A very abbreviated list of a few corruption scandals from the first half of Trump’s second term
The following is merely a list of a few highlights, and omits many items:
*Trump founded a cryptocurrency firm at the same moment he was deregulating the entire crypto industry. He then bought a separate firm that he used to buy his own cryptocurrency, while at the same time raising nearly one billion dollars from investors to buy that very same cryptocurrency.
*He launched a meme coin, aka, a lightly tarted up Ponzi scheme, that netted him hundreds of millions of dollars, even as the coin lost 97% of its value. Mandatory financial disclosures revealed eventually that investors had collectively lost $3.8 billion on this scheme, while Trump himself had netted $636 million, since he made money on every transaction, whether the value of the coin went up or down.
*Relatedly, he received the benefit of enormous crypto “investments” from foreign nationals, that were often barely disguised bribes. He pardoned one of these investors, Changpeng Zhao, the founder of Binance, wiping out a serious criminal conviction. Prior to Trump issuing this pardon, Binance had provided critical software and infrastructure to World Liberty Financial, the cryptocurrency start-up co-founded by Trump and his sons.
*His son-in-law Jared Kushner, a man with no experience in either high finance investment or international diplomacy, was given two billion dollars to manage by Saudi Arabia – this generated a $40 million investment fee per year for Kushner – and then was appointed by Trump to handle wartime negotiations with Iran, Saudi Arabia’s bitterest regional rival. In the midst of the negotiation, Kushner solicited five billion more dollars for his fund from the Saudis and other Middle Eastern governments.
*In the summer of 2025, the nation of Qatar gave Trump a $400 million luxury jumbo jet as a gift. This was a completely unambiguous violation of the Constitution’s emoluments clause.