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was ordering agencies to identify regulations affecting the digital-asset sector and recommend which should be “rescinded or modified.”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.”
