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About a month ago, Donald Trump teased a new family cryptocurrency venture on his TruthSocial page, using an image of himself with his fist raised after his first assassination attempt. On Monday, a day following a second apparent attempt on his life, he and his family officially launched the startup, with a promise to “Make Finance Great Again”: “Crypto is one of those things we have to do,” Trump said on X. “Whether we like it or not, I have to do it.”
The project represents a stark about-face on cryptocurrency for a former president who had previously said it is “not money”—though it was clear Monday evening that his grasp of the digital currency was still not particularly strong. “You want to get in, whether it’s crypto or AI or other things that are coming along,” Trump said. “It’s part of the game. We want to have a great country. We want to stay at the top.”
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More importantly, it represents yet another conflict of interest for a leading presidential candidate who has consistently sought to profit on his political career—be it by selling sneakers, Bibles, and NFTs to his supporters, or by blurring the line between his family business and his presidency. “You generally see presidential candidates try to separate themselves from their conflict of interest instead of bringing new ones into the fold,” Jordan Libowitzof the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told CNN. “It’s definitely new to see a president launching a new company while also at the same time talking up new policies that would potentially directly affect that company.”
Indeed, Trump has cozied up to the industry, describing himself as the “crypto president,” vowing to make America the “world capital of crypto and bitcoin.” At a bitcoin conference in Nashville this summer, Trump said he would fire Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Genslerwho has criticized crypto and called it a “wild west” industry. That pledge has earned Trump some support among crypto proponents and others on the Tech Right. But even some allies have warned that World Liberty Financial could be a “huge mistake,” as Trump supporter Nic Carter of Castle Island Ventures has put it. “I think it genuinely damages trump’s electoral prospects, especially if it gets hacked,” Carter posted on X earlier this month.
The venture has already been the apparent target of hackers; shortly after Trump posted about it in August, the X accounts of his daughter Tiffany Trump and daughter-in-law Lara Trump—who is also the co-chair of the Republican National Committee—were hijacked to post scam links, according to Eric Trumpwho is helping spearhead the new business with fellow failson Donald Trump Jr.
Barron Trump18-years-old and studying at New York University, is listed as the project’s “DeFi visionary.” (“He’s got four wallets or something,” Trump said Monday of his youngest son. “He knows this stuff inside and out.”) Trump, meanwhile, is the face of the company and its “chief crypto advocate.” As the New York Times notes, the details of the venture are being handled by self-described “dirtbag of the internet” Chase Herro and former YouTube pickup artist Zachary Folkman. That pair’s last decentralized finance venture, Dough, lost about two million dollars two months ago in a DeFi hack, as CoinDesk reported.
The launch Monday gave little indication of how the start-up would avoid those kinds of risks. But then again, it gave little detail about how the whole thing would work at allaside from the straining platitudes that have long been a fixture both of Trump’s politics and Big Tech hype men and hucksters: “I do believe in it,” Trump said of crypto Monday. “It has a chance to really be something special.”