Donald Trump accused of corruption as he returns to White House days after launching multibillion-dollar cryptocurrency meme coin

Former government ethics officials and presidential experts said the venture amounted to a “shameful” conflict of interest.

Donald Trump returned to the White House days after launching his own cryptocurrency meme coin, a venture that former government ethics officials and presidential experts said amounted to a “shameful” conflict of interest.

The president and his wife, Melania, each announced their own respective coins ahead of his inauguration. Both were valued at billions of dollars as Trump took the oath of office on Monday.

“There are shameful and major conflicts of interest with respect to his family business benefiting from his cryptocurrency policies,” said James Thurber, the founder and former director of the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies.

Trump “does not seem to worry about the public interest with respect to cryptocurrency”, added Thurber. “He seems to be driven by profit and wanting to be a major part of the billionaire class in the US.”

“America voted for corruption, and Trump is wasting no time delivering it,” said Walter Shaub, the former director of the US Office of Government Ethics, who served under former presidents Barack Obama and Trump. “What was once a government ethics program, made partly of laws and partly of norms, is a smoldering crater.”

The White House was approached for comment.

Trump has pledged to transform the US into the crypto capital of the world, ending a crackdown pursued by officials under Joe Biden and taking an altogether looser approach to regulation of digital currencies. Leading cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin have surged in value since his election victory last November.

The president launched $TRUMP on Friday evening, pitching the meme coin to his followers as a way “to celebrate everything we stand for: WINNING!”, before the first lady followed with $MELANIA on Sunday.

Some 80% of the Trump coin’s tokens are owned by CIC Digital, an affiliate of Trump’s business, and another entity called Fight, Fight, Fight, according to its website. The Melania coin is offered by MKT World LLC, a firm incorporated by the first lady in 2021.

The president’s coin has the potential to raise significant funds for his business empire, and inflate his personal fortune, which Forbes pegged at $6.7bn as of Monday.

Meme coins – which combine two prominent features, memes and cryptocurrencies, of the digital economy – are effectively digital playing cards. They have no intrinsic value, according to experts. Even the website marketing Trump’s coin states that it is “not intended to be, or to be the subject of, an investment opportunity”.

Across the board, the crypto market is also notoriously volatile. $TRUMP, having surged over the weekend, faded on Monday during his inaugural ceremonies; $MELANIA, meanwhile, dropped by a quarter. But together, their market values remained above $9bn.

The sight of an incoming president inflating his personal fortune on his way back to the Oval Office, in an industry he has pledged to support while in power, caused particular alarm among former government officials.

“This may represent the single worst conflict of interest in the modern history of the presidency,” Norman Eisen, a former ethics adviser in the Obama administration, told the Washington Post. Trump has “the most profound conflict of interest” in the crypto space, he added, citing the fact the president is both “seeking to gain” and regulate the industry.

Preston Byrne, a lawyer specializing in cryptocurrencies, put the chances of a civil lawsuit over Trump’s new coin at 90% within the next 14 days, or 100% within the next 60. “I am absolutely certain this will happen,” he wrote on his blog. “Someone will lose money, some lawyer will come up with a theory and file.”

The billionaire businessman Mark Cuban, who campaigned for Kamala Harris ahead of last year’s presidential election, described Trump’s coin as a “gift to all of us who are not fans of his”.

“It’s just a matter of time until a lot of people lose money from this,” Cuban wrote on Bluesky, the social network. “I’m a crypto fan. This is not crypto any more than [infamous fraudster Bernie] Madoff was just buying and selling shares of stock.”

Even figures on the outskirts of Trumpworld are dabbling in the meme coin frenzy. “I need you to do me a favor right now,” Rev Lorenzo Sewell, a senior pastor at 180 church who delivered the benediction after Trump’s swearing-in, said in a video posted on X hours after yesterday’s inauguration. “I need you to go buy the official Lorenzo Sewell coin.”