The Grift: Who Knew 'Draining the Swamp' Meant Pumping It Full of Crypto? $11.6 billion flowed to the Trump family

In a devastating new report —Trump, Crypto, and a New Age of Corruption — the House Judiciary Committee staff paints a portrait of a presidency transformed into a personal bank for the Donald Trump family. 

There is a moment when a government does not break faith with its people in a single act of corruption, but when corruption becomes the architecture itself — when the presidency, once conceived as a public trust, is remodeled as a private vault. The staff report shows we’ve crossed that threshold. Trump and his family, it says, have leveraged their public office to engineer a multi-billion-dollar addition to their fortune through cryptocurrency ventures, while systematically dismantling the legal guardrails meant to protect Americans from fraud, foreign interference, and large-scale financial criminality. Or more specifically:

In the year since his victory in the 2024 election, Donald Trump’s fortune has expanded monumentally, largely because of his crypto dealings. According to Reuters, the Trump family raked in more than $800 million in income from sales of crypto assets in the first half of 2025 alone. Although it is difficult to determine the precise value of President Trump’s cryptocurrency holdings, public reports make clear the number is in the billions with some estimates putting the value of the holdings as high as $11.6 billion.  He has built this wealth from the Oval Office by steering investment to his family firm, shielding his investors from federal fraud and securities investigations and prosecutions, bilking his political base, and degrading the federal agencies ordinarily responsible for investigating bribery and tracking known bad actors online. [...]

While research indicates these crypto ventures have put more than $800 million into the pockets of President Trump and his family members and allowed him to double his net worth, this corruption has gone largely unnoticed by the American electorate. According to some reports, 60% of Americans say they haven’t heard about “the President’s family running a cryptocurrency business” or profiting from that business; nearly half of Trump voters believe he had not profited from the presidency at all, while a third believed he had made less than $100 million while in office.

To long-time Trump observers, none of this crookedness is any surprise. Although most of the regime’s efforts are directed at fulfilling grudges, putting flamethrowers to government agencies and regulations, trying to transform the military and ICE into clean-shaven branches of the Proud Boys, and treating diplomacy like the worst-ever episode of “The Apprentice,” when it comes to the nitty gritty, the grift is the heart of this otherwise heartless regime. 

Far from isolated shady transactions, what we’re witnessing is a full-scale transformation: a presidency captured, retooled, and refurbished for private capital accumulation. The implications stretch beyond the ledger. They strike at democracy, national security, and social justice.

In his first term, Trump was openly skeptical of cryptocurrency. He called Bitcoin and other digital assets “not money,” criticized their volatility, and dismissed them as speculative folly. Yet — just days before his second inauguration — the $TRUMP memecoin was launched. The supposed move from crypto skeptic to crypto tycoon was typical Trump, trashing what he says others are doing as he — sometimes secretly, sometimes openly — does that very thing. 

As the report documents, the launch of crypto ventures such as World Liberty Financial and $TRUMP was accompanied by a pyroclastic flow of campaign contributions and investments from industry insiders, foreign nationals, and corporate interests hoping to win influence with Trump and his toadies. That influence translates into deregulation, the dismantling of oversight, and pardons for crypto-linked criminals. Turns out what Trump had dismissed as “thin air” is just another mechanism for extracting wealth from everyday Americans. He was, as so often is true, projecting.

Scope of the Corruption

The numbers are dizzying. As noted above, those Trump family crypto holdings may total as much as $11.6 billion. And what exactly did that $800 million generated by crypto sales in the first six months of 2025 buy? 

• Foreign actors and state-linked entities are pouring money into Trump’s crypto ventures. Ultimately, profit is their motive, and these investments offer the access and influence to boost their bottom lines, although, as we well know, Trump can be quite fickle even to his loyalists.
• Put in place to protect investors, prevent fraud, and stop money laundering, regulatory safeguards have been dismantled, and enforcement teams shuttered or crippled, oversight weakened. 
• Investigations and prosecutions into crypto firms tied to the administration or its donors have been dropped or postponed — typically without public notice. 

A working democratic republic depends on core commitments: accountability, transparency, the separation of private gain from public office. Once you replace those commitments with private profit, the republic becomes something different. Now, of course, Trump isn’t the first politician of high or low office to leverage governmental position for self-enrichment. Far from it. However, as with so much else, our Outlaw Prez is making past such crooks seem petty by comparison. While the East Wing has been bulldozed into oblivion, he’s intent on further destruction of “norms” by making the White House the Cosa Nostra version of a venture capital firm.

Meanwhile, as crypto insiders and wealthy backers reap windfalls, millions of Americans face cuts to health care, food benefits, and social safety nets, one of the many fulfillments of the Project 2025 manifesto. As the Judiciary committee report notes, during the same period that Trump’s crypto riches soared, the regime cut funding to Medicaid and Medicare, refused to extend tax credits that make healthcare affordable, and used a government shutdown as a pretext to strip food aid from 42 million Americans — including children, individuals with disabilities, and veterans. 

In addition to all else, the corruption is one more weapon in class war.

In ordinary times — remember those? — federal laws of the kind enforced by the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Justice Department and other watchdogs exist to prevent foreign actors from using financial instruments to influence U.S. policy. The regime continues seeking to undo many of those protections. This is real danger. The fact that a stablecoin from WLF is tied to deals involving foreign funds and crypto giants such as Binance should set off alarm bells in every security agency in the country. 

For corruption of this scale to flourish, enough people must believe that politics is always sleazy, or that “all politicians are corrupt anyway.” But there is a difference between that cynical shrug and the structural capture of institutions — between private scandals and institutional rot. This cannot be allowed to become the new normal.

This outrageous moment in our era calls for structural transformation. But, as must be said these days about almost anything beyond naming post offices, the only way to carry out that transformation requires a big shift in Senate and House majorities and a replacement in the White House. Our national polarization makes such a shift difficult, to say the least. But with so many of the regime’s actions deeply unpopular countrywide, perhaps the blue tsunami many Democratic activists are touting as possible next November will actually come to pass. In case we make that fantasy reality, here are some policy-change proposals to initiate, concrete steps toward restoring what is being demolished:

Enact the Stop TRUMP in Crypto Act of 2025. The bill would ban holding, issuing, or trading digital assets by the president, vice president, members of Congress and their immediate families — eliminating the core mechanism of this part of the crypto grift. 

Rebuild and reinforce federal anti-corruption enforcement. Fully restore the investigative teams at the Justice Department, the SEC and other oversight bodies.

Demand full transparency and audited disclosures — including crypto assets — from all public officials. No more shell companies, hidden wallets, or secret token holdings.

Strengthen campaign-finance laws. Close loopholes that allow unlimited, untraceable investments from wealthy donors or foreign actors into political projects — including crypto.

The “New Age of Corruption” revealed by the House Judiciary report is not a sideshow. It’s a moment of reckoning — a crossroads. We can treat this as just one more Trump scandal to be superseded by the next scandal or outlandish Truth Social post. Or we can treat it as the structural assault on the principles of democracy, justice, and public good that it is.

The escape hatch many Americans cling to—that institutions will save us, that voters will “wake up,” that corruption eventually will collapse under its own weight, the idea someone else will clean up the mess — are fairytales the Trumps have learned to exploit. As Jamelle Bouie has observed, corruption under Trump is not a byproduct. It is the governing strategy. And as Paul Krugman has warned, the crypto boom surrounding him is not a market trend. It is a political economy built for plunder. If we want to shut this machine down, it won’t be because the courts suddenly grow spines or the markets rediscover ethics. It will be because people force a new Congress to rebuild what Trump and his minions are dismantling.