Zach Witkoff, left, and Eric Trump in Dubai, United Arab Emirates on May 1, 2025
Yes, the crypto scammer wing of the Trump family business, World Liberty Financial, now has a federally chartered bank thanks to a morally flexible President Donald Trump appointee, Comptroller of the Currency Jonathan Gould.
What could possibly go wrong?
You know, we knew this was coming for a while now, as World Liberty’s application had been kicking around for months. They’re not applying to run a traditional bank, so you won’t be able to get a loan or open some sort of Trump MAGA checking account.
So what does this bank do if not the normal things banks do? Do you really need to ask? It’s gonna be a crypto grift bank, of course. It lets World Liberty issue its stablecoin, USD1, which has proven a terrific bribe vehicle for the president, without needing to use a third-party crypto company to issue the currency.
I don’t speak fluent crypto, but presumably there are good—as in grifty—reasons for this that will better line Trump’s pockets.
World Liberty is really just a way to get in good with Trump if you’re a foreign government that wants to do it on the down low. You can buy hundreds of millions worth of the Trump stablecoin to curry favor, which is exactly what Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the national security adviser for the United Arab Emirates, did in February.
And look, crypto grifting has been very, very good to Trump. He made $1.4 billion in 2025, with nearly $800 million of that from his stake in World Liberty. It helps, of course, that Trump can set government policy however he wants to ensure maximum profits and minimal oversight. So, he reined in both the Department of Justice and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to make sure his crypto interests don’t suffer from too much sunlight.
The media is desperately trying to frame this as anything but wild corruption. ABC News called it an “unprecedented move for [the] president.” Talk about an understatement.
The Wall Street Journal swallowed every World Liberty lie whole, stenographing that the White House has totes said it doesn’t have any conflicts of interest. Sure, the bank is going to be run by Zach Witkoff, and sure Zach is the son of Steve Witkoff, Trump’s Middle East envoy, but no conflicts, not at all. The Journal also let Witkoff babble on about how World Liberty submitted “probably one of the most thoroughly reviewed applications in the history of the OCC.”
Yeah, show your work, buddy. Boasting that your application is nearly 1,000 pages doesn’t mean a thing if you won’t let anyone who isn’t a crony see the full application. Witkoff had some help holding that back, because Gould actually refused to share the unredacted version with the Democrats. Kinda gives the game away when the president’s appointee who is in charge of approving the president’s family business application to become a bank refuses to let anyone in the minority party see the full application of the president’s family business to become a bank. But hey, Gould said that, “We process applications in a fair and evenhanded manner.”
Oh, well. As long as you say so.
Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos
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