On Sunday night time, John Oliver returned to the desk of “Final Week Tonight” from his summer hiatus, and there was, naturally, lots to focus on.
The HBO host, whose contract is up on the finish of 2026 — and whose guardian firm is dealing with a possible acquisition by Paramount Skydance, placing the lefty comic immediately within the crosshairs of a pro-Trump proprietor who’s already carried out a number of administration-friendly changes to CBS News — targeted practically the whole thing of the present on President Trump, who’d beforehand referred to as crypto “a catastrophe ready to occur” that “could also be faux” on Fox Enterprise, however now refers to himself as “the primary crypto president.”
“Trump realized simply how a lot cash he personally might find yourself making from coping with a speculative asset as a result of it’s turned out to be lots,” supplied Oliver. “His current monetary filings present that in simply his first yr again in workplace, his private revenue surged to greater than $2.2 billion, most of which got here from his household’s crypto companies, which introduced in about $1.4 billion. Actually, crypto has grow to be the household’s dominant enterprise curiosity, overshadowing their actual property empire and each different enterprise they’ve ever had.”
As Virginia Canter, a outstanding ethics lawyer, acknowledged, “This is sort of a excellent automobile to funnel cash to [Trump] and his household to enrich them.”
Oliver then broke down two of the Trump household’s principal crypto ventures: his meme coins (or jokes transformed into crypto that purely have novelty worth) and World Liberty Financial.
“Most meme cash, seemingly by design, mainly observe the trajectory of pump-and-dump schemes. They spike in worth after they first come out after which instantly crash with insiders promoting on the peak,” defined Oliver.
You see, Trump and Melania launched meme cash simply prior to his second inauguration, which skyrocketed in worth after which plummeted. By the next December, Trump’s meme coin was down 92% in worth whereas Melania’s was down 99%, however Trump walked away with $636 million. Trump even went so far as internet hosting an intimate personal dinner for the 220 high holders of the Trump meme coin, thus providing “entry to the White Home in change for an funding in one in every of [Trump’s] crypto ventures,” reported The New York Occasions. In the meantime, practically 1 million folks misplaced cash within the Trump meme coin with their losses totaling $3.8 billion, in accordance to the Occasions.
“However Trump’s meme coin is simply the tip of the iceberg right here,” mentioned Oliver, earlier than segueing to the Trump household’s largest crypto enterprise, World Liberty Monetary.
A method you should purchase into World Liberty Monetary is by buying a governance token, $WLFI, which merely permits you to vote on how the token is run, with 75% of purchases flowing to the corporate as a payment. And quite a few sketchy offers have ensued involving World Liberty Monetary. For one, Justin Solar invested $45 million in World Liberty Monetary after which the SEC settled a fraud case being introduced towards him for $10 million with no wrongdoing admitted.
If that weren’t sufficient, an Emirati funding fund pledged to make investments $2 billion in World Liberty Monetary. At minimal, Trump’s firm netted $187 million from the deal. And two weeks later, Trump traveled to the UAE and introduced they’d find a way to purchase lots of of 1000’s of superior AI chips from Nvidia (whereas the Biden administration had issued restrictions on the export of superior AI chips to the UAE over safety issues).
“It positive looks like Trump is exploiting crypto sketchiness for optimum revenue,” declared Oliver.
Trump is now pushing the CLARITY Act, which can shift crypto regulation from the SEC to the Commodity Futures Buying and selling Fee, a small federal company with little to no enforcement energy.
“If these conflicts of curiosity had been as straightforward to perceive as Jimmy Carter and his peanut farm I believe there can be much more alarm about simply how flagrantly corrupt and compromised Trump appears to be like right here,” Oliver maintained. “That’s the reason we badly want correct guardrails going ahead.”
