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Tag: Trump family

  • Trump’s Profiteering Hits $4 Billion

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    In September, the company floated shares on the stock market, capitalizing in another way on the cachet of the Trump name. American Bitcoin merged with a penny-stock bitcoin miner as a way of going public without the cost—or scrutiny—of an initial public offering. And the stock market, as expected, has put a far higher price on the company, in part because it owns a stockpile of bitcoin. The brothers’ stake now appears to be worth around two hundred million dollars. A caveat: Eric Trump, as a large and active investor in American Bitcoin, must report any sale of shares, and that might trigger a selloff. So it seems excessive to add it all to the Presidential-profit ledger. I will add only the approximate value of Donald Trump, Jr.,’s stake: about a hundred million dollars.

    The number in August: $3.4 billion
    Additional profit: $100 million
    New total: $3.5 billion

    WORLD LIBERTY FINANCIAL, BINANCE, AND PAKISTAN

    The Trumps have made even more money since August through World Liberty Financial, a digital-finance startup heavily linked to the family. Its website lists the President as a “co-founder emeritus” and displays his photograph prominently; Eric, Donald, Jr., and Barron Trump are all listed as co-founders. Steven Witkoff, the President’s old friend and diplomatic envoy, is also listed as a co-founder emeritus, and his son Zach is C.E.O.

    In May, World Liberty began selling a form of crypto known as a stablecoin. Unlike digital currencies such as bitcoin, which rise and fall in price, a stablecoin is supposed to hold a fixed value in dollars. Before July, when President Trump signed the first legislation regulating stablecoin, some of the best-known examples, such as TerraUSD, had turned out to be Ponzi schemes. (In December, a New York court sentenced TerraUSD’s co-founder to fifteen years in prison.) But World Liberty promised that its stablecoin, USD1, will always be worth exactly one dollar. Buyers can transfer USD1 to move money or make payments, and any holder can redeem USD1 for dollars. In between, while USD1s are circulating, World Liberty invests the cash that it is holding in U.S. Treasury bonds, in much the same way a savings bank might invest deposits. At current interest rates, World Liberty can expect to earn more than four per cent annually on the volume of USD1 in circulation.

    Last spring, a company owned by the rulers of the United Arab Emirates bought two billion dollars’ worth of USD1. The transaction raised alarms about the appearance of a payoff—because the U.A.E. was simultaneously seeking approval from the Trump Administration to acquire sensitive American artificial-intelligence technology. (President Trump soon granted that approval.) The Emiratis immediately used the stablecoin to invest in Binance, the largest crypto exchange, which has its own interest in influencing Trump. In 2023, Binance’s founder, Changpeng Zhao, known as C.Z., pleaded guilty to violating anti-money-laundering laws, served a brief prison sentence, and agreed to stop running the company. At the time of the two-billion-dollar stablecoin payment from the U.A.E., he was petitioning Trump for a pardon. Binance, as the holder of the stablecoin, can determine how long World Liberty continues earning four per cent a year on that two billion dollars. In other words, Binance controls how much profit the Trumps will make from the two-billion-dollar stablecoin sale. In October, Trump granted C.Z.’s request for a pardon. (David Wachsman, a spokesman for World Liberty, told me that Binance cannot “exert control or influence over World Liberty Financial.”)

    Binance is currently seeking to end federal monitoring that had been imposed when he was convicted for violating anti-money-laundering laws. Now the company is goosing the Trumps’ stablecoin profits in another way. On December 11th, Binance dropped its fees for certain crypto trades if they were conducted in USD1. Then, on December 23rd, Binance began paying users of its platform to hold USD1: Binance announced that, for the next month, it would give users a bonus equal to about 1.7 per cent on up to fifty thousand dollars’ worth of USD1 holdings. If this return rate were annualized, it would yield an eye-popping twenty per cent. And, on January 23rd, Binance announced a combination of new giveaways to USD1 holders which roughly extended that offer. Many users leapt at these opportunities. In the months preceding Binance’s maneuvers, the total volume of USD1 in circulation had held steady at about two billion dollars. On December 25th, shortly after Binance announced its first giveaway, World Liberty announced that USD1’s volume had crossed three billion dollars. It has now climbed to roughly five billion, and most of that expansion appears to have taken place on the Binance platform.

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    David D. Kirkpatrick

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  • The Year in Trump Cashing In

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    On January 17, 2025, three days before Trump’s second Inauguration, he took another leap into the crypto world, releasing a new meme coin: $TRUMP. The day before the ceremony, his wife, Melania, launched her own coin, $MELANIA. Unlike the World Liberty tokens, which gave their holders certain governance rights associated with the company, these assets were simply memes. The $TRUMP one featured a picture of the President with his fist raised and the words “FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT” emblazoned over him. The Melania meme showed a closeup of her face with her hands clasped in front, as if in ebullient prayer. After the Trumps advertised the coins on their social-media accounts, their value jumped up. “$TRUMP is currently the hottest digital meme on earth,” Eric Trump said in a statement to the Times. “This is just the beginning.”

    The Rake-In

    With Trump back in the Oval Office, and players all over the world keen to get in his good books, developments came thick and fast, many of them involving crypto, foreign money, or both. One of his first acts as President was ordering agencies to identify regulations affecting the digital-asset sector and recommend which should be “rescinded or modified.” In February, the S.E.C.—now under new leadership—asked a court to pause its lawsuit against Sun, who by then had raised his World Liberty stake to seventy-five million dollars.

    In March, Trump hosted a crypto summit at the White House, which was organized by his “crypto czar,” David Sacks, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, and announced plans for a U.S. “Strategic Bitcoin Reserve.” Later that month, Eric and Donald, Jr., merged a company that they had formed only the previous month with a Canadian-based bitcoin-mining outfit, Hut 8, to take an ownership stake in a new company, American Bitcoin, which, according to the Wall Street Journal, had ambitions to become the world’s biggest bitcoin miner, and to establish its own bitcoin reserve.

    The spring also saw the Trump brothers expanding in other areas, particularly the Persian Gulf. In April, Dar Global, a Saudi-owned real-estate developer that was already partnering with the Trumps on other Trump-branded projects in the Middle East, declared plans to launch a Trump hotel in Dubai and a Trump golf resort in neighboring Qatar. Eric Trump was in the Gulf for these announcements.

    On the home front, his brother Donald, Jr., attended the launch party for another of his business ventures: the Executive Branch, an exclusive Washington club supposedly charging members an entry fee of half a million dollars. News reports identified Donald, Jr., as one of the club’s owners, and two others as Malik and Buskirk, his partners at 1789, and Zach and Alex Witkoff, two of Steve Witkoff’s sons, who are both co-founders of World Liberty Financial. CNBC said that the attendees at the Executive Branch party included Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Attorney General Pam Bondi, Paul Atkins, the head of the S.E.C., and Brendan Carr, the head of the Federal Communications Commission.

    Crypto—and the cultivation of foreign investors—remained central to the Trumps’ enrichment strategy. According to a lengthy report on their “global crypto cash machine” that Reuters published in October, Eric Trump, while attending a cryptocurrency conference in Dubai in May, pitched World Liberty to potential investors, including a Chinese businessman named Guren (Bobby) Zhou, who had been arrested for suspected money laundering in Britain. (Zhou denied any wrongdoing, and he has not been convicted of any crimes.) Subsequently, the Reuters report said, a U.A.E.-based company associated with Zhou purchased a hundred million dollars’ worth of the World Liberty Financial crypto tokens, WLFI. Evidently, there have been many other foreign purchases. An analysis published by Reuters indicated that more than two-thirds of the purchases of World Liberty’s tokens were carried out via digital wallets that were likely linked to overseas buyers.

    Trump also gained from official largesse. The Constitution explicitly prohibits federal officials, including the President, from accepting gifts from foreign governments without congressional consent. But, in February, Trump, who had been complaining about how long it was taking to build a new Air Force One, went to Palm Beach International Airport and toured a luxurious Boeing 747 owned by the government of Qatar. In May, days before leaving on a trip that took him to Qatar, the U.A.E., and Saudi Arabia, Trump announced on social media that the Pentagon would accept the 747 from the Qatari royal family to replace Air Force One as a “GIFT, FREE OF CHARGE.” The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said in a statement, “Any gift given by a foreign government is always accepted in full compliance with all applicable laws. President Trump’s administration is committed to full transparency.”

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    John Cassidy

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  • Federal judge blocks Trump’s cuts in FEMA funding

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    BOSTON — The Trump administration can’t block federal disaster relief funding for Massachusetts and other states for refusing to cooperate with immigration crackdowns, a federal judge has ruled.

    The ruling by U.S. District Court Judge William E. Smith in Rhode Island sided with Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell and 22 other Democrats who sued to block a Homeland Security policy tying Federal Emergency Management Agency disaster funding to a state’s willingness to cooperate with immigration enforcement.


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    By Christian M. Wade | Statehouse Reporter

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  • Healey to Trump: Hands off South Station

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    BOSTON — Gov. Maura Healey is pushing back on suggestions from the Trump administration that it might take over Boston’s South Street station from the state’s public transit agency.

    U.S. Assistant Secretary of Transportation Steven Bradbury floated the idea during an event at the station Wednesday as Amtrak was unveiling its new, faster Acela trains.


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    By Christian M. Wade | Statehouse Reporter

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  • Dueling standouts meet Vance motorcade

    Dueling standouts meet Vance motorcade

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    There were dueling standouts related to the Nov. 5 presidential election this weekend in Gloucester.

    They were spurred by a visit to America’s oldest seaport by Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance, former President Donald Trump’s running mate, for a fundraising luncheon.

    Republican supporters stood out at the Grant Circle rotary on Friday night and late Saturday morning to meet the motorcade bringing Vance to the luncheon at an address revealed only to attendees. 

    Supporters of Democratic vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris and running mate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz stood out on the 300-block of Gloucester’s Concord Street on Saturday to meet the motorcade as it went by. They brought signs, a green blowup coach, and one man dressed as a hot dog while a woman wore breast pumps.

    Among those protesting Vance’s appearance was Rockport resident, Gloucester native and performance artist Vermin Supreme, who came in fifth on the Democratic ticket in New Hampshire’s presidential primary in January

    The fundraising luncheon was hosted by Mike and Renee Minogue, according to the invitation. Co-hosts were Republican National Committee Committeewoman Janet Fogarty and Bob and Laura Reynolds, according to an invitation posted on the website for the group SRQ4Trump.

    The cost to host the event was a “give/raise” of $100,000 per couple, according to the invitation. The roundtable was a $25,000 give/raise per person. A photo opportunity was a $15,000 give/raise per photo, and attendees were asked to give $5,000 per couple.

    SRQ is the three-letter code that stands for Sarasota-Bradenton International Airport on the west coast of Florida.

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    By Times Staff

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  • Donald Glover Confirms Barron Trump Will Be Writing On ‘Swarm’ Season 2

    Donald Glover Confirms Barron Trump Will Be Writing On ‘Swarm’ Season 2

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    LOS ANGELES—Stating that his latest hire was sure to take the storyline in fascinating new directions, Donald Glover confirmed Friday that Barron Trump would be a writer on the second season of Swarm. “Barron brings a lot to the table, and we’re sure he’ll be an indispensable presence in our writers room next season,” said Glover, explaining that he and his co-creator Janine Nabers were blown away after reading the former president’s son’s Atlanta spec script. “I think the unique life experience Barron has had will give him a lot of insight into the mind of a young Houston woman who has endured a series of dead-end jobs, maxed out her credit cards, and worked as an exotic dancer. It’s honestly a complete coincidence that his father is Donald Trump; he was hands-down the best working professional writer we could find anywhere.” At press time, Glover confirmed that he had hired Hunter Biden to do joke punch-ups on the show.

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