Trump's crypto chicanery must be reined in

The friction between President Donald Trump’s personal and governmental interests in the global cryptocurrency business is creating a corrupt and fiscally dangerous swamp of its own.

On Thursday, he is hosting a dinner at his Virginia golf club exclusively for the biggest holders of his memecoin, $TRUMP. Memecoin values are tied to popularity and hype. His "coin" and another from his wife Melania were introduced in January as he was taking office. The $TRUMP venture had an initial market value of $15 billion, then plunged. But after the dinner invite was announced, prices rose again.

Many of the top 220 guests will be anonymous because the seats are paid for through crypto "wallets," a great number of them presumed to be from overseas. The Trump family business and a Delaware LLC reportedly own 80% of the token’s supply.

Trump’s conflicted role in the burgeoning crypto trade goes disturbingly far. World Liberty Financial, in which Trump’s three sons are involved, is going into stablecoins. That’s an electronic product tied — less subjectively than memecoins — to the value of the dollar. 

Trump family representatives have discussed investing in the U.S. operation of Binance, the world’s biggest crypto exchange. What's unsettling is that Binance’s owner, Changpeng Zhao, pleaded guilty in 2023 to violating a U.S. anti-money laundering law. Now, Zhao is applying for a presidential pardon.

Seamier yet, an Abu Dhabi investment firm reportedly is using the Trump-tied World Liberty’s crypto currency to invest $2 billion in Zhao’s Binance exchange. Zhao last year met with Zach Witkoff in Abu Dhabi. Witkoff is a World Liberty co-founder — and son of Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special Mideast envoy, a clear conflict of its own.

Trump’s crypto involvement is so entangled that it’s even hard for nonspecialists to absorb. It’s much easier to comprehend tangible grift like Trump accepting a $400 million luxury jet from Qatar or partnering his family business with that nation's state-owned real estate firm. 

Most ominously, Trump gets to influence the shape and conduct of an international industry, in which he has grabbed a stake. Venture capitalist David Sacks became his crypto policy "czar" having raised millions of dollars for a Trump-aligned super PAC.

Potential abuses don’t get any bigger than controlling to your benefit a lucrative industry that was specifically created to safeguard transactional secrecy. Worst of all, if crypto isn’t properly controlled, experts say, it threatens to subvert the stability of the dollar. Congress has begun pushing through legislation to set ground rules. But lawmakers must investigate and respond to the sordid facts already on the ground involving Trump & Co.

It’s just one more way Trump’s norm-busting voraciousness to enrich himself must be contained where possible by Congress and the courts. Otherwise, in this case, the fiscal risks to the nation are huge.