At President Donald Trump’s inauguration on Monday, Detroit pastor Lorenzo Sewell took the stage to hope for the incoming administration, peppering his remarks with ham-fisted allusions to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech from some six many years earlier. That very same day, Sewell—a longtime Trump booster who spoke on the Republican Nationwide Conference and hosted the candidate at his church in June—took the logical subsequent step in his quest for conservative influencer superstardom: launch a meme coin and watch rubes throw their hard-earned cash at it.
“I want you to do me a favor proper now. I want you to go purchase the official Lorenzo Sewell coin,” he mentioned in a video posted on X, promising to “by no means promote on the group however somewhat simply earn charges as our token continues to flourish.” After reaching a peak market worth of $4.5 million, $LORENZO—put together to be shocked—misplaced 93% of its value in a matter of hours, leaving some merchants with five- and six-figure losses. I’m guessing Sewell’s congregants won’t be listening to a sermon on the cleaning of the Temple anytime quickly.
Sewell, although, is simply doing what everybody in Trump’s orbit, together with Trump himself, is doing proper now: cashing in as shortly and as typically as potential. Days earlier than taking the oath of workplace, Trump launched his personal cryptocurrency meme coin, inviting potential consumers to hitch his “very particular Trump Group” and urging them to “Have Enjoyable!” His eponymous meme coin, $TRUMP, shouldn’t be confused with $MELANIA, a separate meme coin launched across the identical time by his spouse, shortly earlier than she as soon as once more turned first girl of the US.
The phrases and circumstances on—I swear I’m not making this up—gettrumpmemes.com warn potential $TRUMP consumers that they may incur “substantial losses,” and require anybody who buys to first agree to waive their rights to a jury trial or to take part in any hypothetical future class-action lawsuit, that are typically not indicators that you’re coping with blue-chip funding alternatives. When requested by reporters, Trump didn’t do a lot to encourage further confidence within the enterprise: “I don’t know a lot about it, apart from I launched it,” he said, however famous he did perceive that it had been “very profitable.”
For now, he’s proper, and particularly in comparison with $LORENZO: On the time of the inauguration, $TRUMP was the world’s third-largest meme coin, behind solely Dogecoin and Shina Ibu. As of Thursday afternoon, The Wall Avenue Journal estimated the $TRUMP market cap at $7 billion and valued Trump’s stake at $28 billion, which might be between three and 4 occasions his estimated pre-meme coin internet price all by itself.
The moral challenges of a chief govt with the ability to form cryptocurrency coverage participating in slightly mild eponymous cryptocurrency profiteering don’t require an in depth clarification. However this episode is a mere preview of an administration that can perform as a glorified money dice, the place everybody within the White Home (and everybody who’s sufficiently adjoining to it) can have an opportunity to seize as a lot as they’ll maintain earlier than the clock runs out.
The political dynamics of Trump’s second time period are not like something that anybody alive has skilled: a term-limited president who’s excited by ruling however not governing, who ran for workplace kind of to keep away from the potential for jail time, and whose place on any given challenge relies upon largely on whichever well-dressed man with a agency handshake pitched him final. Not like most presidents, Trump doesn’t care about organising his celebration for future success, as a result of he has by no means cared in regards to the GOP past its utility to his political ambitions. Nor does he care about utilizing a second time period to safe his legacy, as a result of in his thoughts, exacting electoral revenge on Joe Biden was the one factor he wanted to do to perform that process.
For the following 4 years, then, all Trump actually desires is to bask within the glow of successful an election that the haters insisted he would lose, and benefit from the spoils of victory that include the workplace. In earlier many years, these perks would have consisted largely of lengthier-than-usual stays at Camp David in the course of the excessive season. In 2025, they embrace the fitting to slap your title (and your spouse’s title) throughout a digital token and promote it to anybody who can pay for it.
The heads of among the world’s largest and strongest firms, too, understand that the regulatory surroundings may by no means be as pleasant as it’s proper now, when a president who’s as unapologetically profit-driven as they’re is looking the photographs.
Luminaries of the factitious intelligence trade, who perceive that their firms will want staggering quantities of money to have any hope of delivering on their lofty guarantees, are flocking to Trump, keen to take advantage of his disinterest in regulating an trade that wants it badly. Billionaires like Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and Google’s Sundar Pichai similarly understand that exhibiting up in individual to kiss the ring is each the most cost effective and surest option to shield their bloated monopolies from federal oversight.
The quarter-billion that Elon Musk spent to again Trump’s reelection marketing campaign is pennies on the greenback subsequent to the worth of the federal government contracts for which his firms now enjoy the inside track. A month in the past, TikTok was dealing with a ban within the U.S.; now that Trump is in energy, just a few well-placed compliments had been sufficient to maintain the lights on and the underside line intact, for the second.
No trade goes as onerous in Washington because the crypto trade, which threw a star-studded celebratory ball the evening earlier than Trump’s inauguration, full with performances from Snoop Dogg, Rick Ross, and Soulja Boy. David Sacks, a member of the Silicon Valley reactionary clique, who Trump not too long ago named as his AI and crypto czar, told cheering attendees that Washington’s “reign of terror in opposition to crypto” had eventually come to an in depth.
Sure, some trade leaders have criticized Trump for his $TRUMP stunt, however on the entire they’ve little to complain about: On the very least, a president who’s keen to launch his personal meme coin proper earlier than shifting into the White Home is unlikely to be a thorn within the aspect of the crypto trade anytime quickly.
The cashing-in presidency slows down solely—and even then, solely barely—when one individual’s massive rating threatens that of one other. On Tuesday, Trump announced a brand new AI three way partnership, Stargate, billed as a collaboration amongst OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle that will make investments as much as half a trillion {dollars} in OpenAI’s work. (Like many issues for which Trump takes credit score, Stargate was within the works months earlier than his press convention, and because the cash is coming from the personal sector, his administration doesn’t need to fund it.)
However simply hours after Trump declared Stargate a “resounding declaration of confidence in America’s potential,” Musk, who has been feuding with Altman since breaking with OpenAI in 2018—and whose xAI product is a rival to OpenAI’s ChatGPT—publicly undercut Trump’s grand pronouncements. “They don’t even have the cash,” Musk wrote on X. “I’ve that on good authority.” Because it seems, Musk’s purportedly shut relationship with the president began fraying the second he perceived that as enthusiastically as he could be cashing in as of late, one in every of his Silicon Valley rivals was cashing in even more durable.
The opposite tech oligarchs with front-row inauguration seats will in all probability have their loyalties examined quickly, too. Zuckerberg, whose firm lobbied aggressively for the TikTok ban and stands to achieve billions in ad dollars from its enforcement, can’t be completely happy about Trump’s choice to remain the app’s execution; Google and Pichai, whose YouTube Shorts product aspires to compete with TikTok, additionally should have felt the sting of defeat.
Earlier this week, Trump expressed curiosity within the concept of Musk or Oracle’s Larry Ellison saving TikTok by buying the platform from ByteDance. The extra Trump picks winners and losers amongst these competing for his favor, the much less priceless these alliances of comfort with the White Home can be.
Trump is commonly described as a grifter, or a con man, or some variation thereof, which is in my opinion a good characterization of a person who’s unable to cite his favourite Bible verses however however sells formally licensed Trump Bibles for $59.99 and autographed copies for $1,000, a value that one way or the other doesn’t embrace delivery. The distinction between his first administration and this one is that this time, lots of the enterprise leaders who beforehand distanced themselves from Trump have found out that ingratiating themselves is essentially the most profitable path of least resistance in latest reminiscence. When the president is chasing a payday this tough, nobody needs to be shy about following his lead.