Want to Slip Our New POTUS Some Cash? There's a Meme Coin for That.
PLUS: The return of "The Traitors"
When Don Trump was first sworn in as president in January 2017, he instantly became the most corrupt president in American history owing to his connection to the Old Post Office building on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington DC. In 2013, the U.S. government leased the Old Post Office to Trump, who turned the property into a Trump-branded luxury hotel that opened for business in September 2016. That meant when Trump became president, he also became his own landlord, which violated the terms of the lease.1 Despite this, the government never required Trump to divest himself of the property, although Trump did sell the lease to an investment firm that turned the hotel into a Waldorf Astoria in 2022.
The even bigger problem, however, was that the hotel, like Trump’s other properties, became a potential money laundering operation. People looking to curry favor with the new president—say, an interest group, wealthy individuals, super PACs, or foreign governments—now had a very efficient way to line Trump’s pockets with cash: Stay at one of Trump’s properties, host an event there, or simply become a member of one of his clubs. As this article by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington shows, such events were not rare occurrences.
That all seems quaint now, as Trump at the start of his second term has channels in place that could facilitate a more efficient and lucrative form of corruption. The most recent of these is the launch last weekend of his meme coin $TRUMP, which was followed a few days later by his wife’s meme coin $MELANIA.
(Before we go any further, I just have to say this: Those names are dreadful. Dollar signs look like printed capital S’s. I see the word $MELANIA and I think that must be the world’s stinkiest perfume. I see the word $TRUMP and I think that must be the worst dildo ever.)
Anyway, meme coins are kind of like cryptocurrency, but not really. Crypto itself is plenty shady. I get the argument for how a cryptocurrency can gain legitimacy as a medium of exchange for goods and services if enough people accept it as such. The problem is a lot of cryptocurrencies seem like scams, an easy way for a conman to lure in investors, get rich, and cash out before the whole endeavor crumbles. If crypto gets a reputation as unreliable currency, that could damage the reputation and value of more stable cryptocurrencies and bring down the whole crypto house of cards. Should that happen, God help us if there are pillars of the economy overinvested in crypto.
As I understand it, though, meme coins are kind of like crypto collector coins. They’re not intended to be a medium of exchange or to possess a certain monetary value. They’re just valuable as a collectible subject to the whims of a collector’s market.
Trump—who called crypto a “scam” in 2019 but embraced the crypto community while running for president in 2024, and whose sons are now heavily invested in the crypto industry—marketed his meme coins as a way for his supporters to celebrate his inauguration. They gobbled them up, which drove up the price of the meme coins on the trading market. That at one point pushed the value of the Trump-owned business that retains control over 80% of the $TRUMP supply to $58 billion. (The company’s value has since declined but it’s still valued in the tens of billions of dollars.) At one point, it was estimated the demand for the meme coin made Trump one of the world’s 25 wealthiest people, although it should be noted Trump would have a very hard time cashing any of that in if he were to suddenly flood the market by selling his stash of meme coins all at once.
(For the record, from AP: “The Trump family business recently released an ethics agreement that prohibits Trump from ‘day-to-day’ decision making at the Trump Organization when he’s president and limits financial information about the business shared with him.” I would add, however, that the record also shows “Trump” and “ethics” are concepts that are often alien to one another.)
Now, if a foreign government or special interest group wants to influence Trump (or even potentially hold him financially hostage) all they need to do is buy $TRUMP. They no longer need to stay at a hotel or rent out a ballroom, which probably only netted Trump mere millions of dollars during his first term in office. By hording Trump’s meme coins, these influencers can keep the president’s net worth high and pad his nest egg. (BTW: Trump collects a fee every time one of his meme coins is traded; some have estimated he’s made over $50 million from fees alone.) If Trump wants to find out who is most interested in buying his services, he can put a portion of his cache up for sale. And because collector’s markets are quirky, the ridiculously high price people are willing to pay for what should be a near-worthless meme coin can be written off as nothing more than the irrational behavior of his fanbase rather than something more nefarious.
We’ve seen this behavior from Trump and his supporters in the recent past. When Trump launched Truth Social in 2022, he hoped to create a social media network that would rival Twitter (which Trump had been banned from and which, at the time, was not yet owned by Elon Musk.) Trump never came close: For example, in September 2024, Twitter/X received over 700 million visits while Truth Social received 13 million. Truth Social also wasn’t a profitable company, losing $327 million in the first quarter of 2024 while bringing in $770,000 in revenue. It’s not unusual for fledgling companies to lose money, but there were no signs Truth Social was ever positioned to make money.
Yet when Truth Social went public in March 2024—right around the time a New York court imposed a penalty on Trump that could have drained him of his cash reserves—the company’s stock soared. A company that could only generate around $1 million in quarterly revenue was valued by the stock market at roughly $8 billion. It would surpass the value of X in the fall of that year, which is absurd even if you account for how Musk has destroyed X’s value. Truth Social had become a meme stock, a stock that experiences a rise in price disproportionate to its actual value due to interest in the company driven by an online fan base. Investors weren’t placing a financial bet on Truth Social; they were rallying around Trump. Because Trump owned a huge portion of Truth Social, he was suddenly a billionaire, which in turn allowed him to secure the financing necessary to post the court-ordered bond.
(It’s also worth noting the circumstances surrounding Truth Social’s debut on the stock market. Just before going public, Truth Social merged with a shell company named Digital World that helped boost the price of Trump’s company. One of Digital World’s biggest investors, Jeff Yass, is also a major investor in ByteDance, the parent company of the Chinese-controlled social media app TikTok. It was within this same timeframe that Trump flip-flopped on his opposition to TikTok and condemned Congress for passing a bill that would ban TikTok in the United States unless ByteDance sold it to American owners.)
There was speculation Trump would sell his shares in Truth Social in September 2024 after the lock-up period expired. Rather than cash-out, however, Trump held on to the stock. Like his meme coin, Truth Social stock creates a convenient way for people to potentially win favor with Trump by propping up his net worth. It needs to be said there is no evidence anyone has used either Trump’s meme coin or his Truth Social stock in this fashion. Trump could say the reason his meme coin and social media company are so valuable is that people simply like him and have faith in the economic viability of the products he owns. The problem, however, is that Trump has created a way for the rich and powerful to potentially funnel money to him in exchange for political favors.
We live in an age of outrage at “the system.” Trump is an avatar of that outrage. But Trump also embodies so much of what people would ordinarily hate about politics. No other modern-day politician has made himself as vulnerable to the charge of corruption as Donald Trump. Yet his enraged supporters could care less. What gives?
When Trump first began running for president in 2015, he made a striking impression during the first Republican presidential debate when asked by moderator Bret Baier about past donations he had made to Democratic politicians like Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi. Trump had written those donations off as “business-related favors,” but Baier pressed him on what exactly he had asked of those Democratic politicians, particularly since Trump had also said, “When you give, they do whatever the hell you want them to do.”
Trump responded, “If I ask them, if I need them, you know, most of the people on this stage I’ve given to, just so you understand, a lot of money.” After some crosstalk and denials from the other candidates, Trump continued, “I will tell you that our system is broken. I gave to many people, before this, before two months ago, I was a businessman. I give to everybody. When they call, I give. And do you know what? When I need something from them two years later, three years later, I call them, they are there for me. And that’s a broken system.” When another candidate asked what he had gotten from Clinton, Trump said, “Well, I’ll tell you what, with Hillary Clinton, I said be at my wedding and she came to my wedding. You know why? She didn’t have a choice because I gave.” Trump would spend much of the 2016 campaign calling Clinton “crooked” and “corrupt.”
Trump’s opponents had hoped to portray Trump as a millionaire who used his wealth to manipulate the political system. Instead, Trump won over aggrieved voters by insisting he’d been playing the only game in town. Those voters saw in Trump someone like them: A guy just trying to keep his head above water in a system politicians had rigged against them. They admired Trump because he had acquired the power to bend that system to his advantage. Perhaps if Trump became president, they reasoned, he would have the strength to bend that system even further and break it.
Well, Trump broke it, just not in any positive sense of the word. When honorable politicians identify an ethical problem with the way government operates, they tend to propose a solution that holds government to a higher standard. Trump, on the other hand, has always felt that a crooked system not only requires but entitles him to behave crookedly; he ought to be able to profit from it as much as any other politician. He’s also convinced his followers to excuse his bad behavior so that he doesn’t have to combat that crooked system with one arm tied behind his back. That’s the rationalization he used when he attempted to “stop the steal” by actually trying to steal an election. It’s also the rationalization a conservative friend gave to me as we walked down Pennsylvania Avenue during Trump’s first term in office. As we passed Trump’s hotel, I explained the ethical problem related to Trump’s ownership of the property, which was only making the “swamp” Trump had promised to drain swampier. (“There are literally lobbyists lobbying in the lobby of that hotel,” I said.) Yet that only seemed to deepen my friend’s admiration of Trump.
But it’s not just that Trump has convinced his followers that the only way to combat a corrupt system is with one’s own corrupt means. It’s that Trump has also played a major role in obliterating the public’s understanding of the concept of corruption. To be clear, Americans already have a flimsy understanding of the concept, which is fair, because it’s a slippery topic. Americans tend to believe politicians are routinely bought off by interest groups, which use campaign donations to convince political figures to vote against what would otherwise be in the public interest. (Hence all those social media posts calling for legislators to wear NASCAR-style racing suits displaying the logos of their most prominent donors.) I’m not naïve enough to believe that doesn’t ever happen; in fact, I can think of some groups like the NRA or AIPAC that can use their dominance of an issue area and their deep pockets to keep politicians in their corner.
What Americans often don’t understand is that campaign donations typically aren’t made to influence politicians but to support like-minded politicians. (Donors don’t want to throw money at a politician who will end up voting against their cause.) Americans also tend to think all efforts to influence the government are shady and unseemly (with the only exception being when a group they support is doing the lobbying, since that group *clearly* understands the public interest.) Yet there’s nothing wrong with people organizing and attempting to persuade their representatives to support their cause; in fact, it’s a right protected by the First Amendment! What Americans struggle to do is distinguish between the advantages certain groups have over others in that process. For example, it’s far easier for a corporate interest to devote a small percentage of its total profits to a fully-staffed lobbying operation than it is for a non-profit public interest group with limited financial resources to organize, fundraise, staff-up, and maintain a presence in the halls of government.
What Trump did in 2016 was not particularly novel: He simply linked American’s general dislike of government to corruption. He found an easy foil in “Crooked” Hillary Clinton, who embodied what so many hated about insider Washington politics. Eventually, however, Trump began describing anyone who opposed him or attempted to hold him accountable for his actions as crooked or corrupt. Trump brought the latent partisan conception of corruption to the fore: If you favored the result, it was legit, but if you disliked the outcome, it was the product of corrupt political forces. For instance, this past summer, Trump called the state of Minnesota corrupt because the state had voted against him in 2016 and 2020. This was on full display again on Inauguration Day, when, while praising JD Vance, he implied those who criticized Vance during the campaign were “corrupt” and that the “corruption” will begin again when people resume criticizing his vice president.
That’s not what corruption means, of course. Corruption—which I would define as using one’s public position for private gain—is not whatever our political opponents are doing to realize their political objectives or what the legal system does when it attempts to hold people accountable for their alleged crimes. Corruption is a political sin that can afflict members of either party (see Menendez, Bob). Now would be a good time for both parties to affirm that idea and work together to pass legislation that shuts down avenues for public corruption and restores some measure of faith in our campaign finance system. (It would also help if the conservative Supreme Court got on board with this, too, but I’m not holding my breath, as they’ve concluded they’d rather live with a highly-corruptible system than run the risk that a reasonable campaign finance law might restrict the ability of a millionaire to influence the political system. It doesn’t help either that a couple members of that court enjoy using their position to enrich themselves; what incentive do they have to sign-off on laws that would flag their own behavior is inappropriate?)
Now Democrats like me can scream and holler all we want about Trump and his potential for corruption, but we don’t have the power at the moment to fix this problem. Republican members of Congress do, however. I’m sure they’d be outraged if a Democratic president orchestrated a scheme like this. But this isn’t a partisan issue. The fact is every member of Congress—Republican and Democrat—should be outraged by a president who set up a way for anyone interested in influencing him to help boost his net worth by buying intangible, overpriced, and otherwise worthless Internet memes. That this behavior is tolerated tells me less about Trump—I’ve come to expect it from him—than it does the Republican members of Congress who have it in their power to put an end to all this but are too afraid to band together and do the right thing for the sake of our country.
Further Reading:
“Trump’s Crypto Venture Divides the Industry He Aims to Support” by David Yaffe-Bellany and Eric Lipton of the New York Times (“Crypto executives criticized the move as a cash grab, saying that Mr. Trump had undercut the industry’s credibility at the very moment when proponents were seeking a more prominent place for digital currencies in mainstream finance and business. His venture, they said, created a brief and highly publicized bubble that partly deflated within a few days even as Mr. Trump’s family and its business partners collected millions of dollars from fees on purchases and sales of the coin. ‘It makes it all look corrupt and self-interested,’ said Nic Carter, a vocal supporter of Mr. Trump who runs the crypto investment firm Castle Island Ventures and was at the Crypto Ball as the new $Trump coin was announced.”)
Signals and Noise
I’ve decided to change Signals and Noise a little bit. Rather than use it as a weekly political rundown, for now I’m just going to highlight a few interesting articles I read over the past week. If you want a rundown or just want to stay up-to-date on politics, I’d recommend bookmarking the site Political Wire and checking it frequently throughout the day.
“How’d We End Up Here Again?” by Seth Masket (Tusk)
“The GOP’s Stunning Response to Trump Pardoning Those Who Assaulted Police” by Aaron Blake (Washington Post) and “How Republicans Learned to Excuse Political Violence” by Will Saletan (The Bulwark)
“May I ask you to have mercy Mr. President...”
“Emperor Trump’s New Map” by Franklin Foer (The Atlantic)
“DOGE Will Allow Elon Musk to Surveil the US Government from the Inside” by Vittoria Elliott (Wired)
“Trump Faithful Descended on D.C., but Not Everyone Made It Onto a Yacht” by Shawn McCreesh (New York Times)
“On a Mission From God: Inside the Movement to Redirect Billions of Taxpayer Dollars to Private Religious Schools” by Alec MacGillis (ProPublica)
“The Free-Speech War Inside the ACLU” by Jordan Heller (New York)
Vincent’s Picks: The Return of The Traitors
The reality TV genre, which exploded in popularity following the debut of Survivor in 2000, is difficult to pin down. Some shows, like Survivor, are competitions that place ordinary people in extraordinary real-world situations. Others, however, are documentary-style shows in the vein of the Real Housewives series that follow the everyday lives of a unique group of people. What both kinds of shows seem to have in common is that they are ostensibly unscripted but structured in a way to foster drama and ratchet up tension amongst its cast. The audience is interested in what happens, but there is an equal interest in how the ordinary people on the show respond to their circumstances and interact with their fellow castmates. They are not shows that feature actors reading lines penned by writers imagining how people would behave in certain situations; what we are presumably watching instead is the authentic, spontaneous behavior of real people.
The American version of The Traitors, whose third season is now streaming on Peacock, may be the apotheosis of reality TV. It’s an absolutely addictive show, compelling as a game, a drama, and a social experiment. It’s also high trash that revels in the inherent junkiness of television. But it also feels like an act of retribution, a way for the gods of reality TV and their most loyal subjects—their viewers—to punish the reality TV stars who have signed away their private lives and endured personal humiliation for a shot at a cash prize and D-list level celebrity.
The rules of The Traitors are straightforward. The game begins with around twenty players. Three are secretly “traitors,” their traitorhood known only to their fellow traitors. The rest are “faithful.” During the day, the players go on missions to build up a prize pot, hang out with each other, and discuss who among them they believe is a traitor. At night, the contestants gather and vote to banish a player whom the faithful hope is a traitor. If they’re wrong, they end up banishing a faithful. Following the vote, the traitors meet to decide which one of the faithful to “murder,” or eliminate from the game. This process repeats itself for several days. If a traitor is caught, the remaining traitors sometimes have the option to recruit another traitor to their ranks. Eventually, the field is reduced to a small number of players. If only faithful players remain at the end of the game, those few remaining contestants split a prize pot. However, if a traitor makes it all the way to the end without being banished, that traitor wins all the money.
There are various international editions of the game. Peacock streams versions from four different English-language speaking countries. The British version may be the best. The contestants on the British show are all commoners who sprinkle their remarks with words like “brilliant” and “gutted.” They exhibit much more solidarity with one another than their American counterparts, which makes them more passionate in their pursuit of the traitors and more agonized when they inadvertently vote out a faithful. The burden of being a traitor also weighs more heavily on the Brits. A third season has just wrapped up on BBC but is not yet available in the States. I’ve only watched the first season of the Australian series; the game play was pretty good, but many of the contestants had a snotty, cool-kid vibe that was off-putting. You can definitely skip the unengaging New Zealand version.
The American version, however, is a gloriously hot dish. The contestants in the first season were split between average joes and reality TV personalities, but the show abandoned that format for the second season in favor of an all reality TV cast. (Well, almost all reality TV, as the contestants included boxer Deontay Wilder, former Speaker of the UK House of Commons John “Order! Order!” Bercow, and Michael Jordan’s son Marcus, who kind of counts as a reality TV celebrity since at that time he was dating fellow contestant Larsa Pippen, a Real Housewife who is also the ex-wife of his father’s estranged teammate Scottie Pippen.) The third season sticks with that format, which makes for compelling TV, since nearly all the players have experience playing themselves on television. The show’s producers cast them because they’re characters. They know they have public personae to maintain and interpersonal drama to deliver.
But the American version of The Traitors also functions as a kind of comeuppance for reality TV. Some of the contestants, like Boston Rob Mariano of Survivor and Derrick Levasseur of Big Brother, are drawn from competitive reality TV shows. Others, like Chrishell Stause of Selling Sunset and the numerous Real Housewives hail from documentary-style reality TV programs. But the producers have also included players like Britney Spears’ ex-husband Sam Asghari and British royal Lord Ivar Mountbatten as if to remind everyone on the show that fame and celebrity are often unearned and contrived. (It’s only a matter of time until a member of the Trump clan or “George Santos” become contestants.) The cast also includes retired WWE star Nikki Garcia, a.k.a. Nikki Bella, who, as a former professional wrestler who participated in staged sporting events, represents the complete opposite of reality TV but feels completely at home in the company of reality TV stars. The show seems to be asking its audience and its contestants (who are trying to suss out who among them is pretending to be something they are not) how you draw the line between real and fake, between documentary and drama, between an interest in the human condition and a fascination with the lurid tabloid spectacle of it all.
Even more maddening, those questions are asked within the context of a game that spits in the face of strategy. For example, if you were a faithful hoping to expel a traitor, would you vote for someone who acted suspiciously? Since traitors don’t want to act suspiciously, doesn’t it make more sense to vote for unsuspicious players? But if you ignore suspicious behavior, aren’t you just increasing the likelihood that you’ll vote out a faithful? Perhaps it actually makes sense for a faithful to act a little bit suspiciously, since an unsuspicious faithful who has convinced his fellow faithful that he is indeed a faithful will likely be murdered by the traitors, who want to surround themselves with suspicious faithful to minimize their own chances of getting voted out. But wouldn’t a faithful who deliberately exhibits suspicious behavior only be putting a target on their back?
Or consider the dilemma traitors find themselves in. Should traitors eliminate players who suspect they are traitors? If they did that, doesn’t that make them look suspicious? Maybe it is better then to murder a random contestant or someone who has expressed suspicion about another player in order to frame that other player. But doing the former doesn’t get the heat off their back, while doing the latter is so obviously not what a traitor would do that it could exonerate a player. So maybe traitors should try to convince other players to vote out a fellow traitor, since only faithful want to vote out traitors. But how would a player know someone is definitely a traitor if they weren’t also a traitor? Perhaps it’s better then for traitors to just sit back, follow the crowd, and let the faithful devour themselves. But do you know what kind of player would do that? A traitor.
(Having watched a few seasons of this show, I’ve started to wonder if players make a mistake in assuming the point of the game is finding traitors. Instead, I think the objective of the game is survival. To win, a player first needs to make it to the final two or three. What they should be doing is forming alliances with other players to protect one another and accumulate the votes necessary to banish everyone else from the game. Don’t worry if there may be traitors in the alliance. Just get the number of contestants down to a more manageable number and hope the traitors don’t murder you along the way.)
In other words, neither good strategic or social skills are guaranteed to get you far in the game. The contestants are left twisting in the wind, at the mercy of the apparent randomness of the game, racked with paranoia, and completely uncertain of anything they think they know. We as viewers, of course, know everything, so we spend each episode screaming at the players for failing to see what should be obvious and devising strategies for how we would navigate the game, although it doesn’t take long to realize our strategies would be doomed to fail as well. That really doesn’t matter, though, because we’re not the ones immersed in this Kafkaesque competition. We can just sit back and watch these pseudo-stars wend their way through what is essentially reality show purgatory.
Our Virgil is Alan Cumming, whose fabulous tartan wardrobe and overwrought commentary suggests levels these reality show divas can’t reach. He becomes our surrogate when he mocks and admonishes the contestants for stumbling through challenges or failing to catch a traitor. They all seem to have it coming. They’re nothing more than people just like us who (unlike us) were willing to let cameras follow them around under bizarre circumstances while they did crazy things and hammed it up for our low-rent entertainment. We love them for it, but it doesn’t make them stars. The Traitors brings these shameless schmucks back down to earth among us where they belong.
The third season of the American version of The Traitors is currently airing on Peacock. New episodes debut every Thursday evening, with the final episodes scheduled to drop at the beginning of March.
Exit Music: “Don’t Shed a Tear” by Paul Carrack (1987, One Good Reason)
The lease Trump signed in 2013 specified “no elected official of the government…shall be admitted to any share or part of this Lease, or to any benefit that may arise therefrom.”