The crypto lobby has been pouring boatloads of cash into the latest presidential campaign of former president Donald Trump, who has entirely abandoned his once-hardline stance against digital currencies as the campaign money has rolled in.
Now, on the back of recent promises to make America the “crypto capital of the world,” Trump is prepping to publicly roll out a wildly dubious and ethically fraught new crypto project started by none other than his sons Eric and Donald Trump, Jr.
The project is called World Liberty Financial (WLFI), and it centers on “stablecoins,” or coins that creators claim are pegged to stable commodities or government currencies. In an X-formerly-Twitter thread posted last week, the WLFI team claimed their stablecoin would be pegged to the US dollar.
“For too long, the average American has been squeezed by the big banks and financial elites,” Trump, a financial elite whose penthouse is caked in gold, said in a Thursday X-formerly-Twitter video promoting the forthcoming crypto venture. “It’s time we take a stand — together.”
But while stablecoins sound like they should be stable, they’ve historically been disastrous for investors and economies.
The collapse of the so-called stablecoin Terra-Luna was central to the 2022 crypto crash that wiped nearly $2 trillion from the market, resulting not only in the catastrophic fall of billion-dollar crypto ventures like FTX but in people’s entire life savings vanishing into thin air.
What’s more, as The Wall Street Journal reported last year, stablecoins are also a favorite financing tool of organized crime and terror groups, who use the sleazy digital currencies to launder cash, traffic drugs, and even buy and sell humans.
And on top of all that, there are too many conflicts of interest to count.
If elected, Trump has already promised to slash crypto regulations and bring digital currency into the mainstream American economic fold. WLFI would capitalize on those pro-crypto regulatory shifts, thus putting a sitting president in the position of supporting a possibly lucrative family business through the powers of the federal government. And like Trump’s Truth Social meme stock, WLFI would also offer obvious new inroads to currying Trump family favor, as wealthy operators looking to suck up could simply pour investments into the Trump sons’ stablecoins.
Some of the non-Trump family characters reportedly involved in the project are too seedy to even make up. As Bloomberg News reports, a key WLFI “dealmaker” is a person named Chase Herro, a former colon cleanse salesman who stated in a 2018 YouTube video — while driving around in a Rolls-Royce — that “you can literally sell shit in a can, wrapped in piss, 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,” Herro added. Clearly the kind of guy you’d want to be entangled in the American economy.
WLF defended its stablecoin effort in an X post this month as a means of ensuring the “dominance” of the US dollar and maintaining America’s financial leadership on the international stage. In the same thread, the company claimed without evidence that the US dollar is actively under attack by unnamed “foreign-nation states.” But economic experts overwhelmingly agree that fearmongering claims around the allegedly imminent downfall of the American dollar are exaggerated and that knocking the US dollar out of its top spot would likely take decades.
Through one lens, Trump’s very public backing for WLFI is just the latest example of the former president using his campaign to promote a personal or family business. In addition to standard campaign merch, he’s selling less-conventional golden sneakers for nearly $500, as well as a $299 pair of “Trump Crypto President” low-tops in the shade “Bitcoin Orange”; $99 NFTs of himself; a $59.99 “patriotic” take on the Bible; and a recently-published coffee table book in which he threatens to jail Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, which is available for $99 (though you can get a signed version for $499.)
But the implications of WLFI are far more serious than expensive Bibles and random junk.
In addition to being used to fund illicit activities around the world, stablecoins have proven to be anything but stable. Coupled with the clear risk of corruption that the Trump family’s involvement in the crypto world would pose should the former president retake the Oval Office, and everything about WLFI’s scheme is as dangerous as it is bankrupt.
More on Trump and crypto: After Calling Crypto a “Scam,” Donald Trump Now Owns Millions in Crypto
