On April 22nd, Fight Fight Fight LLC, a company with ties to President Donald Trump, announced that the 220 top investors in its meme coin $TRUMP would be invited to meet with Trump himself. The event was billed as an “intimate private” dinner, but with obvious hints that attendees were buying an elected official’s time. Around the date of the announcement, federal government officials reportedly registered three websites apparently related to the dinner: thetrilliondollarinner.gov, dinnerforamerica.gov, and thetrillion.gov. At least one, it was reported, temporarily directed to a Department of Commerce login portal, suggesting that the coin was somehow linked to the government. The coin’s price jumped by more than 50 percent after the dinner was announced, netting Trump and his allies nearly $900,000 in trading fees in just two days.
Two democratic senators demanded an ethics probe into the May 22 dinner, but in February, Trump fired the head of the body that would typically investigate that type of alleged misconduct.
The meme coin dinner is the kind of open graft controversy that would have been unfathomable under previous administrations, even Trump’s first term eight years ago. Now it’s just one of dozens of ways the president and those in his orbit have enriched themselves. Along the way, they’ve dismantled government watchdogs that crack down on scams of every scale. The president has created his own money-fleecing spin on Reagonomics — instead of promising trickle-down wealth, it’s trickle-down opportunities for fraud.
Trickle-down enrichment starts at the top, with Trump selling access to the White House through promotions like the meme coin dinner . Beneath him are high-profile donors who have bought their way out of accusations of corporate misconduct or outright fraud, particularly the grift-ripe world of cryptocurrency. As the watchdogs that oversee these companies are hobbled, they leave the door open to small-time scammers who can trust their operations won’t be spotted. And this government chaos creates whole new opportunities — and more vulnerable people — to exploit. At every level, regular people have become little more than collateral damage or prey.
“It’s every direction of influence peddling and corruption that you could imagine,” Lisa Gilbert, the cochair of the Not Above the Law Coalition, told The Verge. “You’ve got the Trump family personally profiting off the presidency. There are the billionaires surrounding him in the cabinet, which is a whole other level. They’re raking it in.”
Gilbert, who is also the copresident of the consumer rights advocacy group Public Citizen, described the Trump administration’s relationships with business — and particularly with tech — as a “concentric circle” of influence peddling. “There’s this tech bro ecosystem of which Elon Musk is the pinnacle where it’s all about personal profit in your own companies and your own contracts with the government and what you can get out of it,” Gilbert says. “It’s really corruption in every direction you look.”
Trump’s meme coin isn’t his only crypto project. Months before the 2024 election, Trump and his two oldest sons, Eric and Don Jr., launched a cryptocurrency platform called World Liberty Financial. The initial announcement was light on details, but the Trumps described it as a way to help underserved people, as well as those who had been “debanked,” access financial markets they’d otherwise be shut out of. World Liberty struggled to sell its $WLFI tokens early on — until Trump became president, that is. It’s still unclear how much World Liberty is helping debanked people, but it’s a vehicle for foreign investors to essentially donate to the president, as a recent New York Times investigation found.
No one has invested more in World Liberty than Justin Sun. Sun’s crypto company Tron was sued by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for fraud in 2023, after allegedly engaging in market manipulation around its token TRX. Then, the embattled founder spent $75 million on $WLFI coins between November and January. A month after Trump took office, the SEC asked a federal judge to halt proceedings in its suit.
Trump’s first term was marked by some obvious conflicts of interest, like foreign dignitaries and political groups booking rooms and hosting events at his hotels and other properties. But the apparent partiality has become standard practice in Trump’s second term, extending to federal agencies as well. The SEC has dropped inquiries into and cases against several crypto companies that donated to Trump’s inaugural fund, including ConsenSys, Robinhood, Coinbase, Kraken, Ripple Labs, and Crypto.com, the latter of which recently announced a venture with the Trump Media & Technology Group.
Trump media, the parent company of Trump’s social media app Truth Social, has reportedly partnered with Crypto.com and Yorkville America Digital, a Florida-based investment firm, to launch a series of exchange-traded funds (ETFs). Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), the top Democratic member of the Senate Committee on Banking, called Trump’s foray into financial services an “extraordinary conflict of interest” and called on the SEC to ensure that the project would be “free from undue influence.” It’s unlikely that her request will go anywhere.
‘It’s every direction of influence peddling and corruption that you could imagine.’
In the unlikely event that Republicans help launch a congressional probe into Trump’s self-dealing, the administration has completely dismantled nearly every regulatory body that would enforce potential penalties against the president — not to mention gutted the government agencies dedicated to combatting corporate malfeasance in all its forms. The Department of Justice (DOJ) even disbanded a unit dedicated to enforcing crypto fraud, putting an end to what deputy attorney general Todd Blanche described as “regulation by prosecution.”
Other industries are benefitting from Trump’s more laissez-faire approach to enforcement. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has attempted to effectively eliminate the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, sending layoff notices to nearly 1,500 workers in apparent violation of a court order barring further firings. Before DOGE’s evisceration of the CFPB, the bureau had already rolled back or outright dropped several investigations into and lawsuits against corporate misconduct, including a suit alleging that the payment platform Zelle had failed to protect its users from “widespread fraud.”
Musk’s companies themselves, naturally, have also benefited — including Tesla, which reportedly saved over a billion dollars in potential penalties for allegedly misleading customers about its “self-driving” tech.
Far from reining Trump and DOGE in, the Republican-controlled Senate has also attempted to defang the CFPB, and in March voted to strip the bureau of its power to regulate X. The deregulation extends beyond the tech industry: in February, the CFPB halted litigation against Walmart, which it had sued under the Biden administration for allegedly forcing delivery workers to pay “junk fees” in order to get paid. The administration also dropped a lawsuit against Capital One, which the bureau previously alleged had misled customers about savings account interest rates.
Trump’s destruction of the CFPB “has huge ramifications for the American people,” says Gilbert, of the Not Above the Law Coalition. “It reins in payday lenders. It helps people grapple with student loan debt and malfeasance on behalf of the institutions that they borrow from. It helps people who are getting ripped off in terms of service. It was founded in the wake of the financial crisis because there was no cop on the beat explicitly for protecting everyday consumers, so taking it away — the consequences are immediate and scary.”
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) is investigating the Trump administration’s efforts to do away with the CFPB, according to a letter obtained by CNN. Forty Democratic senators have also written to acting CFPB director Russ Vought, asking him to provide a “detailed accounting” of how the CFPB can “perform all of its statutorily required functions with a staff of 200 people left after slashing almost 90% of the agency.”
In a statement to The Verge, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), one of the senators who signed onto the letter to Vought, described Trump’s mass deregulation as “sabotage” that is “turning the country into a grifter’s paradise.”
“By gutting watchdogs like the CFPB, FTC, and SEC to tying regulators’ hands, Trump has opened the floodgates to scams, fraud, and grift at every level,” Schumer says. “Under Trump, the United States isn’t just the Wild West; it’s open season on working families.”
While the president and his cronies strip the government for parts, the worsening economic climate and total dismantling of the regulatory state are creating a perfect storm for scammers who want to bilk people out of their money.
There’s already a copycat $WLFI coin on the market, and there are too many MAGA-inspired shitcoins to name, the values of which crest and fall depending on the goings-on in Trumpworld. One Trump acolyte claims to have founded an app that pays people in crypto for reporting sightings of undocumented immigrants — but that, too, appears to be little more than a crypto pump and dump scheme disguised as a migrant bounty hunting tool.
As job growth slows further and experts warn of a recession on the horizon, it’s likely that people will find themselves increasingly desperate for work and more susceptible to scams as a result. Before Trump took office, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) warned of a sharp increase in “task scams” that purport to offer people work, often in the form of “game-like online jobs.” More recently, fraudsters posing as mortgage lenders have targeted homeowners, saying they’ll put their houses into foreclosure unless they send payments to a third party immediately. Some scammers are reportedly claiming to offer government checks from DOGE.
Gilbert pointed out that many CFPB enforcement actions were the result of complaints lodged by individual consumers. “A lot of that is small-board stuff, things that would not necessarily rise to the level of writing a new rule,” Gilbert says. “When we don’t have those levers in place — when we don’t have that database being watched and reacted to — small scams will be perpetrated across the country, and I think the same is true for each agency that has that responsibility.”
The few government agencies left more or less unscathed by DOGE’s cuts have largely moved their focus to protecting Trump and his allies from their critics — or to going after Trump’s enemies. As the DOJ is downscaling crypto crime investigations, the FBI launched a task force to investigate vandalism of Tesla cars and showrooms, which the government is calling “domestic terrorism.” And the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), now helmed by Trump loyalist Brendan Carr, has shifted its efforts away from consumer protection, focusing instead on harassing media and telecom companies that aren’t sufficiently deferential to the president.
For as long as money has changed hands, con artists have tried to swindle people out of it. Trump didn’t invent scams, but his administration’s dismantling of every institution that protects consumers will allow them to flourish. It won’t matter. They’ve got theirs.