Speaker 1: I'm Daniel James, and you're listening to seven AM. Donald
Speaker 1: Trump returned to the White House promising to make America
Speaker 1: the crypto capital of the world, despite having once dismissed
Speaker 1: bitcoin as not money and warned it was based on
Speaker 1: thin air in a twenty nineteen tweet. In his first
Speaker 1: year back in office, Trump has set that skepticism aside
Speaker 1: as it became clear crypto presented an extraordinary business opportunity.
Speaker 1: A new financial disclosure thinks that just how lucrative those
Speaker 1: ventures have become, and while some investors have lost heavily,
Speaker 1: Trump's own fortune has surged, raising questions about how far
Speaker 1: a president can go in turning public office into a
Speaker 1: money making machine. Today, journalists and research director for Public
Speaker 1: Citizens Trump Accountability Project Zach Everson on Donald Trump's crypto
Speaker 1: empire and the new frontier of political corruption in America.
Speaker 1: It's Friday, July three, Zach, thanks for joining us. We've
Speaker 1: got Trump's slightest financial disclosure. What did it reveal about
Speaker 1: the President's wealth since taking office?
Speaker 2: The presidency has paid Donald Trump quite well, and that's
Speaker 2: not money coming directly from the US taxpayers. It revealed
Speaker 2: that he has made at least one point four billion
Speaker 2: dollars from Crypto in last year, which is just an
Speaker 2: astronomical amount of money. All told, his net worth Forbes
Speaker 2: estimates it to be about six billion in change.
Speaker 1: So he is.
Speaker 2: Really doing better now than he has ever done in
Speaker 2: his entire career as a businessman.
Speaker 1: I guess that pigs The question ahead is actually pay
Speaker 1: to other presidents. Actually it compares quite favorably. We haven't
Speaker 1: seen any sort of record of any other president's reporting
Speaker 1: anything remotely like this. And it's not just Crypto, it's
Speaker 1: really everything now.
Speaker 3: He earned more than eighty six million dollars in legal
Speaker 3: settlements as well. Those included the twenty four point five
Speaker 3: million from Meta, sixteen million dollars a piece from Paramount
Speaker 3: and Disney.
Speaker 2: He reported over twenty two thousand stock traits in the
Speaker 2: last year or so, which again is just an astronomical number.
Speaker 2: I think with Joe Biden it was in the dozens.
Speaker 3: In President Trump's biggest stockholdings include Amazon, Meta, Nvidia, and Tesla.
Speaker 2: He is very active financially. His entire financial disclosure came
Speaker 2: to nine hundred and twenty seven pages at a very
Speaker 2: lucrative year last year. What message does this send to
Speaker 2: average Americans, especially those financially.
Speaker 4: I don't get involved in my personal and we have
Speaker 4: funds that run my money. Well, I've made a lot
Speaker 4: of money before I became president, and they invest my
Speaker 4: money and I don't talk to him.
Speaker 1: I don't even speak to him.
Speaker 4: So I have many people I don't know what they
Speaker 4: go and closed accounts or something you put your money in.
Speaker 4: And that said, I don't talk to him. They're big
Speaker 4: institutions and they run it.
Speaker 1: And he's my money selling other things as well, like
Speaker 1: Trump band, Bibles and snakers and other sort of small automs.
Speaker 2: You've got bibles, You've got sneakers, You've got Trump fragrance,
Speaker 2: which I'm sure you're familiar with.
Speaker 1: I'm wearing it rot now Zech.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I can smell it through the camera.
Speaker 1: It's yeah.
Speaker 2: I mean, he's really opened himself up to be willing
Speaker 2: to profit in any way possible, in a way that
Speaker 2: we didn't even see in the first term. One of
Speaker 2: the examples I give for that is the online Trump
Speaker 2: store dot com. It didn't even exist in the beginning
Speaker 2: of his first term. It just directed people to a
Speaker 2: physical retail shop in Trump Tower in New York. Within
Speaker 2: hours of from being reelected, they already had out the
Speaker 2: forty five forty seven line referring to the numbers of
Speaker 2: his presidency pedaling merch and if you go on there
Speaker 2: right now, there are dozens of different types of maga hats.
Speaker 2: The Trump Organization's official website is now selling Trump twenty
Speaker 2: twenty eight merchandise. But what we're celebrating our two hundred
Speaker 2: and fiftieth birthday. He's got all sorts of stuff pegged
Speaker 2: to that. You know, it doesn't matter that he's not
Speaker 2: two hundred and fifty, although he's getting up there. You know,
Speaker 2: Trump two fifty is on a whole bunch of merchandise
Speaker 2: that he's selling. And you've made several million dollars off
Speaker 2: that last year, but again not not as much as krypto.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the big ticket otomy is crypti one point four
Speaker 1: billion dollars in income from that source. When we say
Speaker 1: income from crypti, what does that mean in this case?
Speaker 2: In this case, you know, he is actually making money
Speaker 2: off this. That's one of the things when people hear crypto,
Speaker 2: it's oh, it's for ten money. It's magic beans without
Speaker 2: the magic. Donald Trump has his deals structured so that
Speaker 2: he gets paid. These deals get him paid upfront. So
Speaker 2: for example, with his mean coin, which I think he
Speaker 2: made about six hundred million dollars off of last year,
Speaker 2: that's a marketing deal. He was paid to use his
Speaker 2: image on that. So the coin which was training for
Speaker 2: as high as about seventy four dollars and is now
Speaker 2: down to a dollar. Seventy eight people who bought that
Speaker 2: lost out on it, but Donald Trump still got paid
Speaker 2: from it. We've had a lot of reporting on him
Speaker 2: making money off this be it World Liberty financial token sales,
Speaker 2: getting selling a significant amount of the company to the
Speaker 2: UE's National Security Advisor. So we've seen enough reports trickling
Speaker 2: in over the course of the last year that this number,
Speaker 2: unfortunately was not a surprise.
Speaker 1: So tell me a little bit more about where this
Speaker 1: money is coming from. Because Donald Trump, finously wasn't always
Speaker 1: a crypti goud. It just seems like a scam.
Speaker 4: I don't like it because it's another currency competing against
Speaker 4: the dollars.
Speaker 1: So, hey does he end up in the crypti business.
Speaker 2: He learned that there was real money to be made
Speaker 2: out of fit air. He will credit it with some
Speaker 2: of it to his son Bannon, who was pretty savvy
Speaker 2: in crypto supposedly and has helped him figure out this stuff,
Speaker 2: but he really started off gradually.
Speaker 4: Hello everyone, this is Donald Trump, hopefully your favorite president
Speaker 4: of all time, better than Lincoln, other than Washington. With
Speaker 4: an important announcement to make. I'm doing my first official
Speaker 4: Donald J. Trump NFT collection right here and right now.
Speaker 4: They're called Trump Digital Trading Cards.
Speaker 2: The first product you put out there were NFTs, which
Speaker 2: are digital trading cards.
Speaker 4: And you get a chance to meet me, go to
Speaker 4: collect Trump Cards dot com right now. And remember Christmas
Speaker 4: is coming, and this makes a great Christmas gift.
Speaker 2: And he did all right with that. So then you
Speaker 2: saw later on he launched World Liberty Financial in the
Speaker 2: waning days of the twenty twenty four presidential campaign, and
Speaker 2: that at first just put out a token that allowed
Speaker 2: you to vote on matters concerning World Liberty Financial. I
Speaker 2: didn't convey ownership, you couldn't even sell it up front,
Speaker 2: but they did sell a chunk of those, and then
Speaker 2: right before he was inaugurated again they launched the Mean coin,
Speaker 2: which took off spectacularly, and later on World Liberty Financial
Speaker 2: launched a second product, USD one that that's a stable
Speaker 2: coin pegged to the value of the US dollar and
Speaker 2: supposedly backed one to one with government reserves, and he
Speaker 2: makes money off that by people depositing money, simwhat to
Speaker 2: how a bank makes money. People give him fiat currency
Speaker 2: and then by him World Liberty Financial, World Liberty Financial
Speaker 2: gives him the stable coin, and the whole time that
Speaker 2: stable coin is in circulation, World Liberty Financial earns interest
Speaker 2: on the money that's being made off of it. So
Speaker 2: that's really how he's pulling in all this money from crypto.
Speaker 1: And when he was selling tokens and the lock there
Speaker 1: were perks that people that were purchasing those tokens were
Speaker 1: able to avail himself off. What were some of those
Speaker 1: cycled perks.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so called is a great way of putting it.
Speaker 2: Because there were a lot of complaints. The biggest one
Speaker 2: was a dinner in his DC area golf club where
Speaker 2: he attended. Now they said he was there in his
Speaker 2: personal capacity, but I believe he was behind elector and
Speaker 2: that showed the presidential seal. But he flew in, made
Speaker 2: a couple of remarks and got out of there. So
Speaker 2: there were a lot of people who attended that and
Speaker 2: were upset. There was a similar event recently at Marlago,
Speaker 2: his Florida residence for people who own a lot of it,
Speaker 2: and they've really tried to incentivize people to keep the
Speaker 2: mean coin around. So they've been trying to drive up
Speaker 2: use of the token through selling access and little perks.
Speaker 1: So for the average person trying to get in on
Speaker 1: this record, cryptocurrency is a famously risky investment. So what
Speaker 1: has happened to those who have bought in?
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, like so many other cryptocurrencies, the problem
Speaker 2: is not being an insider, you know, and people who
Speaker 2: get into business with Donald Trump. This is a guy
Speaker 2: who's been convicted of business fraud. He's taken several hotels
Speaker 2: to bankruptcy. Like, don't do it, but people did it,
Speaker 2: and you know, figuring, oh, it's the president, We're going
Speaker 2: to do all right. According to Reuter's, people who invested
Speaker 2: in his products lost two point three billion dollars. You know,
Speaker 2: we've just seen the market value of these things crash.
Speaker 2: As we talked about with the mean coin, it was
Speaker 2: its seventy four dollars. Now it's down to a dollar
Speaker 2: seventy eight.
Speaker 1: So the people who.
Speaker 2: Got in early through those sales, they're up but if
Speaker 2: you just bought it when it hit the open market
Speaker 2: and you weren't an a credited investor or a foreigner,
Speaker 2: you're down. You know. It seems like almost everybody who's
Speaker 2: engaged in Trump scrypto schemes after the original interest in
Speaker 2: it has lost most of the.
Speaker 1: Money coming out. Now CRYPTI became my full family business, Zach.
Speaker 1: It isn't just Trump cashing in on all of this.
Speaker 1: It's become a family business now as well, with Millennia
Speaker 1: and his sons. How involved are I and what kind
Speaker 1: of money of I'm iking?
Speaker 2: So Milania is We got some information from her from
Speaker 2: the disclosure because presidents are required to disclose their spouse's income.
Speaker 2: She's done all right, not as well as Donald Trump.
Speaker 2: She made about seven million dollars last year from her
Speaker 2: mean coin, which is really shortly after his. The sons
Speaker 2: are really the ones who are super engaged in this
Speaker 2: with him. In World Liberty Financial, they're both listed his
Speaker 2: co founder. Excuse me, all three of them are listed
Speaker 2: as co founders there and are actively involved in the company.
Speaker 2: Don Junior and Eric are involved in another company called
Speaker 2: American Bitcoin, which minds its own bitcoin. So those guys
Speaker 2: are all in on crypto, and again, according to Forbes,
Speaker 2: we've seen their finances just skyrocket. You know, they were
Speaker 2: worth I think Eric was worth about forty million according
Speaker 2: to Forbes before this presidency. Last they did it in
Speaker 2: late fall, he was worth five hundred million. Donald Trump's
Speaker 2: also seen his networth go up about tenfold. And those
Speaker 2: those numbers are several months old and are almost certainly
Speaker 2: much higher right now. So while they did profit during
Speaker 2: the first presidency, it wasn't a ton, but they are
Speaker 2: out to show that they earned some lessons from the
Speaker 2: first presidency and they are ready to make some money
Speaker 2: off those this time around.
Speaker 1: And a cool sec Trump isn't just passively making money
Speaker 1: from crypto. He's the president of the United States, which
Speaker 1: maintain and create rules and conditions that help these investments thrive.
Speaker 1: Is that what has happened here? What is the administration
Speaker 1: done on that front to affect the value of this cryptocurrency.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's really convenient to be launching crypto ventures while
Speaker 2: also oversee the regulatory system of the United States. In
Speaker 2: that regard, we've seen pardons to business partners in the
Speaker 2: crypto most significantly cz in Binance. They are incredibly important
Speaker 2: to world liberty financial helping it set up the plumbing
Speaker 2: that got it running, churning trades to make it look
Speaker 2: like it was more active than it was, having incentives
Speaker 2: for people to keep it in their account and actually
Speaker 2: holding a significant amount amount of it for themselves. Lest
Speaker 2: I checked of the stable coin the usc one, eighty
Speaker 2: seven percent of it was held at binance and finance
Speaker 2: is banned from the United States, so that means, if
Speaker 2: the rules are being followed, eighty seven percent of it
Speaker 2: is an overseas hands. But you know, finance CZ got partned,
Speaker 2: and there were a whole bunch of other investigations that
Speaker 2: got dropped, justin Sun being amongst them. You're seeing all
Speaker 2: sorts of benefits to crypto exchanges that have listed his
Speaker 2: currencies for trade. And yeah, with regulation, we passed a
Speaker 2: stable coin bill and it is set up perfectly for
Speaker 2: his stable coin. You know, it kind of decapped a
Speaker 2: lot of the competitors that maybe weren't as prepared with
Speaker 2: reserves as his was, but his is you know, his,
Speaker 2: His was okay, no surprise.
Speaker 1: From a decent approbably eight in close up Zech, A
Speaker 1: lot of this looks like it's clearly a conflict of
Speaker 1: interests clearly corruption. But is any of it illegal and
Speaker 1: is there any iris sought or investigation into this at all?
Speaker 2: Apparently Yeah, from a late person's look, it is clearly
Speaker 2: a conflict of interest. By law, the president cannot have
Speaker 2: conflicts of interest. I mean that is explicitly stated that
Speaker 2: the president and the vice president cannot have conflicts of interest.
Speaker 2: The constitution does preclude the president from receiving money from
Speaker 2: foreign governments. That was never really put to the test
Speaker 2: in our entire history. We haven't really got a definitive
Speaker 2: case law on that. There was a look at you
Speaker 2: there's some cases during Trump's first term that looked at it,
Speaker 2: but they never got resolved. So we don't know if
Speaker 2: Donald Trump accepting tens of millions of dollars from a
Speaker 2: company backed by the spymaster of the UAE counts. And
Speaker 2: you know, right now, Republicans hold both chambers of our Congress,
Speaker 2: and they are not investigating, you know, as angry as
Speaker 2: they were about Hunter Biden and some of his apparent wrongdoing,
Speaker 2: which was not great.
Speaker 1: He was Jordy.
Speaker 2: He was clearly cashing in on his dad's name. The
Speaker 2: amount of what Hunter Biden did and got the Republicans
Speaker 2: so upset about is minuscule compared to what the Trumps
Speaker 2: are doing. One thing I think a lot of us
Speaker 2: take hope is we saw what happened in Hungary where
Speaker 2: corruption was just such a major issue there to drive
Speaker 2: out an entrenched power that you're hearing Democrats saying, Okay,
Speaker 2: we think this corruption is going to play like this,
Speaker 2: and polls are showing that it is resonating with voters.
Speaker 2: The issue again is that it's hard to make a
Speaker 2: lot of these people who've lost money to Donald Trump
Speaker 2: seem sympathetic and that, you know, to the rest of
Speaker 2: the country, and that they're Trump supporters who put money
Speaker 2: in a guy who's got a reputation of not being
Speaker 2: a great investment.
Speaker 1: And finally, Zach one, are the broader ethical implications of
Speaker 1: Trump cashing in on the presidency like this, are we
Speaker 1: opening a Pandora's box here when it comes to how
Speaker 1: political pal could be monetized in the United States?
Speaker 2: That box was opened during his first term, when he
Speaker 2: didn't suffer any consequences for how he monetized the office
Speaker 2: there that paled in comparison to what he's done this term.
Speaker 2: You know, the thought would be that Joe Biden and
Speaker 2: the Democrats would come in, they would have some power.
Speaker 2: They would say, Okay, here's what Donald Trump did, Here's
Speaker 2: how he got away with it. You know, yes, okay,
Speaker 2: this was never done before, but it was legal. Let's
Speaker 2: try to close that loophole. Let's put in some rules here.
Speaker 2: And they did nothing of the sort, and there was
Speaker 2: no really reckoning with what he did. So when he
Speaker 2: came back into power, it's all out there again.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: My hope is that now is just so watantly obvious
Speaker 2: and so massive that whomever takes power after Donald Trump,
Speaker 2: we will go ahead and say, okay, yes, we need
Speaker 2: to get some checks put in here, because we have
Speaker 2: seen somebody absolutely exploit these rules and we can't let
Speaker 2: that happen again. But that's my hope.
Speaker 1: Well, I think it's many people's hopes. Zax. Thank you
Speaker 1: so much for joining us.
Speaker 2: Thanks for having me on, Daniel.
Speaker 1: All someone us Shadow Assistant Finance min Is to Simon
Speaker 1: Kennedy says the Albinezy government is crumbling to the gambling
Speaker 1: lobby as it introduces its gambling aed reform into Parliament.
Speaker 1: The Coalition, the Grains and the crossbenches are all pushing
Speaker 1: for changes to the bill, which limits TV and radio
Speaker 1: ads only certain times and creates an opt out feature
Speaker 1: for online platforms. The legislation will now be sent to
Speaker 1: an eight week Senate inquiry, and a United Nations scientific
Speaker 1: panel has released its first global report and Artificial Intelligence.
Speaker 1: The report, compiled by forty experts, say AI could transform healthcare,
Speaker 1: hunger relief, education, and climate action if used responsibly, but
Speaker 1: the technology is advancing faster than governments can regulate it.
Speaker 1: The report also says power is increasingly concentrated in the
Speaker 1: hands of a few companies and countries, with the United
Speaker 1: States controlling seventy five percent of computing power in the
Speaker 1: world's largest AI clusters. I'm Daniel James. Thanks once again
Speaker 1: for listening to seven AM. We'll be back tomorrow.