Tuesday, July 07, 2026
Trump's Corrupt Crypto "Pump and Dump" Scheme
The following is by Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman:
Donald Trump has distinguished himself in many ways. One of them is that he is our first pump and dump president.
Obviously no president has enriched himself from office the way that Trump has. That’s common knowledge. One of the things that is really amazing about it, however, is the way in which he enriched himself — a lot of which has to do with crypto.
So the New York Times had a report just the other day on Trumpcoin, the memecoin issued on Trump’s behalf which got a lot of buyers, a lot of money came flowing into it.
It should have been obvious from the beginning that the coin was inherently worthless, and at this point it essentially is worthless. It has lost 97 percent of its value. But a lot of people did buy in at the high prices.
What was special about the New York Times story was two things. First, they put a number on how much money naive investors have lost on the coin, which is 3.8 billion dollars. And even more surprising is the number of people who were in effect suckers here — almost a million.
That’s really amazing. I mean, I was completely cynical but I didn’t think there were that many suckers out there. But it turns out there were really a lot. A few people made money off the coin — basically insiders who got to buy it early and then were able to cash in before the broader retail market realized that this was a worthless token. There’s another token, the World Liberty Financial coin — which has also crashed, although the Times had difficulty in tracking down how many people have lost how much money. There’s the Melania coin.
Okay, all of this is amazing. As Trump would say, it’s like nothing anybody’s ever seen before. I think we should say, however, that this is a bigger story than just the Trump coin, and it’s a bigger story than just Trump himself.
What we’re witnessing is or has been a really enormous pump and dump scheme, I would argue, involving more or less all of crypto.
So if you don’t know the background, Trump used to be highly critical of cryptocurrency, saying it was worthless and a scam, which was true. But then when it became clear that there was money in it for him, he reversed course. And during the 2024 election, crypto interests contributed a lot of money to Trump. They then after the election poured a lot of money into his own enrichment, into his own projects. And the administration came in with a very pro crypto stance: deregulation encouraging uses of crypto, at least talk about a national bitcoin reserve, all of that. And the price of bitcoin doubled after the election; the valuation, the market cap of cryptocurrency in general went from a little over two trillion to more than four trillion.
And then starting last fall it all came crashing down. Not all the way to zero — the price of Bitcoin right now as I record this is about what it was on the eve of the 2024 election; it’s about half what it was at its peak. That’s also true, roughly speaking for the market cap. So we’ve seen about two trillion dollars of market valuation wiped out.
Why is this a pump and dump story? Well what is cryptocurrency good for? As you know, I’ve been on this for a long time. Bitcoin was introduced in 2009 — this is a seventeen year old idea which has yet to find any legitimate use cases. Illegitimate use cases, yes. There was also a report in the Wall Street Journal about the extent to which Iran and North Korea have been making use of cryptocurrency to evade U.S. sanctions, so there is that. But it’s still not enough to justify a multi-trillion dollar asset.
Anyway, it was trendy, it was exciting, it was fashionable and particularly after November 2024 it was pushed with the encouragement of the Trump Administration. It was just a heavy marketing campaign that had the advantage of also having the authority or whatever, the credibility — such as it was but among some people real —of Donald Trump behind it. They all evaporated.
I think we can say that to some extent what happened was that Trump kind of moved on to other things. There also is some distracted boyfriend meme: the guy looking over his shoulder. A lot of the excitable, fear of missing out, latest thing money has probably moved from crypto to AI. So that might have happened even without Trump. But the basic story is that Trump guided, pushed people into a whole asset class, crypto, of which a large part is Bitcoin, but other stuff as well.
We don’t know how much, or I don’t know, how much crypto was bought during this period, but it has to be substantial. And then it crashed. And at this point, essentially anybody who bought crypto during this era, since the 2024 election, has lost money.
It’s a lot of money; we know that on paper — it’s not really paper, but anyway — in principle two trillion dollars has been lost in crypto. Now a lot of that is probably money just given back, imaginary gains that took place during the run-up. But a substantial amount of additional money was from people who did buy in during this whole episode. So this has to be many times the size of the losses on the Trump coin. And it is, I would say, at a functional level another pump and dump scheme.
In this case the beneficiaries were people who were already in crypto. Clearly some of the crypto interests that bought themselves a president probably stayed fully invested. But others must have cashed out, and a lot of innocents — well a lot of a lot of suckers, let’s not mince words here — a lot of suckers clearly lost a lot of money.
It’s an extraordinary thing. There have been pump and dump schemes forever, probably going back to the Phoenicians or something. But this is on a scale we’ve never seen, and with the president of the United States in the center of it. Which I guess given everything else comes as no surprise.
Trump Gives World The Impression That U.S. Soccer Doesn't Have To Follow The Rules
Donald Trump has blundered again, and the people who must pay the price for this one are the players on the United States soccer team.
In the last game, The leading scorer for the United States committed a foul. He was given a red card by the referee, which meant he had to leave the game (leaving the U.S. to finish the game a man short) and could not play in the next game according to FIFA rules.
It can be debated whether the foul deserved a red card. Personally, I thought a yellow card would have been more appropriate. But a red card was given.
U.S. soccer could have petitioned for a review. But that's not what happened. Donald Trump intervened by calling the head of FIFA. Then FIFA changed its rule for this player and said he could play in the next game against Belgium.
FIFA did not give a reason for changing the ban on playing for the U.S. player, and without a valid reason, it is looking like Trump pressured his buddy (the same head of FIFA that gave him a "peace prize" and is know for trying to appease Trump) to change the rules for the U.S. team.
Belgium immediately became upset at the change, and many other countries joined in against the decision. They think the U.S. is being given special treatment.
As I write this, the game against Belgium has not yet been played. But the U.S. team has been put in a no win situation. If the player (Folarin Balogun) plays and the U.S. wins, most other countries will believe it was unfair cheating. And if they lose, the world will still think the U.S. tried to cheat. Either way, it's a black mark against U.S. soccer.
This was a colossal blunder by Donald Trump - but then blundering is what he does best.
NOTE - Belgium appealed the overturning of the ban, but their appeal was denied.
UPDATE - Balogun played in the game, but it didn't make much difference. Belgium easily won the game by a score of 4 to 1. I doubt that will mitigate the way most of the world sees the unethical behavior of Donald Trump and FIFA.
Monday, July 06, 2026
Most Say Trump Doesn't Pursue The Right Priorities To Solve U.S. Problems
The chart above reflects the results of the Economist / YouGov Poll -- done between June 26th and 29th of a nationwide sample of 1,606 adults (including 1,428 registered voters).The margin of error is 3.2 points for both adults and registered voters.
Nearly Half Of Americans Didn't Know What Event They Were Celebrating On The 4th
This chart is from a Cato Institute survey -- done on June 25th and 26th of a nationwide sample of 2,253 adults, with a 2 point margin of error.
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