June 17, 2025
By The Gonzo Poltergeist, Senior Correspondent, Haunted Institutions
There was never going to be a retirement plan. Not for you, not for me, and sure as hell not for the MAGA movement rank and file. Social Security is on the block — no it’s not, yes it is — but we all know the game: insolvency by 2031 unless something gives. And so far, the only person in Washington who seems to be actively planning for retirement is the guy selling meme coins with his face on them.
Maybe Trump felt like he needed to fluff the nest a little before slinking off to Mar-a-Lago, and then that great Mar-a-Lago in the sky. According to his 2024 financial disclosure, he pulled in over $600 million that year alone — from golf resorts, licensing deals, NFTs, and early crypto partnerships. One crypto venture, World Liberty Financial, brought in an estimated $400 million, and the now-infamous Trump NFTs added another $1.16 million to the haul.
Trump Coin wouldn’t launch until Inauguration Week 2025 — but you could already see the architecture forming: blockchain meets branding meets presidency. The only thing missing was the rug pull.
Maybe he is a real (billionaire) boy at last.
Five months in, with 34 felony convictions and 88 criminal counts hanging off him like cursed medallions, the grift has hardened into its final form — not as policy, not as ideology, but as product: a meme coin with a mugshot.
Trump Coin isn’t just a punchline. It’s a currency for the collapse. A symbolic IOU from a man who turned casinos into carcasses and steaks into subpoenas. It’s loyalty as liquidity. It’s patriotism as pump-and-dump. It looks like merch, trades like hype, and works like a bribe.
Because the most effective thing Trump ever built was a funnel — a big, shiny, gold-leafed funnel that sucks in rage, faith, nationalism, and fear… and converts it all into cash. This isn’t politics. It’s asset extraction in executive form.
Donald Trump didn’t invent the American grift, but he sure as hell perfected it. There was Trump Airlines, Trump Vodka, Trump Magazine, Trump Ice, and of course, Trump Steaks — all gone. There was Trump University, which promised wealth-building secrets and delivered lawsuits. There were the casinos, the golf resorts, and the half-empty towers that now serve as mausoleums for bad credit and worse taste. Along the way came six corporate bankruptcies, two impeachments (so far), and one gold-plated toilet in a Fifth Avenue apartment built on tax fraud.
We’ve chronicled the grift as best we could — but it’s kind of like catching a firehose with a bucket. We do what we can, right? The gold-plated phone’s probably next. Give us a week or two.
So far, we’ve covered:
• Vol. 1: Welcome to the Family Business
• Vol. 2: The Plane, the Prince, and the President-for-Hire
• Vol. 3: The Great Arabian Peninsula Heist
• Vol. 4: Taco Tuesdays
But the hustle evolved. And now the grift has gone digital.
Trump Coin was developed in the fall of 2024, quietly pushed through shell firms and crypto cutouts, and then launched to coincide with Inauguration Day — January 20, 2025. Not even a full week after the oath, the coin was live and trading. It wasn’t a side hustle. It was the plan. Like submitting your direct deposit form with your onboarding paperwork — except the job is “President,” and the employer is everyone: rich criminals, loyalists, anyone seeking favor really, up to and including foreign governments willing to buy access and consideration on-chain.
At first glance, $TRUMP looks like just another novelty coin — a blockchain-era bobblehead, part merch, part message board in-joke. It trades like a joke. It spikes on news and tweets. It dips when Trump sneezes in the wrong ZIP code. But that’s the trick. Its volatility is the feature. The chaos is the camouflage.
Trump Coin doesn’t promise utility. It doesn’t fund infrastructure. It’s not even clear what entity runs it. And that’s the beauty of it — it can be anything to anyone. To the base, it’s a symbol of loyalty — a MAGA hat with a price chart. To the curious, it’s a meme-fueled moonshot — maybe you flip it and make a few bucks, maybe buy a shit ton and get invited to dinner. To the insiders, it’s a soft influence marker — a ledger entry that proves you’re willing to spend money to get close to the flame.
Like any good illusion, it was only a matter of time before it was put to better use. And that time is now.
According to Cryptopolitan, billions of dollars are quietly flowing into Trump Coin from foreign entities — including China, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE. The largest investment identified to date? $2 billion, traced to a United Arab Emirates–backed firm, routed through the British Virgin Islands.
Another major player: GD Culture Group, a Nasdaq-traded company with just eight employees, no known revenue, and a Chinese subsidiary that openly admits it can be “influenced” by the Chinese government. The company runs a failing TikTok storefront and was profiled by New York Magazine’s Intelligencer as a shell operation hiding in plain sight. And yet, GD Culture just announced it would spend $300 million — sourced through an unnamed BVI investor — to purchase Bitcoin and Trump Coin, at the very moment Trump was weighing whether to ban TikTok in the U.S.
Let’s spell that out. A Chinese-linked company with no real business model — one that runs a failing TikTok storefront and admits it can be influenced by the Chinese government — just announced a $300 million crypto buy. Not as a generic investment. As a direct purchase of Bitcoin and Trump Coin. And they did it at the exact moment that same president is weighing legislation that could kill the only platform they operate on.
It’s influence acquisition — paid to a meme coin and wired through offshore cutouts. And GD Culture isn’t the only one.
A Mexico-based shipping company, Fr8Tech, publicly pledged $20 million to buy $TRUMP in the name of “fair, balanced, and free trade.” A Qatari-linked real estate deal is in the mix. And according to analytics firm Nansen, top buyers are concentrated in Mexico, Singapore, and Australia.
Because unlike campaign donations — which are tightly regulated, logged, and limited under U.S. election law — there are no rules blocking foreign nationals from buying coins. No disclosures. No FEC filings. No donation caps. Just one big open-air bazaar, where foreign actors can bid for access in crypto and leave no paper trail behind.
All at once, that’s the loophole, the brilliance, and the rot.
The Trump team didn’t stop at accepting the money. They gamified it. The top 220 Trump Coin holders were promised dinner at his Virginia golf club. That’s not a fundraiser, that’s a blockchain-based auction for presidential access.
And now we arrive at the Trump Coin endgame.
“Crypto platform Tron will go public in the US this year, a reverse merger with the publicly listed company SRM Entertainment… But it’s the context around this reverse merger that really matters here…
In 2023, Tron and its founder Justin Sun were charged by the SEC over allegations that they had sold unregistered securities and engaged in market manipulation. That investigation was dropped, however, four months ago when Trump took office.
Last month, Justin Sun… attended President Trump’s crypto banquet as one of the top 24 holders of the Trump meme coin. He also invested $75 million into World Liberty Financial, a crypto company run by Trump’s family. President Trump derived $57 million in income from that company.
The investment bank that brokered this deal… is Dominari Securities… headquartered on the 23rd floor of Trump Tower, two floors below the Trump Organization. A company filing reveals two new appointments to the Dominari advisory board: Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr.
Eric Trump is expected to take up a role in this company, which will be called Tron Inc.
So if the grift wasn’t apparent to you before, let me just lay it out for you again now: a crypto founder, who was charged with securities fraud and market manipulation, who then bought millions of dollars’ worth of Trump Coin and World Liberty, who then got his fraud charges dropped by Trump’s SEC, is now going public in a reverse merger brokered by a bank advised by Trump’s children — and which will place Eric Trump in a leadership position…
That is actually happening.”
— Ed Elson, Prof G Markets, June 17, 2025“The President has now become this investment vehicle in which you can basically park money to flout and escape the law… They know the people on Wall Street are too smart to buy into this bullshit. So instead, what do they do? They go out to the public. Because they believe the only people dumb enough to hand over their money to them like this is a Trump-loving retail investor who thinks Eric and Don Jr. are the geniuses who are going to make them rich.”
That’s not a political party. That’s a Ponzi. That’s not populism. That’s regulatory arbitrage dressed in red hats.
The base isn’t being mobilized anymore. It’s being monetized.
Filed from Trump Tower’s 23rd Floor — or so says the letterhead.
