‘Trump’s grifting tendencies’: how the president’s crypto ties could spur corruption 

With Donald Trump tapping top regulators with cryptocurrency ties and promising to make the US the “crypto capital of the planet”, the controversial and scandal-plagued industry is poised for laxer oversight and faster growth, which ethics watchdogs and ex-prosecutors fear could pose dangers for investors and spur potential criminal abuses.The president’s pro-crypto stances have come as he wooed crypto companies to ratchet up their campaign contributions to help him win the White House. Although in 2021 Trump called Bitcoin a “scam”, he also announced last fall that he and his sons were helping launch a new crypto business, dubbed World Liberty Financial, they can profit from.Underscoring his own growing ties to the speculative crypto business, Trump in a stark act of self-enrichment days prior to his inauguration revealed another crypto venture, a personal meme coin dubbed $Trump which drew strong criticism from ethics watchdogs, economists and some industry insiders.“The Trump meme coin represents the intersection of Trump’s grifting tendencies and his administration’s embrace of cryptocurrencies, along with his dismissive attitude toward government regulation,” said Cornell economics professor Eswar Prasad.More broadly, Prasad foresees that under Trump “regulatory agencies and top administration officials will contribute legitimacy to crypto assets, notwithstanding the highly speculative nature of these investments and the perils of exposing unsophisticated retail investors to their volatility”.The political fortunes of the crypto industry have soared as its leaders ponied up millions of dollars to help Trump’s campaign and inaugural bashes including a “crypto ball” and accelerated lobbying of the new administration and Congress to achieve their priorities.In an early sign of laxer oversight for the industry, crypto executives applauded when Trump last month tapped Paul Atkins who founded a pro-cryptocurrency group to chair the Securities and Exchange where he used to be a commissioner.Moreover, Trump issued an executive order last Thursday to support the growth of cryptocurrency that called for a new working group to explore establishing a national crypto stockpile and propose new digital asset regulations, fulfilling his promise to revamp crypto policies.Trump has also earned kudos from crypto companies for appointing David Sacks, a Silicon Valley venture capital mogul who helped found PayPal and has good ties with uber billionaire and crypto enthusiast Elon Musk, to be the first crypto and AI czar in his new administration.At the crypto ball Sacks declared the “reign of terror against crypto is ending”. The same night Trump took to his Truth Social platform to launch $Trump, which has no inherent value but whose price soared before Trump’s inauguration increasing his paper worth by billions of dollars.Trump’s blatant mixing of his political efforts to boost crypto via less regulation and his own pursuit o