Trump’s Idiot Sons’ Crypto Scheme Is a “Huge Mistake”

Donald Trump has completely reversed his opinion on the cryptocurrency industry, moving past calling it a “scam” to becoming a warm ally—but his sons may be screwing up the blossoming alliance.

Donald Jr. and Eric Trump’s botched rollout of their own cryptocurrency platform, World Liberty Financial, has been plagued by scams and raised alarm bells from Trump’s allies within the crypto circuit, who fear that the poor handling and bad press could damage the burgeoning sector’s reputation.

“This is a huge mistake,” Nic Carter, a Trump supporter and founding partner at the crypto-focused venture capital firm Castle Island Ventures, told Politico. “It looks like Trump’s inner circle is just cashing in on his recent embrace of crypto in a kind of naive way, and frankly it looks like they’re burning a lot of the good will that’s been built with the industry so far.”

The project was announced last month under a different name—“The Trump DeFi Project”, short for decentralized finance—as a way to platform cryptocurrencies, but actual details of the proposed platform have been scant.

That slow rollout has ushered in an onslaught of misinformation about World Liberty Financial. Fraudsters have relentlessly attacked the project, compromising the social media accounts of Republican National Committee Co-Chair Lara Trump and Tiffany Trump, and sending supporters to a fake website with inaccurate details about the platform. False Telegram channels posing as the official World Liberty Financial channel have also drawn thousands of users to a host of misinformation, thwarted only by the Trump brothers’ loose warnings not to click on unaffiliated links and avoid scams.

World Liberty representative Zak Folkman told Politico that the group behind the crypto project is “building a world-class decentralized finance platform with the absolute best of the best in the industry.”

“We take security very seriously and put it first and foremost, above anything,” Folkman told the outlet, adding that the startup is working “with the top auditing firms and security specialists in the world.”

Trump has increasingly tried to frame himself as a pro-crypto candidate in this election cycle. At a Bitcoin conference in Nashville in July, Trump promised to build out a “strategic national bitcoin reserve” if elected, according to CoinDesk. But the former president’s recent investments would show that his change of heart on the digital assets isn’t all an act.

Financial disclosures released in August show that Trump has $7.15 million coming from a source labeled NFT INT., likely referring to his NFT series. He’s also kept a stockpile of cash in the new-wave currencies, with the disclosure listing roughly $5 million in crypto.

J.D. Vance won’t change who he is in order to win the election in November. And that means aligning with frightening far-right weirdos unapologetically—even if they’re pushing pro-Nazi propaganda.

On Thursday, Vance sat down for a recorded interview with Tucker Carlson as the former Fox News host continues facing backlash for platforming a pro-Nazi podcaster. In fact, Vance joined Carlson just hours after the White House condemned the “Nazi propaganda” interview.

Carlson came under fire after inviting Darryl Cooper, host of The MartyrMade podcast, as a guest on his show—whereupon Cooper proceeded to call Winston Churchill the “chief villain” of World War II, not Adolf Hitler.

In platforming Cooper on the “Tucker Carlson Show,” the former Fox host helped MartyrMade shoot to the top of the podcast charts. This was no red flag for Vance, who still appeared at his scheduled pre-recorded interview with Carlson following this news.

“Not ideal timing. But it is what it is,” a Trump campaign official said.

It makes sense that Vance doesn’t seem to care about Cooper’s revisionist history, considering that he still follows the Hitler apologist on X.

Besides boosting white supremacists, Carlson continues to regularly promoting “the great replacement theory” and spreads election lies. Meanwhile, Vance is still set to appear alongside Carlson during a live speaking tour. They’ll be joined by the likes of Alex Jones, Donald Trump Jr., and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene.

On Friday at the U.S.-Mexico border, Vance was asked if Carlson “should be interviewing those kinds of people months before the election.”

“Tucker Carlson isn’t affiliated with the campaign,” Vance replied. “He’s going to do what he wants to do.” And so too will Vance it seems.

This story has been updated.

Donald Trump’s media company initially presented some grandiose projections to attract potential shareholders. Cut to two years later, and those projections have proved to be completely misleading, according to a Meidas Touch report published Friday. 

The original pitch deck that Trump Media & Technology Group showed to its investors in 2022, including “hundreds of thousands of retail shareholders,” per CEO Devin Nunes, contained some pretty fantastical numbers. The company projected revenue of $114 million in 2023, which would then balloon to $835 million in 2024. 

The reality of Trump’s struggling stock couldn’t live up to the fantasy that was promised.

In 2023, TMTG’s revenue was only $4.1 million, and the company reported a loss of more than $58 million. The projection fed to investors was off by a whopping $110 million—and that was before the election cycle had even really begun. Since then, things have become even more dire.  

Since spiking around the Republican National Convention, the value of Truth Social stock has steadily declined. Shares of Trump’s media stock have often corresponded with how well investors think Trump’s presidential campaign is going, according to The New York Times. 

The company’s current state is a far cry from the massive jump it was projected to make this year. By the end of the second quarter of 2024, TMTG had only taken in $836,000 and reported losses of $343 million. 

Trump’s majority stake in the company, which is 115 million shares, a roughly 60 percent stake, was once worth a whopping $6 billion. Now it’s worth only $2 billion.

TMTG stock has continued to crater this week, as it hit its lowest value since it became publicly traded, closing beneath $17 on Wednesday. 

Donald Trump apparently doesn’t care whether or not he wins in November anymore.

At a Fox News town hall on Thursday, the Republican presidential nominee revealed that his 2024 campaign strategy excludes anyone who he doesn’t believe supported him in the last election cycles.

Responding to a question from Sean Hannity about the economy, Trump spun a thread about a would-be supporter in the Republican primary who hadn’t voted for him before.

“One person who didn’t support me—he said, ‘I must admit I had the most successful four years of my life but I’m gonna vote for some—’ and now that person came back to me. I don’t want that person,” Trump said to muffled applause. “I don’t want that person.

“You know, they say you should take everybody, but that’s not the way I’m built. It’s one of those little problems,” he added.

It’s not the first time Trump has attempted to wash his hands of the labor required to win a fair election. Speaking in Detroit in June, Trump said of his campaign, “We don’t need [the] votes,” and “We got more votes than anybody’s ever had.” Instead, he argued that the campaign needed to “guard the vote” in anticipation of a “steal.”

Failing to draw more voters to his cause would, frankly, prove to be a huge problem for Trump, who finally admitted earlier this week that he actually did lose the 2020 election. The former president lost to President Joe Biden by more than seven million votes.

Neglecting to court those voters would surely spell disaster for his chances in November, especially during a fresher election season that has drawn renewed energy since Vice President Kamala Harris has taken over the Democratic ticket—though Trump may not understand the depth of the problem. While Trump’s support levels have held steady, Harris’s have slowly grown, indicating that she is picking up crucial undecided voters.

Later in the town hall, Trump made an outlandishly hyperbolic statement about his support around the country while discussing the September 10 debate on ABC News, arguing that the network better “be fair” to him or else it would alienate “75, 80 percent of the country.”

Senator Marco Rubio doesn’t think that Russia paying off right-wing influencers is a big deal.

The ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was asked on Fox News Thursday about the Justice Department revelation that several conservative commentators were paid by assets of the Russian government to produce propaganda and disinformation. Rubio defended the influencers, calling them “victims.”

“We are talking about preexisting political opinions in the United States. These are preexisting political opinions that have existed well before any Russian engagement or involvement or what have you,” Rubio said to Sean Hannity. “These people that they say that were being funded by the secret donor that was hiding their true identity, they already had these opinions, they already believed in these things.”

“They legitimately believe in the views that they’re espousing,” Rubio added. “They were victims, they were targets of a fraud in which someone posing as just a regular investor had Russian money behind them.”

Rubio is joining his fellow conservatives in defending the commentators at Tenet Media, which the DOJ revealed Wednesday was secretly funded by Russian state media employees in “a scheme to create and distribute content to U.S. audiences with hidden Russian government messaging.” These influencers included Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, Lauren Chen, and Benny Johnson. One right-wing media organization, Blaze Media, has already fired Chen as a result of the indictment.

Not surprisingly, these commentators described themselves as victims in the scheme, a point that was not only echoed by Rubio, but also by MAGA Republicans like Representative Matt Gaetz, pundit Ben Shapiro, and even Donald Trump. But, how do they explain that these “preexisting ideas” popular among Republicans right now seem to be exactly what Vladimir Putin’s government wanted to fund?

Previous Russian operations in the United States appear to have been aimed at promoting conflict and discord to undermine faith in the country’s institutions, such as the electoral process, and promote foreign policy favorable to Russia. It stands to reason that funding conservative influencers had similar aims. Right-wing figures like Rubio, Trump (whose political rise has been very useful to Putin), and Gaetz have to ask themselves if the ideas they’re espousing can really be good for America if Putin himself wants to put money behind them.