Donald Trump’s rise to power, especially during his second term in office, has changed the political culture of the United States.
He is using the presidency as an instrument for the enrichment of himself and his family that has in fact no precedent in U.S. history. Trump is running the government like a mafia boss.
He has managed to defy accountability by destroying or marginalizing institutions that would rein in his executive power, and in Trump v. United States, the Supreme Court ruled that presidents have absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions taken while in office.
Enter Trump’s crypto business dealings as a case in point, from which the president made more than $1 billion last year.
In a move that makes even Vito Corleone look like an amateur, a regulator appointed by the president himself has granted the Trump family-backed crypto firm World Liberty Financial preliminary approval to function as a bank. Sen. Elizabeth Warren commented after the approval: “President Trump is now the first president in history to approve, operate, and supervise his own bank. This is the most brazen act of self-dealing our financial system has ever seen — and Congress cannot allow it to stand.”
This is one of the sleaziest acts of conduct by a sitting president of the United States. But the fact that it happened without overwhelming pushback from the populace also speaks volumes about the thorough and wide-ranging transformation of U.S. political life during Trump’s second presidency.
Ironically, Trump had previously expressed that he was not a fan of cryptocurrencies. In June 2021, during an interview with Fox Business Network, he described Bitcoin as a scam and even suggested that cryptocurrencies posed an actual threat to the status of the U.S. dollar as a global reserve currency. In another interview with the same network that year, he said that crypto was “potentially a disaster waiting to happen.”
But The Donald was never one to hold values of any kind. With him, money is everything — nothing else really matters. So, he reversed course on cryptocurrencies during his 2024 presidential campaign when he became convinced by executives in the industry that there was a fortune to be made by investing in crypto and recognized that cryptocurrencies can move value quickly and easily across borders. Of course, Trump also flipped on crypto when he realized that these companies were huge corporate donors to that year’s elections.
In 2024, Trump and his sons — along with special envoy Steve Witkoff and his own sons — had helped co-found World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency business that is trading publicly. The Trump family owns 38 percent of World Liberty. An investment firm in the United Arab Emirates owns nearly half of World Liberty, according to a Wall Street Journal report published in January 2026. Yet the Trump family collects 75 percent of all of the crypto revenues. The mafia don always gets the lion’s share from all undertakings conducted by the lower tiers of the organization.
World Liberty was established during the height of the 2024 presidential campaign so Donald Trump could join as a private citizen. Still, World Liberty employed those connections as part of its branding to raise funds by letting everyone know that the company was linked to Trump.
In January 2025, a few days before his second inauguration, Trump launched a meme cryptocurrency, $TRUMP, which netted him hundreds of millions of dollars. Unsurprisingly, with no guardrails between presidency and personal profits, Trump collected nearly $800 million in 2025 from World Liberty’s sales of its own digital tokens. Incidentally, digital tokens have zero intrinsic value and their prices are driven purely by speculation. They are digital “tulips.” This development was seen by many as a new phase in the monetization of the presidency.
Cryptocurrency, mind you, is not a traditional currency and doesn’t have legal tender status. But it is a powerful tool for criminal activity. Needless to say, World Liberty won’t run like a traditional bank. There will be no checking accounts or loan applications. It will issue and manage its own stablecoins (digital tokens whose values are pegged to the U.S. dollar), known as USD1. Its main function will likely be to legitimize institutional graft, especially since U.S. federal regulators have taken a hands-off approach to crypto oversight. From now on, corporate entities or governments from around the world seeking access to the Trump administration can route huge sums of money through World Liberty digital tokens.
Indeed, another characteristic of cryptocurrencies is that they make foreign political interference easier — and far right leaders seem to be especially drawn to them. In the U.K., Nigel Farage, leader of the far right Reform Party, received more than 5 million British pounds from a cryptocurrency billionaire, who lives in Thailand, without declaring it. Argentina’s far right President Javier Milei was accused of being involved in a transnational crypto fraud scheme in which thousands of token-holders saw their investments, to the tune of 250 million U.S. dollars, being wiped out. Naturally, both Farage and Milei have denied any wrongdoing. However, Farage is still being investigated, while Milei faced calls for impeachment.
C.J. Polychroniou is a political scientist/political economist, author, and journalist who has taught and worked in numerous universities and research centers in Europe and the United States. Currently, his main research interests are in U.S. politics and the political economy of the United States, European economic integration, globalization, climate change and environmental economics, and the deconstruction of neoliberalism’s politico-economic project. He has published scores of books and over one thousand articles which have appeared in a variety of journals, magazines, newspapers and popular news websites. His latest books are Optimism Over Despair: Noam Chomsky On Capitalism, Empire, and Social Change (2017); Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet (with Noam Chomsky and Robert Pollin as primary authors, 2020); The Precipice: Neoliberalism, the Pandemic, and the Urgent Need for Radical Change (an anthology of interviews with Noam Chomsky, 2021); and Economics and the Left: Interviews with Progressive Economists (2021).
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