what a scheme it is: The Trump family is getting into the cryptocurrency game.
It's obvious that Trump was completely clueless about how his new business, called World Liberty Financial, works. When asked during a conversation on Elon Musk's X on Monday why it is so important for America to lead in cryptocurrency, the former president started talking about how AI requires a lot of electricity. (Luckily he didn't digress into shark attacks.)
Later he extolled the expertise and brilliance of his 18-year-old son Barron, who he said has "four wallets" and is named as the new company's “DeFi visionary” (that stands for decentralized finance.) Trump himself is the “Chief Crypto Advocate" and Trump's oldest sons, the alleged movers and shakers of this deal, are both called “Web3 Ambassadors."
The Trumps have a couple of very interesting partners in this new venture, exactly the kind of people you'd expect a president to be involved with. The first is a self-described "dirtbag of the internet" named Chase Herro who once famously said of the crypto market, “You can literally sell s—t in a can, wrapped in p—s, covered in human skin, for a billion dollars if the story’s right, because people will buy it. I’m not going to question the right and wrong of all that.” The other partner is Zachary Folkman who, according to the New York Times, used to teach classes on how to seduce women. You can see why the Trumps jumped at the chance to get into business with them.
Both Trump's crypto scheme and the Truth Social stock present an obvious conflict of interest if he wins the presidency as he would have control of the regulatory agencies that oversee them.
It is unprecedented for a presidential candidate to launch a new business less than two months before the election. As those of you who were around before Trump poisoned all ethics and morals in politics will recall, candidates actually divested themselves of their businesses, often putting them in a blind trust in order to avoid even the perception of conflict of interest. It all seems so quaint now.
Trump is also hawking bibles, tennis shoes, NFTs and even pieces of the suit he was wearing during the assassination attempt in August, as if it is a holy relic. And in a matter of days, he could conceivably come into a huge windfall when the "lock-out period" on his Truth Social stock ends and he can sell his shares. Wall Street has inexplicably valued the failed company at $3 billion and he owns 57% of the shares so if he decided to sell he'd finally be a real billionaire. The stock price would plummet even more than it already has and other investors, many of them his fans who've invested their nest eggs, would be ruined. But I think we know that would be of no concern to Donald Trump.
He claimed last Friday that he has no intention of selling and as you know he cannot tell a lie, so that's that. Also, now that he's said he won't do it, he could be subject to SEC investigations and shareholder lawsuits if he did. I have a sneaking suspicion, however, that he isn't too worried about that. After all, they'll have to get in line.
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Both Trump's crypto scheme and the Truth Social stock present an obvious conflict of interest if he wins the presidency as he would have control of the regulatory agencies that oversee them. But Trump's criminality and corruption as president is already well established so what would be a major scandal for any other candidate is irrelevant when it comes to him. (One can't help but think about the Republicans dragging every member of the Biden family through the mud for four years over a legal business deal that took place when Joe Biden was out of office but that's just how it works in Trump's America.)
Trump's been getting away with scams, cons and crimes his entire life and always wriggles out of them. A new book by New York Times reporters Ross Beutner and Suzanne Craig called "Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered his Father's Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success" says it all about Trump's long history of fraudulent business failures and his unique ability to convince people to keep giving him money anyway. They point out that Trump has had two big financial windfalls in his life, neither of them based on even the slightest talent for business. The first came via his daddy, who bankrolled him for decades with hundreds of millions of dollars and bailed him out repeatedly. He did manage some early success with Trump Tower and a couple of other buildings on which he'd been partnered with some people who knew what they were doing. But apparently, that was when the narcissism really kicked in so he bought into his own hype. He never listened to anyone ever again and virtually everything he touched — casinos, an airline, a football league, buildings in Chicago, a development for the world's tallest building in Manhattan, money-losing golf resorts, all of it — failed.
The second windfall came from "The Apprentice" which was picked up by NBC at a moment when Trump badly needed money. The illusion of wealth the show sold to America helped Trump cash in with an exclusive product placement deal that brought in a ton of money. (He even cheated his collaborator Mark Burnett, the producer who created the show, but they were all making money so they just let him do it.) Trump's personal licensing deals — the steaks, the vodka, the ties etc. — apparently never made much money, however.
He is simply terrible at business. According to the authors, he makes the same mistakes over and over again. He pays way too much, doesn't believe in research and always thinks that his name on a project is the magic that will make it work — yet it never does. And he's done the same thing in politics. He has one talent and that's convincing people that he's successful even though he's not. And he's been doing it his entire life.
The big question is whether at the age of 78, he can pull it off one more time. Will he be able to cash in for more than a billion dollars with his failed social media company? Will he be able to parlay his political losses since 2016 into another term as president? We'd better hope that this loser's luck has finally run out.
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