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Is the $TRUMP memecoin actually just a vehicle for bribes? Did China pay him off for lower tariffs? [1]

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Date: 2025-02-01

While Tr*mp has been grifting all along, with his Trump Media stock priced at many times its enterprise value as one example, his new memecoin $Trump may be even worse. Sure, bribery is listed in the constitution as an impeachable offense. But blockchain supposedly hides the parties to the transaction. Surely Tr*mp himself is getting a lot of the action. From Forbes:

The “Official Trump” website lists two entities as owners of a collective 80% of $TRUMP’s supply: CIC Digital LLC, an affiliate of the billionaire’s Trump Organization, and Fight Fight Fight LLC, a recently incorporated business whose ownership is unclear – without naming the split between CIC Digital and Fight Fight Fight.

We know that memecoins are popular among young men, many of whom are obvious “marks” for get-rich-quick schemes, and who think they are the ones who will make money when a “greater fool” pays more than they did. And if $Trump were a widely held form of obeisance from the great masses of red hat wearers, then its ownership would be diverse. But cryptocurrency lives on a public blockchain, and while you don’t know who the owners are, you can see how much each anonymous transaction entails.

Could this be influencing policies including tariffs? Why is he hitting Canada harder than China? Paul Krugman noted in today’s newsletter (from Substack, highly recommended):

And then there’s the matter of Trump’s self-dealing, especially through the $Trump and $Melania tokens, which clearly have no intrinsic value. Who bought these tokens? Were they grifts aimed at red-hatted MAGA fans who don’t know better? Well, a significant number of small investors did buy them. But Chainalysis found that 94 percent of the tokens were purchased by around 40 “whales,” large buyers holding more than $10 million worth of the coins. We don’t know who these whales are. But it’s not unreasonable to guess that they were individuals or entities seeking to buy influence, rather than looking for a good investment. Could some of the whales be effective proxies for the Chinese government? Could China have, in effect, bought itself lower tariffs by enriching Trump personally? To be clear, I have no evidence that this happened. But in making this conjecture, isn’t this a plausible explanation?

So if it’s 40 whales doing almost all of the buying, perhaps they’re not so anonymous. And thus Tr*mp’s extremely transactional behavior may be being bought and paid for, via crypto. No wonder he loves it so much.

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