On January 17, 2025, three days before Trump's second inauguration, he took another step into the world of cryptocurrencies by releasing a new meme coin: $TRUMP. The day before the ceremony, his wife Melania released her own $MELANIA coin. Unlike World Liberty tokens, which gave their holders specific management rights associated with the company, these assets were simply memes. The $TRUMP poster featured an image of the President with a raised fist and the words “FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT“, emblazoned above it. Melania's meme showed a close-up of her face with her hands clasped in front of her, as if in fervent prayer. After the Trumps promoted the coins on their social media accounts, their value jumped. “$TRUMP is currently the most popular digital meme on earth,” Eric Trump said in a statement to Time. “This is just the beginning.”
Rake-In
With Trump back in the Oval Office and players around the world vying to get into his good books, events have moved thick and fast, many involving cryptocurrencies, foreign money, or both. One of his first actions as president was to direct agencies to identify regulations affecting the digital asset sector and recommend which ones should be “repeated or modified.” In February, the Securities and Exchange Commission (now under new management) asked the court to stay the lawsuit against Sun, who had by then increased his stake in World Liberty to seventy-five million dollars.
In March, Trump hosted a White House crypto summit hosted by his “crypto czar” David Sachs, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, and announced plans to create a “strategic Bitcoin reserve” in the US. Later that month, Eric and Donald Jr. merged the company they had formed just the previous month with Canadian Bitcoin mining company Hut 8 to take a stake in the new American Bitcoin company, which, according to To Wall Street Journalhad ambitions to become the world's largest Bitcoin miner and create its own Bitcoin reserve.
The Trump brothers also expanded their operations in other regions this spring, especially in the Gulf. In April, Dar Global, a Saudi-owned developer that has partnered with the Trumps on other Trump-branded projects in the Middle East, announced plans to open a Trump hotel in Dubai and a Trump golf resort in neighboring Qatar. Eric Trump was in the Gulf because of these statements.
On the domestic front, his brother Donald Jr. attended the launch party for another of his business ventures: the Executive Branch, an exclusive Washington club supposedly charging members a half-million-dollar initiation fee. News reports identified Donald Jr. as one of the club's owners, with the other two identified as Malik and Buskirk, his partners in 1789, and Zach and Alex Witkoff, two sons of Steve Witkoff, who are both co-founders of World Liberty Financial. CNBC reported that the executive party was attended by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Attorney General Pam Bondi, Paul Atkins, head of the SEC, and Brendan Carr, head of the Federal Communications Commission.
Cryptocurrency—and attracting foreign investors—remained central to Trump's enrichment strategy. According to a lengthy report on their “global crypto ATM machine” that Reuters published In October, Eric Trump, who attended a cryptocurrency conference in Dubai in May, introduced World Liberty to potential investors, including a Chinese businessman named Guren (Bobby) Zhou, who was arrested on suspicion of money laundering in the UK. (Zhou denied any wrongdoing and was not convicted of any crimes.) Subsequently, according to a Reuters report, a UAE company linked to Zhou purchased one hundred million dollars worth of World Liberty Financial's cryptocurrency tokens, WLFI. Obviously there were many other foreign purchases. An analysis published by Reuters found that more than two-thirds of World Liberty token purchases were made through digital wallets that were likely linked to overseas buyers.
Trump has also benefited from official largesse. The Constitution expressly prohibits federal officials, including the president, from accepting gifts from foreign governments without the consent of Congress. But in February, Trump, who had complained about how long it was taking to build the new Air Force One, went to Palm Beach International Airport and inspected a luxury Boeing 747 owned by the Qatari government. In May, days before leaving for Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, Trump announced on social media that the Pentagon would take Boeing 747 from the Royal Family of Qatar in exchange for Air Force One as a “GIFT, FREE”. White House press secretary Caroline Leavitt said in a statement: “Any gift made by a foreign government is always accepted in full compliance with all applicable laws. President Trump's administration is committed to full transparency.”
