Trump’s Crypto Scheme: A Layer Cake of Corruption
America is a banana republic now.
1. DJT
Yesterday the Financial Times reported that the Trump Media and Technology Group (DJT)—of which I am a shareholder1—was in talks to buy a cryptocurrency exchange.
This may not seem like much, but it’s a layer cake of corruption and it’s taking place in broad daylight. Walk through the layers with me.
(1) How is DJT going to buy anything? Isn’t the company a joke? This is such a good question. So far in 2024 DJT has reported a grand total of $2.6 million in revenue.
That’s not a typo.
I’d like to give you a sense of scale here. An individual McDonald’s restaurant brings in north of $3 million a year.
So DJT as a company does a bit less business than your neighborhood Mickey D’s. There’s a difference, though. Individual McDonald’s locations average somewhere around 15 percent profits annually.
DJT does . . . not.
In the third quarter of this year—just a three-month period—DJT lost $19 million. And this rate of spend is increasing. For all of 2023, DJT lost $33 million.
(2) So how does DJT have the money to buy a crypto exchange?