The Maga backlash against Trump’s crypto grab: ‘This is bad, and looks bad’

 

Analysis

The Maga backlash against Trump’s crypto grab: ‘This is bad, and looks bad’

J Oliver Conroy

Trump’s meme coin has some conservatives complaining over ‘most blatant ponzi scheme in history’

 

Fri 31 Jan 2025 10.00 EST

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/31/trump-cryptocurrency-republicans

 

When Donald Trump announced – three days before assuming the presidency of the United States, and followed shortly by Melania Trump – that he was launching a self-named “meme coin” cryptocurrency, many in the crypto industry were quick to express frustration. Ethics experts were also alarmed.

 

Among Trump’s base, however, a similar backlash – smaller, more muted, but similarly anguished – has been taking hold.

 

After a brief bubble as speculators raced to buy them, both Trump coins have mostly plummeted in value. Within the online Maga community – which has a certain degree of overlap with crypto enthusiasts – some feel betrayed by the president’s embrace of what some conservatives view as little better than a penny-stock pump-and-dump scam.

 

Trump, who in 2021 said bitcoin “seems like a scam”, has since flipped on the issue. He was widely expected to be a “pro-crypto” president, with the crypto sector hoping he would be a broadminded sheriff who would grant their financial frontier new legitimacy; instead he embarrassed them by initiating a gold-rush on meme coins, considered the riskiest and least reputable form of mainstream cryptocurrency.

 

Unlike traditional crypto-currencies that are “mined” and used in a blockchain, meme coins cannot be used as electronic currency and are generally regarded as having no enduring value. They are “minted” to exploit a viral moment.

 

“Now, on the cusp of getting some liberalization of crypto regulations in this country, the main thing people are thinking about crypto is, ‘Oh, it’s just a casino for these meme coins,’” Nic Carter, a Trump supporter and cryptocurrency investor, told the New York Post. “It does the opposite of validating us, it makes it look completely unserious.”

 

Similarly, keyboard Maga warriors who hoped that Trump would stick up for the American little guy are bitterly disappointed that he endorsed a financial scheme that immediately took little guys for a ride.

 

The new president claimed his coin would “celebrate everything we stand for: WINNING!”, but not everyone seems persuaded.

 

“I wish Trump was more tempered on this,” someone on a conservative Reddit forum despaired after Trump’s coin debuted. “He owns casinos and knows the addiction of gambling.” Another argued that meme coins prey “on the poor and most desperate”.

 

“Can anyone make a cogent argument in favor of this?” one poster asked. Few did. “This is bad, and looks bad,” one person said.

 

Others called the Trump token “degrad[ing] to the office of the Presidency”, “a lame money grab”, “a bad idea with a million ways to go wrong and derail his second term”, “shady”, and “kinda gross”. Another added, “This crypto is the most blatant ponzi scheme in history and we are the marks.”

 

One conservative wrote that their litmus test was “if Biden pulled this shit, how would I feel? … I can’t imagine any other president doing this”.

 

“The GOP has to find someone better for 2028,” someone said – a sentiment that was surprisingly common. “I want a real man like Vance to run this,” someone else said.

 

After a meme coin named IVANKA launched last week, Ivanka Trump was forced to clarify that she had no relationship with the venture, and condemned it as “being promoted without my consent or approval”. She said the coin “risks deceiving consumers and defrauding them of their hard-earned money”, an argument that some crypto critics might say applies to all meme coins, including Trump and Melania’s official tokens.

 

The famously conservative Wall Street Journal editorial board, influential in conservative circles, ran an editorial criticizing Trump’s turn as a crypto impresario. The piece noted a litany of legal, ethical and political problems with meme coins, “vehicles for speculation” that could open Trump to civil and criminal liabilities or be used by foreign adversaries to curry influence. “No careful President would get anywhere near this kind of political risk, and we can’t recall any President who has.”

 

The Trump token’s website contains a disclaimer noting that the tokens are “not intended to be, or to be the subject of, an investment opportunity, investment contract, or security of any type”, though that language probably does not bear much relation with how the average investor views a meme coin.

 

Undeterred, Trump’s wider business empire is stepping further into this space. On Tuesday, the Trump Media and Technology Group, which operates Trump’s social media platform Truth Social, announced the launch of a financial technology brand called “Truth.Fi”, through which the company plans to invest up to $250m in crypto-currencies and “crypto securities”, and other investment accounts.

 

Ethics experts have widely condemned Trump’s coin as creating serious and unprecedented conflicts of interest or as one conservative on Reddit begs: “Please please please Mr. President. Don’t get involved with crypto.”