Trump’s crypto grift is the last thing America needs

In such a dispiriting campaign season, it’s tempting to tune out each new outrage. Even so, former President Donald Trump’s continued promotion of a sketchy new crypto project mere weeks before the presidential election merits comment.

It’s one thing for Trump, who once said that cryptocurrencies were “based on thin air,” to make an about-face on policy. Politicians do that all the time, especially when a fount of campaign donations is at stake. What’s not normal is for a leading candidate to lease his campaign out as a publicity platform for a new business that would explicitly benefit from his future administration’s policies.

And what a business! Even in an industry that’s become almost synonymous with fraud and hacks, World Liberty Financial stands out. One of the key players, Chase Herro, has called himself the “dirtbag of the internet” and spent a career pitching dubious products, from a weight-loss scheme to a previous crypto project that lost millions in a hack. Another, Zachary Folkman, once ran a highbrow enterprise called Date Hotter Girls. You might think these are odd associates for a presidential candidate — but remember that Trump himself spent a career pitching grubby scams and routinely appointed kooks and cranks to executive-branch offices.

What few details have been revealed about World Liberty Financial’s operations aren’t reassuring. It appears to be a decentralized finance platform that will issue a new digital token, called WLFI, to be sold in an unregistered offering. Anyone who has paid attention to the crypto world in recent years — where about a quarter of new tokens end up being pure pump-and-dump schemes — would hesitate before committing to such an offering.

Nevertheless, just weeks before an election that Trump says “is our one shot to save our country,” the former president spent about 40 leisurely minutes on the livestream launch of World Liberty Financial talking about the expansive virtues of this new-to-him financial product. “Crypto is one of those things we have to do,” he said. “Whether we like it or not, I have to do it.”

We don’t and he doesn’t. As so often is the case, Trump was confusing his personal financial interests with the interests of the United States. It’s not to the benefit of most Americans — with the exception of hackers, fraudsters and a small number of true believers — to pump up the value of digital tokens. Nor would it benefit the public to amass a strategic Bitcoin stockpile or to appoint “people who love your industry” to write crypto regulations, as Trump has pledged.

Trump is of course free to sell his campaign swag, however tacky or unbecoming. (You can still get your $399 Trump gold sneakers, $59.99 Trump Bibles or $99 Trump digital trading cards, all available for a limited time!) What he shouldn’t get away with is corrupting public policy to serve his business partners or selling out the national interest to benefit his flailing company.

It was perhaps inevitable that Trump’s family would end up desperately hawking a crypto scheme to his most gullible supporters. It should never be acceptable to wield the presidency itself to advance such a grift.

— Bloomberg Opinion