Dem
47
GOP
53
The airplane is such an obvious, and high-profile example of corruption that another instance of grossly corrupt behavior from Donald Trump this week has basically gotten no attention at all.
The Trump family is trying to squeeze as much money out of crypto as it can, in the event that the whole house of cards collapses. They have three different crypto ventures; the most scammy of those is $TRUMP, which is a meme coin that has no intrinsic value. In other words, you can't use it to buy or sell things; it's just a collectible, like the "limited edition" crap sold by roughly half the advertisers on Fox. Making things worse is that there is considerable evidence that the Trumps and their allies orchestrated things so they could execute a "pump and dump" scheme. In other words, they held, and then sold, a bunch of $TRUMP coins while the value was at its highest (around $40/coin), and then left the rubes holding the bag when the price plummeted (to around $10/coin).
As part of drumming up interest in $TRUMP, on April 23, the President announced a "contest." He declared that, at some date and time in April/early May, chosen apparently at random, his employees would create a list of the 220 largest $TRUMP coin holders. Those folks received an invitation to a fancy dinner hosted by Trump at his Washington, DC, golf club. And the top 25 also received a guided tour of the White House, conducted by Trump himself. The dinner and the tour took place this past weekend.
As with the "new" Air Force One, Trump performed some verbal gymnastics to try to make all of this OK, insisting that he was attending the dinner (and, presumably, conducting the tour) as a private citizen, and not as President of the United States. This is ridiculous, since there is nobody among the 220 "winners" who was mindful of the distinction. The very last person to make the cut had $55,000 in $TRUMP coins, while the guy at the very top of the list holds $37.7 million. The average attendee holds about $1.8 million in $TRUMP coins; the median attendee holds about $350,000. You can be damn sure that these folks are not also spending between five and eight figures on Franklin Mint collectible plates, pogs, or Beanie Babies.
No, they were buying face time and influence with Trump, and every single one of them was sending him far more money than is possible under federal campaign limits ($3,500 a person). And it gets worse. Foreign nationals aren't legally allowed to give ANY money to candidates or officeholders. However, the users' crypto wallets make it possible to figure out that 73% of the dinner guests, and 23 of the 25 people who got to take the White House tour, are foreign nationals. And wait, it gets worse still. While it's possible to figure out that the great majority of the donors are foreign nationals, it's not possible to figure out exactly who they are. Except for #1 $TRUMP coin holder Justin Sun, who outed himself, and a couple of others, most of them are known only by their online handles. For example, one of the people who got a White House tour was PW21, with about $7 million in $TRUMP holdings. That could be Vladimir Putin (Putin Wallet 21?) and nobody but Trump and Putin would know for sure.
And so, Trump is selling access to foreigners, for huge amounts of money, and nobody can even track who he's whoring himself out to. REKT, the #5 $TRUMP coin holder, with about $12 million in holdings, could be bidding on a multi-billion-dollar federal contract right now, and there would be no paper trail at all connecting the crypto with the contract.
In contrast to the airplane, we seriously doubt this will become a liability for Trump. It's got too many moving parts, and it's too complicated to communicate easily. Further, quite a few politicians see crypto as the next big thing (many of them because of campaign contributions made by the crypto industry) and are not eager to take a posture that could be seen as anti-crypto. And that's true of members of Congress on both sides of the aisle.
When (Z) lectures on Boss William Magear Tweed, students often wonder how he could get away with such gross corruption without the people of New York pitching a fit. And the answers are: (1) He kept things a little too complicated for people to quickly understand, and (2) He committed so many different corrupt acts, it was hard to focus on any one of them. Trump seems to be following right in the footsteps of his fellow New Yorker. That said, Tweed was eventually brought down when the political cartoonist Thomas Nast managed to dumb things down enough that anyone could understand what was going on. The Qatari plane could well be Trump's Thomas Nast. (Z)