America’s first Gilded Age is often remembered as a time of industrial growth and excessive corporate power, when economic power and basic resources became concentrated in too few hands for a healthy democratic society to tolerate. The very name conjures up images of railroads and steel mills, coal mines and robber barons.
It was also a golden age of scams, frauds, and cons. Confidence men who promised high returns on railroad investments would disappear after exchanging worthless bonds for their victims’ hard-earned money. Back-alley bookies worked with crooked athletes to rig baseball games and boxing matches for private gain. Pharmacies and drugstores would sell legitimate medicine alongside snake-oil cures, useless tonics, and even dangerous concoctions.
I’ve written before on how the second Trump administration has ushered in a new gilded age of extreme wealth inequality, corporate consolidation, and public corruption. Just as our ancestors dragged America out of the muck and into a progressive era of cleaner politics and business, so too should the next Democratic administration orient itself around purging scams and frauds from both the economy and our civic life.
Perhaps no scam in modern American life is more Trumpian than cryptocurrency. The digital tokens, of which bitcoin is the most popular, are supposed to fulfill some kind of economic role depending on the owner’s wishes: as a medium of exchange, as a store of value, as an investment vehicle, and so on. At best, cryptocurrency was a cynical response to widespread disillusionment with the banking and financial sectors after the 2008 crash.
It has now been 17 years since bitcoin’s launch, and it is safe to describe cryptocurrency as a failure. The tokens provide no legitimate social or economic value. They do not offer a fixed rate of return like bonds. They do not represent an ownership stake in a company or pay dividends like stocks. They are not a feasible medium of exchange even after nearly two decades of attempts to build the infrastructure for it. You can’t buy groceries with them.
In recent years, cryptocurrencies have abandoned their once-utopian promise of a decentralized financial system and pivoted to purely extractive enterprises. Leading the charge is none other than President Trump, who introduced two official tokens under his World Liberty Financial business around the time he returned to the White House last year. The tokens, $TRUMP and $MELANIA, were initially sold at high prices and then lost between 95 percent and 99 percent of their respective values.
Crypto scams are so common that users have an entire vocabulary around them: Trump’s coins appear to have “rug-pulled” initial customers, meaning that the company cashed in and those customers became “bagholders” of the worthless, useless digital tokens. Indeed, the only real utility that cryptocurrencies appear to provide is facilitating criminal behavior by avoiding regulated financial services. Reuters reported in January that money launderers processed at least $82 billion in 2025, a more than eightfold increase from five years earlier.
In a healthy and functional civic society, the crypto “industry” would be on the verge of annihilation. Instead, thanks to obscene political spending in the last election cycle, it remains an influential power player in Washington under the extremely friendly eyes of the second Trump administration’s deregulators. On Monday, the Labor Department announced a rule that would open up Americans’ 401(k) retirement savings to crypto. Some Republican lawmakers even proposed creating a national cryptocurrency reserve that would buy trillions of dollars in bitcoin and hold it for a fixed period of time. In practical terms, this would allow early adopters to cash in while leaving the American taxpayer as the bagholders.
A new progressive administration should abandon the half-hearted approach to cryptocurrency that the Obama and Biden administrations pursued. Instead, the policy should be scorched earth. Crypto enthusiasts have had two decades to work out a productive and socially valuable use case for their tokens. They have failed. Perhaps the simplest solution would be to pass a law that bans American financial institutions from accepting or conducting any transactions in cryptocurrency, effectively severing the digital tokens from the real economy.
Another scourge is the explosive growth of sports betting and the emergence of so-called “prediction markets.” There are vital differences between the two industries, which I’ll get to in a second. What they share is the promise of potential riches by striking it right just once or twice.
Sports betting was largely banned in the United States outside of Nevada until 2018, when the Supreme Court struck down the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992, more commonly known as PASPA. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie had mounted a legal challenge to the law in a bid to create legal sports books at Atlantic City casinos. PASPA had forbidden states from passing laws to legalize sports books after a certain date, which New Jersey failed to do before the deadline in the 1990s.
Americans enjoyed a fairly stable legal regime where sports books could only lawfully exist in one state, making them theoretically available but practically inaccessible for most Americans. Then the Supreme Court ruled that PASPA violated the Tenth Amendment’s “anti-commandeering principle,” and the floodgates opened. Online sports betting is now legal in roughly four out of five states thanks to an all-out lobbying blitz, and has become a multibillion-dollar industry.
The results have been devastating. Mobile sports betting is a deeply predatory industry, one that entices users over and over again to place wagers in a way that old-school Las Vegas sports books never could. Those who actually profit from betting on a regular basis are banned from the apps. A growing body of research shows that sports betting leads to higher divorce and bankruptcy rates and reduced personal savings and financial stability. The damage is most pronounced among younger men but not limited to them: One 2024 study found a measurable uptick in domestic violence incidents when an NFL home team loses in a state where sports betting is legalized.
The nonstop glut of pro-gambling ads has normalized risky, self-destructive behaviors for an entire generation of young men under the often phantasmal promise of instant wealth and riches. Players and coaches across all sports have reported surges in death threats and personal harassment by desperate, enraged losing bettors. Earlier this month, 404media’s Jason Koehler called it the “depravity economy,” which he described as “a massive industrial complex that is not-so-slowly bankrupting a generation of underemployed people addicted to gambling.”
As terrible as sports betting can be, prediction markets are even more corruptible. Imagine that you want to bet $100 that the Los Angeles Dodgers will win the 2026 World Series. The counterparty to your bet is the sports book itself. This creates an inherent financial incentive in ensuring the integrity of the event upon which the bet is placed. (Contrary to folk belief, no legal sports book has ever been found to have influenced the outcome of a sporting event.) In practical terms, the risk of illicit tampering with the event is borne entirely by the sports book, as recent gambling scandals in baseball and the NBA have shown.
Prediction markets work differently. When you place a wager on them, your counterparty is other bettors. The prediction market itself is a middleman and earns revenue from transaction fees, memberships, and other indirect costs. This difference upends how a casual gambler might view a transaction. You are actually betting on two things: that a specific outcome will happen and that the other side of the bet doesn’t know more than you about the potential outcome.
Again, with sporting events, the risk is fairly low. People bet on sports because the event’s outcome can’t truly be known by all parties until it actually occurs. The problem is that prediction markets take bets on a whole host of events for which people might have nonpublic information. No greater example could exist than a recent surge in bets on Polymarket, one of the largest prediction markets, on the eve of the Iran war.
Hundreds of bettors made thousands of dollars on predictions on Polymarket that the first U.S. and Israeli strikes would take place on February 27, a pattern that suggests insider knowledge that the strikes would occur. It is hard to imagine a more grotesquely corrupt act than profiting from one’s foreknowledge of a war. Learning the identities of these bettors, and other apparent insider traders on prediction markets, should be a top Justice Department priority under the next administration. It should also prompt Congress to enact a national ban on prediction markets, as well as a revised version of PASPA that will survive the Supreme Court’s scrutiny.
Perhaps the most corrosive of all MAGA-adjacent scams has been those involving Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services, and his Make America Healthy Again movement. Trump had always been a believer in medical conspiracy theories, such as the debunked link between autism and vaccines. But his first-term administration did not translate these into policy and instead focused on traditional GOP culture warfare.
Trump’s alliance with Kennedy during the 2024 presidential election upended MAGA’s approach to the nation’s public health infrastructure. Kennedy began his legal career as a public-interest lawyer working on environmental cases. In the 2000s, however, he transformed into one of the nation’s leading anti-vaccine proponents, famously resulting in a deadly measles outbreak in Samoa. He also dabbled in a wide variety of alternative and pseudoscientific medical claims.
Right-wing backlash to the scientific community over the Covid-19 pandemic response, along with Trump’s eagerness to leech off of the Kennedy political legacy, brought the two men together in an unholy union of sorts. Kennedy’s principal goals at HHS have been to undermine the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s ability to warn the public about public health crises and to compromise the Food and Drug Administration’s decision-making abilities.
Take, for example, Casey Means, Trump’s MAHA pick to serve as the next surgeon general. Past surgeon generals have been well-qualified doctors at the top of their respective fields. C. Everett Koop, who served as the nation’s top doctor for the 1980s, was a pioneering pediatric surgeon. Means dropped out of her residency program in Oregon in 2018 and instead became a “wellness” influencer who has promoted anti-vaccine views.
What does “wellness” mean? The term is most commonly used in place of “health” or “medicine” as a way to skate around the FDA’s legally required approval process. Not every wellness product is necessarily harmful, and much of the advice that “wellness influencers” give is benign or good. Americans should generally get more exercise, go outside more often, and eat healthier food.
But there is no real profit in telling people to jog regularly or eat vegetables. Instead, wellness companies and influencers sell a variety of unregulated or underregulated products that are supposedly designed to make you feel better. They typically carry the FDA’s standard disclaimer that such products are not meant to cure or treat any disease or medical condition. Other “interventions” praised by wellness influencers—like chiropractic treatments, red-light therapy, cold plunges, and more—often lack any scientific proof that they work.
That oppositional nature is by design. The wellness industry feeds into and fosters Americans’ simmering mistrust of the scientific medical community and the pharmaceutical industry, then offers its products for sale as the alternative way forward. It preys on desperate people who feel unsatisfied with their lives or failed by scientific medicine with unverified and unverifiable treatments. A chapter in one of Means’s books is even titled, “Trust Yourself, Not Your Doctor.”
When lawmakers enacted the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, they sought to address the growing public health crisis of quackery and patent medicines, as well. Turn-of-the-century America was replete with purported medical treatments, which ranged from the unverified to the pseudoscientific to the outright fraudulent. Coca-Cola, the world’s most popular soft drink today, began as a patent medicine that distributors billed as a “brain tonic” that would “invigorate” the drinker. (The caffeine and cocaine in the original recipe likely helped.) Congress could strengthen the FDA by giving it the power to regulate health and wellness supplements before they reach the market, rather than afterward, as well as entrusting it with broader authority over health-adjacent products.
Democrats have an opportunity here to reorient both their case against Trump and their case for themselves as an anti-fraud, anti-scam campaign. Much of Trump’s business career and public life can be described as fraudulent and scam-driven. He has persistently lied about the value of his real estate properties to secure better loans and lower taxes, as proven by New York regulatory officials and prosecutors.
Once in power, Trump has done everything he can to reward fraudsters like himself with pardons and favorable legal treatment. The New York Times reported earlier this month that Trump has pardoned more than 70 people who were convicted of federal fraud charges since taking office last year. Recipients ranged from former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, who was convicted of trying to sell Barack Obama’s vacated Senate seat in 2009, to Devon Archer, who defrauded a Native American tribe of billions of dollars and testified against former business partner Hunter Biden at Republicans’ behest.
Many of these pardons came after family members and business associates donated thousands or even millions of dollars to the pro-Trump super PAC MAGA, Inc. In a more dignified and honorable era, federal prosecutors could pursue bribery charges against Trump after he leaves office for what a casual observer could only conclude is bribery. Thanks to the Supreme Court’s ruling that invented “presidential immunity,” however, such efforts would likely be doomed.
Trump’s pro-fraud administration has led the Justice Department and the FBI to largely abandon their efforts to tackle white-collar crime. Pro-crypto appointees at agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission offer little hope that even nominally independent agencies will protect Americans from fraudsters. The Trump administration’s war on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which enforces federal consumer-welfare laws, is the clearest sign possible that the MAGA movement thrives on predatory financial schemes.
Rebuilding and strengthening the federal government’s anti-fraud and anti-scam machinery should therefore be a paramount goal for any incoming Democratic president. The Trump years have been politically and socially poisonous, bringing nothing but seeping corrosion into every aspect of American life. Instead of honest industries, entire sectors are now devoted to extracting as much wealth from the American people as possible while offering nothing real or substantive in return. Only by purging this corruption—both in the legal sense and the metaphysical one—can the country start to heal.
