Memecoin Strump
it is NOT a stable coin?!
INDEP UK
...“Today at Trump National Doral Miami, we witnessed an unforgettable moment,” Burns wrote on social media before emphasizing that the gilded effigy was not a false idol.
“Let me be clear: this is not a golden calf,” he said. “This statue is a celebration of life. It is a symbol of resilience, freedom, patriotism, strength, and the will power to keep fighting for the future of America.”
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A pastor dedicated a 22-foot golden statue of Donald Trump at his golf course in Florida on Wednesday, saying it 'stands as a reminder of the hand of God and His protection over President Trump’s life' (Getty Images)
The massive statue was commissioned by a collective of crypto investors and created by sculptor Alan Cottrill (Getty Images)
Burns, who previously described the president as divinely appointed, added that the sculpture stands as a reminder that God is protecting Trump’s life — in a nod to the multiple assassination attempts he has survived.
At one point during the proceedings, Burns held his cell phone up to the microphone, and the president’s voice rang out.
“I want to thank Mark Burns, a pastor, he’s a good pastor, he's a good man,” Trump said. “I’ve known him a long time, he’s been with me from the beginning, right from the beginning, maybe about two days later.”
“I want to thank everybody there,” he added. “I know it was done from love.”
The statue — which rises 15 feet atop a 7-foot base — was commissioned and bankrolled by a collective of crypto investors seeking to boost visibility for their memecoin, $PATRIOT, according to The Daily Beast.
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Pastor Mark Burns has been a longtime supporter of the president and served as his informal spiritual adviser. Here, he is pictured speaking at a Trump rally in 2016 (AFP via Getty Images)
Sculptor Alan Cottrill told The Times in February that he agreed to create the bronze figure for $300,000 but complained that the investors were slow in paying. In November he proposed coating it in gold leaf.
His suggestion went down like an offering of water “to a person dying of thirst,” he said. “Immediately everybody jumped on board.”
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AN 9 25
In the midst of the Trump regime’s shameful attempt to attack any and all organizations and institutions that oppose it, we must not and will not back down from holding Trump accountable for his corruption and lawlessness.
Yesterday, the New York Times — which Trump just sued for $15 billion for allegedly defaming him —reported that Steve Witkoff, Trump’s envoy to the Middle East, apparently made a multi-billion dollar deal with Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, a member of the ultrarich ruling family of the United Arab Emirates who controls $1.5 trillion of the Emiratis’ sovereign wealth.
In return for Sheikh Tahnoon’s investment firm depositing $2 billion into World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency start-up founded by the Witkoffs and Trumps, the White House agreed to give the U.A.E. — in particular, a sprawling technology firm controlled by Sheikh Tahnoon —access to hundreds of thousands of the world’s most advanced and scarce computer chips, despite national security concerns that the chips could be shared with China.
This is just the top of the iceberg of Trump’s crypto corruption.
To understand the full extent of it, you need to go back to four days before early voting started in 2024. That’s when Trump and his sons launched the crypto firm, World Liberty Financial.
As soon as Trump won, money started pouring in.
Then, just days before returning to office, Trump launched a separate crypto scheme, selling TRUMP and MELANIA memecoins. Memecoins are a type of cryptocurrency based on an image or online joke.
Within his first six weeks in office, Trump called for a “Crypto Strategic Reserve”— a government backed stockpile of crypto assets, sort of like our oil reserve, but completely pointless. That announcement made crypto prices soar.
So far, the Trump family has made about $3 billion from crypto — with many purchases by foreign buyers. Forbes now estimates that over halfof Trump’s entire net worth is crypto-based.
With Trump acting as both the President of the United States and as his own crypto brand ambassador, it’s hard to tell which job he’s doing at any given moment.
One US company said it explicitly purchased $2 millionof Trump’s meme coins to influence trade policy.
The corruption goes further.
Trump’s pro-crypto SEC chair, Paul Atkins is heavily invested in crypto himself. He’s been lifting financial guardrails in ways that will make it easier for crypto firms (like the Trumps’) to spread into new markets, and going easy on crypto fraud.
Chinese billionaire Justin Sun had been charged with crypto-related fraud before Trump was elected. After Trump’s election, Sun invested more than $115 million into various Trump crypto products. What happened next? Trump’s SEC suddenly stopped prosecuting Sun.
Trump’s SEC also abandoned a lawsuit against Binance, a crypto exchange that had previously pled guilty to money laundering.
This happened just days after Binance started listing a Trump cryptocurrency on its marketplace.
The corruption goes even further.
Trump’s Justice Department even scrapped the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team, giving a green-light to all kinds of crypto crime, even though Americans lost $9.3 billion in crypto scams in 2024.
The crypto industry spent big on House and Senate races, on both Republicans and Democrats. Why? So the Senate would pass the so-called GENIUS Act — a regulatory bill that the crypto industry lobbied for. Eighteen Democrats joined with nearly all Republicans to vote yes.
The bill gives a stamp of legitimacy to so-called “stablecoins,” a type of currency that Trump’s World Liberty Financial makes and sells.
Stablecoins claim to be more stable because they’re supposedly tied to the value of other assets that are held as collateral — like the dollar or Treasury securities. But we already saw one collapse just a couple years ago, wiping out some investors’ life savings.
While the bill appropriately bans members of Congress and their families from profiting off stablecoins,it places no such restrictions on the president.
The most dangerous part of the GENIUS Act is how it allows crypto to reach into mainstream financial systems.
All this corruption is bad enough. Worse, it could tank the economy.
The GENIUS Act opens the door to institutions investing more heavily in crypto. It would even let banks and big corporations, like Walmart, Amazon, or Facebook, launch their own digital currencies — potentially thousands of them — all with little oversight.
Trump has also opened the door to letting retirement plan administrators invest 401(k) funds in crypto. That could put your savings at risk even if you never buy any cryptocurrencies.
As we saw during the 2008 financial meltdown, the more the economy becomes entwined with volatile and speculative investments, like crypto, the greater the risk to all of us. The failure of risky bets can have a domino effect.
If a single cryptocurrency began to tank — as crypto has done in the past — investors would likely rush to sell off crypto to get their real money back. This could lead to massive bank runs.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has predicted that under the GENIUS Act, crypto firms could end up holding more than $2 trillion in U.S. treasury bills as collateral. If they had to suddenly liquidate those assets to cover a bank run, the value of U.S. securities could plummet, triggering a global financial crisis.
Crypto has shown no redeeming social value and it poses huge dangers to our economy. Yet Trump is enabling it to worm into the economy because he’s taken huge crypto payoffs that have made him and his family billions of dollars.
NOW READ:'Lucky Loser': Trump's 'psychotic' NYT lawsuit ridiculed by legal experts
*Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.
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an 8 25
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May 14, 2025, edition of National Review's The McCarthy Report
RICH LOWRY: Crypto. What's the news?
ANDY MCCARTHY: So, well, the news last night, is that an obscure company, that has a Chinese subsidiary. It's a company that, trades on, NASDAQ, and it, it has a Chinese subsidiary. It last year did such booming business that it has had zero revenue.
It only has eight employees. Again, we know this because the company trades on NASDAQ. It turned out that they raised $300,000,000 from an unidentified entity that's set up in The Virgin Islands, which is notorious for, people, because its laws allow for shell companies to be easily set up. The Virgin Islands is notorious for people who want to be anonymous in conducting financial transactions. So we have somebody who we don't know who is giving $300,000,000, bought $300,000,000 of the stock of this nondescript company with the Chinese subsidiary that doesn't apparently have any business, but somehow trades on NASDAQ.
They have gotten $300,000,000 from whoever the source is, and they've announced that they're gonna buy $300,000,000 worth of Trump's meme coin that we talked about last week, the Trump coin. This is the coin that Trump announced, three days before he was being inaugurated that his company or company that he controls, was basically going to market. And the Trump entities are enriched the more that the coin is worth, and they also make money because whether people who buy the meme coin meme coin scheme is basically a pump and dump scheme. You know, people buy a meme coin is not like as I described last week, a meme coin is not like stable coin or other cryptocurrency. It doesn't even pretend to be currency.
It's basically people are buying a memento that's associated with, you know, a person, a joke, an internet influence operation, what have you. But it's a memento of something. Trump's meme coin, the image that they put out when they began to market it three days before he was inaugurated was Trump with his fist in the air going fight, fight, fight, kind of, invoking the memory of the assassination attempt, in Butler. They began selling it. It was, I think that it was selling for 18 cents a token when they first put it out.
At one point, it went up to $75 a token. And there were they marketed, like, a thousand of these tokens. So on paper, Trump was a very rich person and may actually have, have already made over a billion dollars on this based on sales of the coin and also the way they structured it every time a buyer has a transaction in in, this meme coin, the Trump people make money. They make a transaction fee on every transfer of the meme coin. So they've made about $350,000,000 on the, on the transaction fees and their holding of the coins that they have is inflated.
If the, if the price of the coins goes up and every time there's a big purchase of the coins, obviously the value goes up. So now we have this transaction where somebody is basically giving Trump three hundred million dollars. And I think the most alarming thing about the meme coin is, again, we have all these laws against government officials taking foreign money. We have the bribery law in the constitution. We have the Emoluments Clause, but we also have, you know, campaign finance laws that make it illegal for foreigners to give American campaigns or related activities like, inauguration funds, foreigners can't contribute to them.
So something like the meme coin, which Trump sets up as a private business of his and is obviously using the presidency as leverage to increase the value of it. And because crypto, a lot of the transactions can be fairly anonymous transactions, what the people who are investigating this are finding is that the money and it's now it's been billions of dollars, but the money that's pouring into these ventures is from overseas. A lot of it comes from China. A lot of it comes from Singapore.
A lot of it comes from places in the Middle East. A lot of it comes from other places in Asia. So it's a way for foreigners to pay Trump a lot of money. And some of them have been pretty open about the fact that they're not only big buyers of this meme coin. Trump is now, the other the other meme coin thing that's gone on for the last couple of weeks is they were worried that the price of meme coin, the market in meme coin, the Trump meme coin was going to collapse because after it surged at the beginning, it's gone down.
And even though a lot of people made a lot of money, most investors have lost money. The last thing I saw this week said that the losses were probably over $3,000,000,000, but a lot of people who got in early, as is typical of a pump and dump scheme, a lot of people who got in early and then sold when the, when the value surged made a lot of money. And again, the Trump's make a lot of money because whether investors win or lose, they make the transaction fee, but they don't want they don't want the thing to collapse because they're still holding about 800,000 of these coins. They only marketed 200,000, and the value of what they're holding depends on what the market is. So what they did to try to prop up the market was have a contest where the top I think it was 220 purchasers of the Trump meme coin would be invited to a big gala dinner at Trump's Virginia golf club.
LOWRY: Yeah.
MCCARTHY: And one of the big prizes, if you were at the, like, the really high rung of people who were purchases, was you're gonna get a tour of the White House. So, I mean, it couldn't be more blatant that, that they're using.
LOWRY: [INAUDIBLE]
MCCARTHY: Yeah. Right. So, they're trying to prop up the price. And in the meantime, a lot of these people have gone public because now they've had this contest and they were trying to win the contest. Right?
So, you know, the Times has a bunch of these people who they've interviewed. And they said, yeah, I bought, like, you know, a million dollars worth of the mean coin to get into the into the contest because I'm hoping to discuss, I'm hoping to meet president Trump at the gala and talk to him about, you know, conditions in Mexico and the tariffs. And I wanna talk to him about crypto policy. Of course, they're trying to buy influence. I mean, it couldn't be more obvious that that's what they're doing.
But the alarming thing here is you have all these foreign I mean, even if the even if they weren't foreign, it would be very disturbing to have somebody who was president leveraging the power of the presidency to get people to buy stuff from him, which is obviously making him much richer. Trump's net worth, according to Forbes, this week is $5,400,000,000 between, you know, what they did to stand up, this Trump media company, the Trump media and technology group that owns, Truth Social. And what they've done with this cryptocurrency stuff, Trump's net worth has doubled in the last year or so. And that's, you know, that's when, Tish James had him on the ropes and it looked for a second like he was gonna lose everything, right?
Which is probably in part why he's so adamant to strike while the iron is hot. But this is very disturbing. There's a lot of foreign money coming into these, into the family coffers.
LOWRY: Is there any precedent for this sort of action? I would they only be Joe Biden and and his his family business? Or have we ever seen anything like this?
MCCARTHY: I don't I don't think so. I mean, I think as I said in the first column I wrote about the cryptocurrency stuff, I think the analogs here would be something like the Biden family business or the Clinton Foundation.
LOWRY: Right.
MCCARTHY: You know, the Clintons set up this foundation in large part so that foreign people could pay them a lot of money and not have to worry about the campaign finance laws.
LOWRY: Pay a lot of money, and you go to the conferences, and you spend time with former president, future presidents, I believe. .
MCCARTHY: Right. Right. And, it all looks like global good. Right? Global do-gooding.
LOWRY: It's will just be done in office while in office.
MCCARTHY: Yes. Right. That's the difference is when you were paying into the Clinton Foundation, you were trying to buy influence with very influential buy access to very influential people. And there was always a chance that Hillary could become president again. Right?
But they weren't in office. And with Biden, as scummy as that whole thing was, they actually tried to shut it down and mainly did shut it down in 2019 because he was running for president.
LOWRY: Right.
MCCARTHY: And you could tell, by the way, that Biden, you know, implausibly, how many times did he say, I don't know anything about it. That's Hunter's stuff. I don't ask him about it. I don't know anything about it. I know nothing about it.
So even though they were making what what for them was a lot of money, and they were clearly selling Biden's political influence, they at least had enough sense to say, this has nothing to do with the presidency. I'm not cashing in on my power. You know, they were trying to erase the, to the extent that there was a a a trail of clues that that was what they were doing. They were trying to, to wipe that slate clean. With Trump, he's very much right out in the open, and he's leveraging the actual power of the presidency, which is why the money is so astronomical.
I mean, look, the Biden stuff, the the House Committee trace $27,000,000 into the Biden family coffers, that's a rounding error compared to the money that we're talking about here. Yeah. And it's not surprising that that's true because there's nothing like the power of the presidency. You cannot you can obviously understand why if people think they can turn it to their advantage, that would be something, it would be worth it to them to pay a lot of money for.
LOWRY: Get pardoned. Investigations get dropped. You know? You're you're, It's happening. Some obscure question foreign policy question settled in in your favor or your pay master's favor, etcetera.
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an 5 25
Handful of investors make $100M off Melania memecoin dump
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an 525
President Donald Trump is continuing to blur the lines between the federal government and his private businesses as his family rolls out its latest cryptocurrency project.
The New York Times reported that Trump's son, Eric, recently appeared at a conference in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) alongside Zach Witkoff, who is a co-founder of the Trump family's World Liberty Financial cryptocurrency company. The two announced that the government of Abu Dhabi (the capital city of the UAE) was investing $2 billion into the Binance cryptocurrency exchange — the largest crypto market by volume — using a so-called "stablecoin" (a cryptocurrency designed to have a constant value close to $1) developed by the Trump family's company.
According to the Times, that deal is likely to net the Trump family a profit in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The Times' David Yaffe-Bellany wrote that World Liberty's work has "created conflicts of interest with no precedent in modern U.S. history" given the amount of foreign investors typically barred from making conventional political contributions chipping in large sums of money.
READ MORE:The Emmys take a shot at Trump with an eye-popping nomination
Justin Sun — a Chinese-born billionaire who runs the TRON cryptocurrency exchange — is a top investor in World Liberty. After Trump was elected, he bought $75 million worth of World Liberty's $WLFI coins. That purchase came after the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) accused him of manipulating one of TRON's cryptocurrencies. The Times reported that the SEC then asked a judge to pause the investigation into Sun after Trump was reelected last year.
“I just got to thank you for the support, Justin,” Witkoff said during the Dubai conference. “TRON is just an incredible technology, and we’re lucky to be partners with you.”
Some of these investors and companies also have significant baggage in the form of criminal charges and convictions. In 2023, the Binance exchange pleaded guilty to charges that it had knowingly allowed criminals to do business on its platform. Its founder, Changpeng Zhao, is reportedly seeking a presidential pardon from Trump after pleading guilty to money laundering charges and serving a four-month federal prison sentence.
The World Liberty stablecoin is a separate venture from the $TRUMP "memecoin," which grew significantly in market cap after he began his second term. Trump has since offered a private dinner opportunity to some of his biggest memecoin investors.
READ MORE:BUSTED: Audio recording undermines top Republican's sworn denial of threats
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